ART-PRESENTATION: Cinthia Marcelle-Education by Stone

Cinthia Marcelle is recognized as one of the most notable young artists working in Brazil, known for her installations, performances, and videos, which stage forms of labor emptied of productivity. Through this engagement with everyday activities that constitute labor, she examines the forms that work can take in a given economic system and its role in the process of producing art.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo MoMA PS1 Archive

“Education by Stone”, is Cinthia Marcelle’s first solo exhibition in New York, the artist collaborated with a team of installers to lodge 20,000 sticks of chalk into the fissures in the grout of the towering brick walls of the gallery in the MoMA PS1 building. Chalk is a stone that was used for generations to imprint the structures of language and learning on students across the globe and, once, in this very building. In returning chalk to the building, Marcelle shows us that these functions may not be so separate: if, as a school, PS1 taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, MoMA PS1, the art institution, trains its public for proficiency in a visual culture that it also defines. The process of negotiating where each chalk rod should go was a process of reading the fissures and crevices that have deepened with time, the inexplicable holes and openings that have appeared along the way, and the areas that remain stubbornly even and flat. The process involved labor: a team of installers, working in concert, delicately fit or roughly smashed pieces of chalk into these brick walls. They worked to translate Marcelle’s observation into a form that is legible here, now, with bright chalk that is always slowly shedding its dust into the air. Also on view in MoMA PS1’s cinema, is Marcelle’s video “Leitmotif” (2011). Marcelle has worked with video since the beginning of her career, and the video indicates the extent to which her media works have mirrored the concerns of her site-specific installations. Her subjects have included forms of civic labor practices like firefighting, street cleaning, construction, and political protesting, and, in this video, the work of washing a sidewalk is transformed into an occasion to create a glorious whirlpool of water.

Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, New York, Duration: 23/10/16-5/3/17, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 12:00-18:00, http://momaps1.org