Round the back of Monica Bonvicini’s latest installation in the Neue Nationalgalerie, the artist has reincarnated the glass from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s original design for the building. Prone to cracking and frosting up from condensation, the artist has positioned the architect’s most publicised flaw to give a grim view of the scaffolded interior of her new architectural intervention. The great Bauhaus architect could never have imagined that his modernist masterpiece would become a showcase for his most notorious failures. But then, Bonvicini’s exhibition I do You is unlike any other that’s been shown at the NNG.
The handcuffs she’s installed around the edge of the museum, with their long stretching chains connecting visitors to the black roof, somehow manage to be kinky, gimmicky and deadly serious
The Italian-born, Berlin-based artist has spent her career investigating the relationship between architecture and gender, dismantling the legacy of male power structures in institutional spaces. Such caustic jibes at the jewel in Berlin’s cultural crown capture the fury at the heart of her intervention. The pile of rubble on the gallery floor, the addition of an upper third floor that compromises the famous open-plan interior – it all amounts to a scathing reappraisal of the six years and €140 million allocated to rebuilding the defective museum piece by piece.
This extra floor has been brilliantly conceived. It’s so well concealed behind a seamless mirror that it’s a shock to see your own reflection suddenly come striding towards you. Across its raised floor, a carpet spreads out, featuring an endless photo tapestry of the artist’s discarded jeans and pants, captured over a year after undressing each day.
Around it on either side are riveted black S&M chairs that anyone can sit on, and her familiar metal-chained bondage chairs that are a perennial hit with Instagrammers. The additions of such signature works exemplifies a misguided aim to combine the new large-scale installation with a career retrospective. When properly separated, works from her career bristle with intensity, as is the case with ‘Hausfrau Swinging’ (1997), a brutal metaphor for women trapped in domestic servitude.
Exhibition concept and reality feel similarly mismatched at another level. During the exhibition’s press conference, Bonvicini spoke of “finding your own space… so that I don’t simply exhibit again where an army of male colleagues did it before”. But with I do You, you feel that rather than forcing the audience to reevaluate the space, she dwells too much on finding a critical connection with the legacy of its creator.
On a side of her raised floor – mimicking the frosted glass of van der Rohe’s flawed design – she’s placed quotes, like that of Edith Farnsworth, a former lover of van der Rohe who commissioned a house epitomising the architect’s ideals only to find that open-plan vision did not tally with everyday needs. “I am always restless. Even in the evening,” one of them reads.
The Neue Nationalgalerie is also a deeply uncompromising space: an enormous black roof somehow being held up on eight matchstick legs. That famous facade is disturbed by Bonvicini, who leans an enormous square mirror up against it. Stretching up above the roof of the museum, her brash gesture, meant to show she won’t be cowed by the building, comes across as exactly that: a gesture.
So much in the exhibition is deceptive and hard to grasp. Even the handcuffs she’s installed around the edge of the museum, with their long stretching chains connecting visitors to the black roof, somehow manage to be kinky, gimmicky and deadly serious. Waiting guards are on hand to chain you up for a minimum of 30 minutes. Hard, engineered steel encasing soft human tissue, so clinical and fierce, but ultimately lacking in true resonance in the vast interior of Berlin’s modern art temple.
- Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, Mitte, details, until 30.04.23
