Hammer Projects: Carlos Bunga

Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest. [Image Source]

While visiting the Hammer Museum late last year to attend the L.A Rebellion Symposium, I noticed the work by Carlos Bunga being installed and pondered "I wonder what this will turn out to be?" At the time it was bare cardboard filling the unique and often fascinating space of the front stairwell of the Hammer museum. I imagine this to be a difficult space for an artist to either work within, produce upon, or make relevant: the scale is huge and the positioning in a main entrance both bestows a place of importance and also a negation by viewers as they pass this work to "go see art".

As I was back at the Hammer this last weekend to see Now Dig This! I passed by the now completed cardboard structure and was first underwhelmed. "This is it - for all of that scaffolding and labor?" However this first impression really did not do justice to the work; when viewed with the supporting pieces in the smaller gallery off of the lobby, they actually make a compelling collection of thoughts and images on contemporary re/use of materials, scale and the oppositional and supportive forces of the interior and exterior within architectural construction. Bunga in this work, Landscape (2011), both creates a surface that is decorative and decayed, taming the entirety of the unruly staircase space with subdivided cardboard spaces. The wall becomes a surface exposed, as if someone had torn of the drywall of the Hammer and reveled it to be merely cardboard underneath, which could not be possibly strong enough to hold the building together but somehow the walls are still standing. The cardboard envelopes the railing for the staircase, which both further unifies the work into the structure and also entangles our safety and the sturdiness of the cardboard structure together.

In the lobby adjacent gallery of smaller objects (which is not hard to do because almost everything is smaller than the lobby of the Hammer) Bunga has provided a collection of mixed media creations dating from 2002-2008 that tie in thematically to the large cardboard creation. Small models are roughly created; tape and paint holding a world together. Items are in transition, destroyed, created, improved upon, taken apart.

Though I have a strong bias toward moving image art, in many ways the single channel video outside the gallery had an equal weight to the large cardboard construction. Within the video Lamp (2002 1:34 min. duration), the artist smashes a light bulb and then meticulously gathers all the pieces and with tape "reassembles" the light. While reassembled, the light will never work, and it is not the same object that it was before, though it is easy to still use the term "light" to describe it. Our society is in a constant path of construction and reconstruction, and what we take apart is never the same, but yet somehow it is not different. Bunga, in this way, feels like his abstractions get to the core of a very real and reoccurring phenomena in society.