Tag: absence

  1. Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios [Irritable], 1996, wall installation with drywall, shoes, cow bladder and surgical thread (four niches), 116.8 × 170.2 cm, 46 × 67 in., photo © Todd-White Art Photography Courtesy White Cube, © Doris Salcedo and White Cube
  2. Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios [Irritable], 1996, wall installation with drywall, shoes, cow bladder and surgical thread (four niches), 116.8 × 170.2 cm, 46 × 67 in., photo courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales 
  3. Installation view: Doris Salcedo, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 26–October 12, 2015, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

“In ‘Atrabiliarios’ Salcedo evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer’s response is, in turn, emotional, even visceral, rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes as relics or attributes of lost people, donated by the families of those who have disappeared. Shoes are particularly personal items as they carry the imprint of our body more than any other item of clothing. She then sealed the niches with a membrane of cow bladder, which she literally sutured into the plaster of the wall as if picturing the literal process of internalised bodily memory. Barely visible through the animal skin membrane, the shoes are a haunting evocation of their absent owners and inevitably recall the grizzly souvenirs of Nazi death camps.”

— Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Yoko Ono. Morning Piece. 1964. Glass, paper, ink, and glue, dimensions vary. Private collection. © 2015 Yoko Ono

In 1965 Morning Piece was performed over three days on the roof of Ono’s apartment building at 87 Christopher Street. Like many of her early works, Morning Piece originated as an instruction with the potential to be realized by the artist or others. To perform the work, Ono attached small pieces of paper to shards of glass and sold them to participants. Each specified a future date and a particular period of the morning, namely “until sunrise,” “after sunrise,” or “all morning.” She conceived Morning Piece while she was living in Japan in 1964 and held several performances—at her apartment, on the roof of a gallery, in a park—selling mornings and informing buyers, “You can see the sky through it.” It is through the changing sky, a dominant motif in Ono’s work, that a morning is experienced. The work offers the buyer the possibility of possessing an intangible, universally shared, and infinitely repeating feature of human life: a morning. The artist views sunrise as an opportunity for renewal and reflection and she encourages participants in Morning Piece to use their glass morning as a vehicle for meditation and contemplation.

Source: moma.org