Falke Pisano. What Can a Sculpture Do?

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Falke Pisano What can a sculpture do?

A TEXT BY CECILIA CANZIANI

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In a dialogue published originally in the pages of Shifter Magazine, there is an exchange that I found hilarious. Falke Pisano and Charlotte Moth discuss their recent works, and Charlotte describes what will happen the day after: the equipment is ready for filming, she will meet the cameraman, they’ll have a coffee, and see what happens. Falke asks if she doesn’t ultimately always have a plan, and Charlotte answers: “No, I don’t have a plan, Falke!”.What I like in this rapid exchange is that I can really see the two of them, for what little I know of them, their different personalities, and their work, and the intimacy that this ‘Falke’ marking the end of Charlotte’s answer reveals. I realize that I have encountered Falke’s work many times in just about every place I have traveled for work or for leisure in recent years, however I only met her recently, while both her and Judith Hopf were involved in the second cycle of exhibitions at Praxes Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin, last winter. In the time that I spent there, I could have a special look at Falke’s work. I was not involved in curating her exhibition, but could access its backstage and maintain a semi-detached although informed view of her inprogress show. For her second exhibition of the cycle, she presented a structure made of bamboo poles dressed in textiles that changed shape, position, form and function over time. I remember the moment when, from what at some point seemed to be a bottomless suitcase, she extracted all sorts of fabrics, in different textures, colors, weights and décor, that she would test on the bamboo frame, adjust, move, take up, pull down. The bamboo scaffold, placed at one end of the room, became an animated structure that oddly reminded me of Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés. What she was doing was not ultimately different from when she organizes her diagrams in space, selects images for her collages, or edits her videos frame by frame. Yet somehow the different – rougher, and apparently less polished – materials employed there, made me reconsider my reading of her works, and ushered the desire to write about it as a means of getting to know it better. But how to address a practice that seems so codified, and already indexed and organized by the artist herself without risking to get lost in the structures she has created? The plan is that there is no plan, other than following loose impressions, serendipitous encounters and from there – quoting Moth – ‘let’s see where we go’.

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Structure for Distance (Obstacles), 2012 mdf, paint, metal, vinyl (detail)

Fig. 01

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Obviously, one cannot resist breaking rules to make the exercise of writing more interesting for oneself. So, rather than talking individually of the three works that Falke selected for me, I will consider them as a totality. Collected in a folder that she handed me on a memory stick, and titled ‘What a sculpture can do’, there are three works, all part of the series The Body in Crisis, a cycle initiated in 2011, and which, as opposed to the previous Figures of Speech, retains a more open-ended structure. Building on Figures of Speech as methodological basis, this new cycle is developed as a growing – yet unlinear – rhizomatic narrative centered on the body as political subject through time and in specific historical moments. The first to be realized in the frame of this body of works, Structure for Distance (Obstacles) consists of a series of low slabs, painted in black, labeled in white, looking and functioning as an index, and carrying a description of the six historical moments that will be further explored in the course of her current investigation. The boards are tilted, knee height, and are presented as a regular space sequence. They are referred to as ‘obstacles’, which allows us to see them both as sculptures and as performative structures, a passage that is often inherent to Falke Pisano’s shifting elements. Literally, we stumble on moments in history when the body is in crisis. Structure for Repetition (not Representation) is a series of two by one meter boards, connected on the top by a triangular wooden structure suspending black curtains. It both carries and hides the other components of the work, taking over space with its spiral shape and multiplying points of view. While departing from the index in its shape, Structure for Repetition also acts as an archive, as it lends itself to the collection of notes – in the form of collages, drawings and cutouts – of Pisano’s ongoing investigation of the body in crisis, and thus becomes – over time – a sort of memory cabinet of future pasts. It is accompanied by a series of chalk drawings on blackboard – impermanent traces, notes that could be perhaps revised, and also alluding to a pedagogical framework. Prison Work (2013) is the third and most recent work of the cycle that I am proposed to analyse. It consists of two distanced cubic volumes, one in steel and tinted glass, the second in powder coated metal and wood. The shape of the two sculptures evokes, or rather, is inspired by the odd position of a relatively recently decommissioned Philadelphia prison, appearing in the accompanying video, which, from an aerial view, appears to be tilted in respect to the urban grid. Despite what one can think, it was not the prison, but the city that was built at an angle to the correction house. This happened as the Philadelphia of the ’30s grew to the point it reached the waste area where the prison was built one century before. The triangle described by the wall of the penitentiary and the street represents a spatial statement marking a dissociation (or convergence) of society from the penitentiary, that is activated by any citizen walking outwards (or backwards) from the corner where wall and street join. The two sculptures can be similarly inscribed one in the other; their transparent or opaque walls, their apertures and surfaces close and open the view on the diagrams presented and continuously circulating from one to the other, retracing visually as well as performatively the assumption, made explicit in the first sentence of the video, that the Penitentiary and Society, far from being separate institutions, meet on the same ground as they are equally subjected to global economic laws.

