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BRUSHES WITH GREATNESS: Lara Favaretto’s Coppie simplici/Simple Couples, here shown in a previous outdoor installation, is now on view at the MCA Santa Barbara in Paseo Nuevo.
ART LOST AND FOUND
T
his new exhibition from the Museum of Con- my car from the parking structure on the Chapala temporary Art, simply titled Lara Favaretto, can side of the 900 block that I realized the full impact be found in the organization’s gallery at Paseo of “We All Fall Down.” Looking up out of the dark Nuevo and in other locations, including the Glass garage through a symmetrical opening that framed Box at UCSB’s Art, Design, & Architecture Museum, the bright-green Television Hill in a gauzy cloak of fog, a storefront on the 900 block of State Street, and, I momentarily saw a fragment of Santa Barbara landeventually, in a vacant lot in the heart of the Funk scape as a heap of green-dominant confetti, executed Zone. Favaretto’s work belongs to the “expanded in the same neo-pointillist palette as the storefront field of sculpture,” a term coined by art historian piece, and only slightly less evanescent. Rosalind Krauss in 1979 to identify the multiplicity The minimalist sculptures at UCSB, Boring and Fistof opportunities for making art ing, are enormously heavy blocks of opened by the logic of postmodernconcrete that the artist has marked ism. No longer confined to creating as they were setting with a series of or finding objects for independent gestures that then give the works display, artists such as Robert Mortheir titles. Following the logic of the Process Art movement in their ris and Christo began marking and focus on the presence of body, on constructing sites and building and installing what Krauss called “axinontraditional uses of material, by Charles Donelan omatic structures,” meaning archiand on the act of formation rather tectural forms that were at than the resulting object, these monumental forms once recognizable and out also reflect another imporof place. It is at this practice of tant aspect of Favaretto’s creating axiomatic strucpractice: the challenges of tures on a monumental movement and mobility. scale that Favaretto excels. Both “Defense d’Entrer” The Coppie simplici or Sim(“Do Not Enter”) and ple Couples on display in “Lost and Found” are in the MCA space are found the MCASB gallery space, objects — the automobilealthough soon “Do Not sized rotating brushes that Enter” will move to the scrub your Prius at the property in the Funk Zone car wash — paired off and that MCASB has purchased affixed to the gallery walls with the intention to build a by imposing steel plates. permanent museum there. At irregular intervals, the “Defense d’Entrer” is a giant brushes torque into simple sign saying exactly motion, sending off waves that, the purpose of which of air and not a little menin the context of Favaretto’s ace. Deprived of their funcoeuvre is to provoke contion in the car wash, these sideration of the extreme couples “still have each CAST IN CONCRETE: For one series of large minimalist political, psychological, other,” a familiar axiom sculptures, the artist uses her hands and body to mark and and philosophical crises manipulate soft concrete before it sets. that in this case means that, of boundaries so characover time, through the fricteristic of our historical tion of their pointless spinning, they will wear one moment. “Lost and Found” takes this line of inquiry another out. further by incarnating that most threatening of modAt 907 State Street, in a piece called “Tutti giù per ern anxious objects: abandoned luggage. Favaretto terra” or “We All Fall Down,” Favaretto has filled fills suitcases obtained from flea markets with mystery a storefront with one ton of multicolored confetti. contents, then locks them and throws away the keys. Industrial fans blow the colorful circles of paper, each Once they have been sealed, explicit instructions stipa little smaller than a dime, into shifting piles that ulate that they must never again be opened by anyone. resemble dunes or rolling hills. Curious passersby To do so would, according to Favaretto, permanently on State Street are wonderstruck by this unexpected void their status as works of her art. As a result, these intervention, although some of the wonder I over- are tricky bags to travel with, especially across national heard took the form of, “I wonder how hard it will be borders. One of them sits in Paseo Nuevo right now. Is n to clean up all that confetti?” It wasn’t until I retrieved it waiting for you?
LARA FAVARETTO
INSTALLATIONS
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THE INDEPENDENT
FEBRUARY 21, 2019
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