ABSTRACT
Artworks derive from the world of things in their preformed material as in their technique. There is nothing in them that doesn’t belong to this world.
(Adorno in Adorno, et al., 1997:132.)
Recently, I brought my students on a fi eld trip to New York City’s renowned commercial gallery district, West Chelsea. A student of mine-a man in his
mid-forties who had recently emigrated from Nigeria to the United Statescontemplated an art installation by the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis (1936-). Surveying a slab of steel on the fl oor of the art gallery embedded in a mound of what appeared to be used charcoal from a barbeque, in front of several shelves of ordinary glassware, he shook his head and asked me “but what does it mean?” We had stumbled upon this gallery almost accidentally, and I didn’t know much about this artist. In the absence of any clues in the form of wall text or even titles that could help me out of my predicament, I shamefacedly moved to the entrance of the gallery, in search of one of the printed press releases that inevitably accompanies such shows. The text, possibly written by a curator or art historian, told us that
Kounellis’s multi-layered, eloquent installations juxtapose earthy substances (i.e. coal, wool, iron, glass, stone) with evocative objects (such as sewing machines), producing theatrical compositions in which “art” collides with the “everyday.” In this way, he attempts to deconstruct and recontextualize artistic and cultural hierarchies, challenging not only the consumerist ideology of the art market but also the viewer’s passive gaze.
