THIS PAST FALL, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened “Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers,” a presentation of some forty objects and artworks selected by the London-based designer from the museum’s collection (on view through April 7). Here, the artist Eric N. Mack—a friend and one-time collaborator of Wales Bonner’s—offers his reflections on the show.
ALL THE RESOUNDING SOUNDS, trumpeting from the gods. From the lips of angels. A reflection of perfect love, of justified value.
Something you can spend, such as copper, brass, or gold.
Value felt in the body. This feels closer to my definition of purity.
Something that endures the rage and the noise of the everyday. Four Akrhaphones reverberate into the ground like muffled speakers.
The sound penetrates the floor and gives life to the works in the exhibition.
Our dear Terry Adkins’s work Last Trumpet, 1995.
Dark Night, 1987–88: copper, wood, tin, rawhide, and brass.
Synapse, 1992: metal, drum skin, and enamel.
In the presence of his art, he is with us.
The force lifting up the exhibition is the aural ascension.
The pedestal weighs the balance of materiality like a scale.
The main confrontation in the gallery seeks to describe. The contortion of the body becomes material as I move around the platformed pedestal.
This is a chance meeting of a 1935 Jean Arp sculpture that concretizes the felt movement of a body and Moustapha Dimé’s Lady with a Long Neck, 1992, a torqued slab of wood with wings of iron, with the span of a great cape spinning round and round.
What’s a reclining nude to a whirling dervish?
It’s all in the movement.
The highest highs and the lowest lows.
Again, the highs are aural, like notes from a trumpet.
Gold
Brass
Thread
Cast stone
Wood
Everythings for real.
As the Wales Bonner garment care tag reads.
Swarovski crystals and cowries adorn the hem of her garments, giving us something to cherish. Some transformative motif adds color and spice. The wrists for hands that must do the work are embellished with crochet and colored like a horizon line.
