Shotgun Review Archive

New Work: Felix Schramm

A ghostly presence by German artist Felix Schramm appears to have been propelled through the walls of SF MOMA and lodged tightly within its 4th floor galleries. Titled Collider 2007, the installation is monumental in scale, and brings to mind the New Jersey house that Gordon Matta-Clark carved in two (Splitting, 1974). Imagine if Matta-Clark's house was further split apart, and if bisecting sections of its torn, peeling walls were catapulted through the modern museum's pristine white box by something approximating the force and speed of a tornado, or better yet, Hurricane Katrina. This may give you a sense of the magnitude of Schram's work. I make this comparison between Schram's work and Matta-Clark's infamous piece because I believe that sections of Splitting (the corners of the house, to be exact) are housed in SF MOMA's collection (and, if memory serves correct, have been placed on view on the fifth floor galleries). When we encounter sculpture of such scale and magnitude, and especially when we encounter it indoors, its relationship to human scale usually elicits feelings of awe from the onlooker. In addition to inspiring awe, Collider also communicates a significant sense of aggression and violence through the ragged edges of its torn walls, its imposing mass, and the precarious angle at which it's positioned within the museum's rooms (plopped diagonally between two gallery bays, it threatens to potentially collapse on the viewer). The necessary aggression, force and violence exerted in order to tear a house apart is beautifully documented in a film by Matta-Clark, in which he and another construction worker are seen laboring day after day to bisect the New Jersey house with a chainsaw. The entropic force that may have destroyed Collider and brought it to its current state, however, are merely simulated by Schramm. And the potential violence of his piece is merely implied, not real, more like a Hollywood stage set than an artifact from the lived world. The curatorial text by Apsara DiQuinzio states that Schramm spent three weeks working with several assistants to painstakingly build this structure out of Sheetrock, plaster, plywood, hardware, and other materials found on site (including leftover wall paint from past SFMOMA exhibitions). So the artist has created a simulacra of an indistinct architectural ruin, and in painstakingly reconstructing something that is so banal and decrepit, yet by making it look so beautiful (parts of the walls, with their various patches of paint, look like AbEx paintings), he has created a fantastical parallel universe for the viewer--a universe that's off kilter so as to offer us a skewed viewpoint and to thereby contain many alternate realities. If you read site-specificity into Schramm's alternate realities, it could act as mnemonic trigger for contextual histories. For San Franciscans who have lived here for more than 15 years, Collider may represent a ghostly parallel universe that reminds us of what stood on the museum's grounds before it was built--all of those pawnshops and SROs that were destroyed in the 80s and 90s to make room for shiny new buildings such as SF MOMA, the Yerba Buena Complex and Moscone Center. Better yet, for those who lived through the last earthquake, the piece can serve as a chilling reminder of the shaky ground that we stand upon. If you lend the work a psychological read, Collider could be seen as a jagged thought bubble containing the more troubling thoughts of our psyche. If the perfect white gallery walls that wrap around and contain Schramm's installation represent our outward appearance, the cheerful, public face that we turn towards to the world, Collider, with its formidable mass and its raw texture, may represent all of the heavy, emotional baggage that looms overhead and threatens to come crashing down in the most inopportune social situations. When contrasted to Matta-Clark's work, Schramm's work appears to grapple with similar concerns about the mobility of a site or place. Matta-Clark's work can be seen as a comment on how a site itself is rendered obsolete by the uprooting of structures and populations, often put into effect by notions of urban renewal and progress. Yet earlier concepts of site-specificity and authenticity debated by Matta-Clark and his contemporaries have been replaced by Schramm's full-blown investment and belief in the power and pervasiveness of simulacra and the multiplicity of reads and meanings ushered in by something that can serve as a beautifully engineered copy. New Work: Felix Schramm will be on view at SF MOMA until September 30, 2007