2023-08-05 00:11:03
Last Updated Saturday, 5 August 2023 – 00:11
The Portuguese artist erects a hilarious and happy building/sculpture in an English garden.
Joana Vasconcelos, on her cake.PAUL QUEZADA-NEIMANJoana Vasconcelos Splendor in Bilbao
The world of discussing monuments in public spaces will never end, no matter how old the concept may seem. For the past two years, much of the global conversation in art has revolved around The Vessel, a Manhattan landmark built in a former warehouse district on the Hudson River that now houses skyscrapers overlooking New Jersey. . Its promoter, the real estate company Hudson Yards, wanted to adorn the project with a large sculpture and the architect Thomas Heatherwick built for his site a swarm of crossed ladders like something out of an Escher painting but with more muscles. The stairs lead to the height of a 16th floor where there are no shops or cafeterias, or multipurpose rooms but it does house some mysterious sense of doom that has driven four people to throw themselves into the void in two years. The owners have suspended access to the monument, which writers refer to today as a symbol of the intimate anguish caused by contemporary capitalism.
The relief of The Vessel has been taken this summer by The Wedding Cake, the wedding cake, a piece that is the exact opposite of the viewpoint of the New York suicide bombers. Instead of being in the city, The Wedding Cake is in the wooded park of Waddesdon Manor, the mansion (more like palace) that the famous Rothschild family has in Buckinghamshire, In England. Instead of being the work of an English architect and built like a balancing beam, The Wedding Cake is massive and heavy like a wedding cake and full of textures: of brocades, of fretwork and borders, of traditional Portuguese ceramics. Its author is Joana Vasconcelos from Lisbon, the woman the world discovered with another bridal piece, A Noiva (2005), a large lamp in which there were tampons instead of crystals and which represented a bride and which at that time came into the collection of the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao. Now, in the photos, at least in the photos, visitors to The Wedding Cake are seen to laugh a lot, instead of heading to suicide as they do in The Vessel.
Because it is undeniably funny Joana Vasconcelos’s wedding cake, with its interior that looks like a baroque crypt painted in Barbie colours: there is greenish blues, pale pinks, lilacs like veils, gleaming golds, and Spanish whites.… From the perimeter of the crypt it is possible to climb to the top of the cake, at a height of 12 metres, which is a circular viewpoint, like in a fantasy of Marie Antoinette in the Little Triann.
PAUL QUEZADA-NEIMAN
If you dig a little, it is also possible to find an ironic meaning in the cake, which obviously holds up to the adjective of kitsch. as if it had been invented for you. The Vasconcelos monument is in dialogue with the Rothschild palace, a Versailles-inspired building that anyone would colloquially refer to as a cake. And Vasconcelos has already installed in the park of Waddesdon Manor a work called Lafite, made with Chteau Lafite wine husks, which the Rothschild family produces.
But irony is not what matters in Joana Vasconcelos’s Wedding cake. The Portuguese artist describes her work as a building built exclusively for the joy of being there, in large gardens, as simple decoration. The joy of discovering an absurd and colorful place in the middle of a beautiful English garden is enough to justify such a piece.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that the society of his time (a century ago) no longer had anything to commemorate because it lived in a continuous present, with no sense of past or future. For this reason, the word monument, in the style of the immense Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, seems a bit anachronistic. What does this commemorate? Is the question that haunts any monument born in today’s world. And the answer is always a disappointed nothing, actually.
The Vasconcelos Wedding cake commemorates something, joy and love, and, furthermore, it has, at least, a specific use: It is possible to get married in your crypt and celebrate life for once as a colorful, self-parochial and happily ridiculous party.. Then, if things go wrong in the marriage, there will always be time to go to New York and take a walk around Hudson Yads, to see if they have opened the doors of The Vessel.
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