Anna Moderato, Untitled (2012)
The work of Anna Moderato hangs in balance. Still, her sculptures are brim-full of potential movement; they contain motion just as an unstruck tuning fork holds its note. It is frustrating. You circle them, willing them to move untouched, pacing, as they remain static. Obstinate. It lies just beyond recognition how you know that they are supposed to unfold or to sway pendulum-heavy and regular. But motion is there, on the periphery of consciousness; it lies dormant beneath the surface of plywood, it suspends itself between milled steel rods. Something kinetic resonates, and provokes. The tension is too much; you reach out to touch them, and off they go.
Anna Moderato, Untitled (2012)
Two square metal bars start to swing backwards and forwards in parallel, less than a foot apart. The angle between them and their doppelgangers – those fixed to the wall – reduces and increases with a heartbeat rhythm. They are attached in pairs at the top by a curved strip of steel. As this absorbs the flow, eventually, the heartbeat slows and comes to a rest. Another strip of steel, this one wider and wound into a loop, moves across the floor and back again like a kind of utilitarian rocking horse. It almost tumbles all the way over in a somersault, but instead, weighted at one point in its arc, it returns in on itself. The movement is wobbly, comedic, but the dull gleam of the materials and the repetitive cycle absorb outright laughter as it emerges, leaving viewers with a smile alone. This is enough. The artist is careful never to let her work tip into the absurd, nor to leave it deadened by a minimalist aesthetic, instead she lets it rock between these two registers, never committing to either but touching a little of both. Her stool works straddle both registers accordingly. Flattened and hung they are two-dimensional, austere, but once their hinge is engaged they reconfigure on a spectrum between sculpture and seating.
Anna Moderato, Untitled (2012)
Back to frustration, for some lingers. There is something too familiar about these objects, something in their scale and their tempo. The twinned bars stand on the floor; proud to the wall they reach up vertically to shoulder height. Equally, the stools unfold to hang level with the tops of our heads. The circle of flattened metal is light enough to pick up and could hold a curled-up body within its curves. As one sculpture wavers and another rolls its deficient roly-poly, a source of unrest clicks into place: the machines are mocking us. Their size, their poise, their movements, it is all in our image. They challenge us, in their engineered simplicity, to imagine or perform the humanoid movements they manifest. To compete in this task of slow endurance. Once the realisation is triggered, we are there whether we like it or not, body or mind, rolling around on the floor or rocking on our heels, shoulder blades thumping dully against the wall. The impertinence of it all.
It is a trick of the intellect that encourages us to endow things with human traits. Moderato acknowledges the persistence of such ascription and strips it back to its barest possibility. How simple can they become before we no longer see little people in these building materials? The pieces, though kinetic, through their simplicity cannot recall the mechanised clockwork creations of Jean Tingueley and François Morellet, nor even the glacial motorised progression of Robert Breer’s works. Instead, they appear like a reenactment of minimal dance, machines that perform performers performing machines. A cyborgian waltz, yet no joyful vision of a technological future like perhaps the kinetic works of the 1960s held, no more the dystopian view of a malevelont android take-over that followed. These works are contemporary, not referential; they track our relationship to technology as it sits now, on the brink. The artist sets things in motion and then steps away to let her objects do the critical work. As it turns out, some of Moderato’s sculptures have minds of their own.
Anna Moderato, Untitled (2012)
For the exhibition In Use, three adults are set to take up the sculptures’ challenge and make like machinery. The performers are given set instructions on how to move, and do so in a repeat cycle held for a few minutes. The movements simulate those of perpetual motion, but unlike their wood-and-steel equivalents, the decision to continue remains with the performer, as does the decision to stop. Yet they don’t stop. Over this exhibition’s three-day run, the performers do not vary their limited scope of movement, nor do they rest. In the gallery space for all its opening hours, fatigue is inevitable for the human components of Moderato’s performance. Like Yvonne Rainer, Moderato has said no both to spectacle and to virtuosity, so the performers are not professional dancers. They do not bring flourish or style to confuse the work, nor do they bring bodies trained to operate under this strain. Perhaps their sculptural partners, the metal rods and the looped steel, will outperform them? Or perhaps exhaustion is the point? Moderato asks very little of her performers, they move simply and repeatedly. What they do barely requires will. When viewed against the prevailing technology of our time, she presents a physical performance in opposition to the utopian theory of online choice: when we can do whatever we want, if persuaded thus, we often do the same thing, repeatedly, to exhaustion. All this from the slightest touch.
Anna Moderato, Untitled (2012)
But just as the works tip into this ominous terrain, they are brought back to ground more familiar. Humour is engaged with a deft agency. Moderato’s performed actions recall The Way Things Go (1987) by Fischli & Weiss, a work triggered by the artist’s hand and left to descend into chaos. Bas Jan Ader’s falls and even perhaps the tumbles and scrapes of Chaplin and Keaton come to mind, although in Moderato’s work the comedy is scaled and restrained to the point that it reaches its own core. As we all rock back and forth – the sculptures, their performing mimics and the audience, albeit in our imagination alone – we recognise that we have locked ourselves into a cycle. This is the only way out, to mourn our lack of agency. For, at the centre of comedy, is melancholy, and this, under Moderato’s governance is what does the work.
This text was written for Anna Moderato’s first solo exhibition, ‘In Use‘, at Acme Project Space 22–24 June 2012. The exhibition was curated by Stella Bottai, Daria Khan, Ned McConnell and Jessica Vaughan, students on the MA Curating Contemporary Art programme at the RCA.