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Structure for Repetition (not Representation), version London, 2013, wood, litho ink, chalkboard paint, metal, felt, glass, digital print, high gloss. Exhibition view The Showroom, London. Photo: Dan Weill

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Fig. 02

Approaching the end of the essay The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes proposes to include writing aloud as a form of textual pleasure, and describes it as revealing the grain of the voice, a stereophony of flesh, the manifestation of the body of the one who speaks, more concerned with its material reality than with sense, and language. Most of Falke’s works resonate with her own voice, a distinct, apparently detached and yet pervasive voice. A voice that engulfs the work and creates a space of its own where the spectator is suspended, and which seems to write over the other elements composing the work. A voice over which text and images are written onto, thus partially erased when other elements, stringently linked to what she is saying, yet visually acting as interruptions, reiterate and erase, highlight and distract. And what is left for the viewer of her video, or the public of her performance, is the voice as pure sound. The voice in Pisano’s work is a note to self, a way of retelling to herself – and therefore to us – the story that she is otherwise (at the same time) recounting through objects, and images, and diagrams.

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Prison Work, 2013, plexiglass, tinted foil, aluminium, digital prints, elastic band, powder-coated metal, metal, mdf, wood, paint, video. Exhibition view De Appel, Amsterdam (detail). Photo: Tamara Kuselman All images Courtesy of the artist; Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam; Hollybush Gardens, London.

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Fig. 03

Taken as a group, the three works all employ a minimalist grammar and strategy: centrifugal modular structures, sequenced in space and which demand from the spectator an active participation to bring each element together. If Structure for Distance (Obstacles) is reminiscent of Richard Serra’s formal language, Structure for Repetition (not Representation) and Prison Work remind of Robert Morris’ L-beams, both from a formal and operational point of view, by questioning the viewer’s relation between perception and experience – an aspect that reoccurs in most of Pisano’s works. Yet, these objects do not exist solely as volumes, but also as dispositifs which on one hand translate as diagrams, on the other support as display structures, the same content offered to the viewer in another form. Recalling again the bamboo structure (which, I was alerted, is not properly to be considered a work) can serve as an example of the use of sculpture in Pisano’s practice. There, the structure changed shape and, accordingly, function many times over the period that it was on show, revealing its nature of model for testing shapes, functions, space and public, and ultimately, the medium per se to an extent that seldom the artist allows to a work. I mentioned in passing Hélio Oiticica’s work, but looking at it closer, isn’t there a proximity between Pisano’s accessible sculptures, and the Brazilian artist’s Permeables, both on the formal level and in a deeper sense, as the Movimento Neo Concreto, whereas embedded with Conceptual Art strategies, considered the body as an overtly political subject matter of art? What does a sculpture really do, then? Falke’s sculptures are ultimately narrative structures, gently forcing the viewer to position themselves in front of the content that ushered the work, they are elements for displaying content, to organize material – and still, they operate as objects.

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