What happens when we melt something? The objects are disfigured? destroyed? maimed? ruined? transformed? united with another object? relaxed? stretched? twisted? reconfigured? freed? re-thought? reduced? re-used? re-cycled? undefined? redefined?
What happens when we see this piece? The faces emerge. They’re not disfigured. We see creation not destruction. Not even the records seem defaced just repeated. The face disappears slowly from one to the other as if we’re losing ourselves in the music. or are we finding ourselves? Is it even about music?
But who are we kidding this face isn’t ours. We’re not finding or losing anything, we’re looking at melted records in a frame. It’s cool yes but does it actually say anything?
What if we consider the name Through the Barricade. Where are the faces coming from? What barricade are the pressed against? The word through can’t be already completed because nothing has passed through the records - if those are in fact the barricade - so has the sentence been edited? are we “passing” Through the Barricade?
and what if we look at it from this angle. They look sad.
But so what??
The reason I ended up looking at this piece by L017 was because I wanted to melt things (still do, always have really) so I wanted to look at what other people have melted and called art. While I appreciate this piece for its cool factor I really feel no connection to it. I don’t doubt it has meaning to the artists or to other viewers - if anyone reading this has any thoughts on the piece I would really love to hear them - but for me I can’t get much past the wow that’s cool part which is why I started asking all those questions; to try and realize why melting is interesting. What I realized was that what’s interesting or cool about this is not that it’s melted but that it’s transformative. It’s faces into records or records into faces.
I actually started out looking at another “piece” that I saw in the British Museum three years ago called “The Throne of Weapons” by a Mozambican artist Cristovao Canhavato (Kester).
This piece is striking for the obvious reason - that it’s made of guns. What makes it so much more interesting is the significance of the guns. It’s no surprise (or shouldn’t be) that many African countries since the end of colonization have had a lot of political unrest. The chair in that context alone becomes more intriguing. What’s more is that the weapons Kester used in this piece were acquired through a program called Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) through which both sides of the conflict voluntarily turned in their weapons for farm and construction tools. What I learned in going back to find this piece was that chairs and stools have even more significance in many African countries where they’re viewed as symbols of power and prestige.
Personally, I connect to this piece much more than to the first. I think both pieces have an amount of weight and realistically I think the difference is cultural. I would LOVE to make a piece like this with so much weight and symbolism and significance but it comes from a place of violent political unrest that I imagine penetrates much more of a person’s life than any sort of political unrest we may face in our own country. Even without any history the piece addresses obvious violence which is universally recognizable while the first piece, Through the Barricade, is much more emotional, specific and personal to the artist which I think is indicative of our modern western culture. While both pieces could be said to be trying to connect with the world I think L017’s work is reaching out asking for our attention while the Throne of Weapons is silently commanding our attention and focusing it on a universal condition rather than a personal crisis.
