Mario Merz at the Whitechapel Gallery

This double issue of Audio Arts grew out of a collaboration between the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Audio Arts on two projects in January and July 1980.

from Audio Arts Magazine Vol 5, Number 2, 1980

Transcript

During the 1980s Audio Arts collaborated with the Whitechapel Art Gallery and produced a series of audio-visual presentations relating to current exhibitions. These included Joseph Comell, Max Beckmann, David Smith, Bruce McLean and Mario Merz. In order both to produce a tape/slide programme to accompany the Merz exhibition and to record his commentary for an issue, Audio Arts spent a week with the artist in the gallery during the setting up and installation of his exhibition. A discussion was then held with Merz, the Whitechapel’s Director, Nicholas Serota, the exhibition’s curator Mark Francis, and William Furlong. The following statements from the recordings refer to some of the works in the exhibition.

Luoghi Senza Strada (translation)
Merz The bitumen covers come from oil, usually used for construction, making streets or the like. It is a fantastic material to use since it is such a concentration of both the liquid and non-liquid power of the world. After a process of millions of years, earth becomes oil, so that bitumen is a reality showing the power which the earth itself has. This is what makes it possible for me to use it.

The Double Igloo
It is not my job to explain my work exactly. When I explain, I put myself in the position of making a new work, and the work is always in the doing of it. For instance, with The Double Igloo, the reality of this piece is that it is necessary to do it on site. If you look at the work you have a sensation about it, not because it is sculpture, but because, for example, each piece of glass is in flight around the structure. It is fixed for the moment of the show, but it is in flight between the earth and the sky. This is true for all that is built by man: a castle, a monument, a Greek column. Each thing has one direction, like each piece of glass. Together, they become one place.

The Painting The painting was made on 14 January in the gallery.
The painting comes from and works against the old classical idea of fully representing man, his body, hands, head, feet and all. Here I take a part – the foot and some of the leg – and repeat it ten times. This piece of leg is like a gramophone record which is stuck so that you get a fragment, repeating itself time and again. It is related to the spiral and is made to destroy the idea of the classical representation where the full structure has to be shown. This kind of work is also related to time since each foot is made one time. When you do it ten times, you have an idea of time itself. Someone seeing it without knowing my explanation would, I think, have the same sensation about it.

Question What do you want people to go away thinking about after visiting your exhibition?

Merz I don’t know, because I don’t have any idea what people themselves should think. They might take away a feeling against the architecture that they see around them in the streets. Also an idea that the time used to construct a work is the time of the work. But I don’t mean that they would think this directly, since art is undirected, it is an invention by man to express something indirectly. Art is not meant to explain, but to show what it is impossible to explain.