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ON SITE: SANTIAGO CUCULLU (MF Ziggurat)
April 24, 2008–January 4, 2009
Curator’s Statement
Santiago Cucullu’s art making is fertile and resourceful: he shifts from myth to truth, social to formal, readymade sculpture to watercolor painting. The installation Cucullu created for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Santiago Calatrava–designed galleria illustrates his technique of deconstruction on a grand scale. Developed amid the columns, arches, bays, windows—even curves—of the Schroeder (west) Galleria, his installation physically disrupts the symmetrical space, yet it works in tandem with the galleria as a place where the city and Museum converge.
Cucullu’s intervention infiltrates the clean, white space of the galleria with discordant colors and a cacophony of images. He transformed the innermost wall into a support for his monumental wall drawing, which features manipulated images of Milwaukee amongst other source imagery—pop culture, his imagination, references to works of fiction and nonfiction. Cucullu previously created similar montages of people and places; however, for this site, he specifically incorporated scenes inspired by his neighborhood.
Throughout the perfectly proportioned space, Cucullu intertwined sculptures created from found objects to create asymmetry and turbulence. He salvaged a tentlike structure from a dumpster and altered it into a colorful artwork curiously attached to the ceiling of the space. Borrowed Wall, a collection of common rocks,was likewise taken from a nearby site and transformed into an entryway for the installation. With works distinctly from the street, Cucullu reduces the lofty quality of the highly designed space.
Thrift store video monitors, sitting atop structures of Cucullu’s design, are directed towards the inner chamber of the galleria and its exterior windows. In this manner, Cucullu activates the space with a flurry of activity, which becomes most effective when a viewer is in the middle of the galleria and hears the clash of sounds produced by the multiple videos. However, in a unique twist, Cucullu further invites the viewer to visit the Museum’s exterior façade at night, when the videos that point outward become one with the lights of the city. While the videos cannot be heard through the windows, they encourage an entirely new critical position from which to examine the larger spatial relationship of the city to the Museum.
With such an elaborate intervention, Cucullu replaces the neutral gallery space with references to the overlooked niches of the Museum’s immediate surroundings. By making the symmetrical space of the galleria off-balance, using the city as another source for his collage technique, Cucullu unearths new relational properties: His intermingled source material reveals the allegorical ivory white tower is not so far away but, rather, part of the larger, complex relationships of everyday.
On Site: Santiago Cucullu (MF Ziggurat)
On Site: Santiago Cucullu (MF Ziggurat)
On Site: Santiago Cucullu (MF Ziggurat)
