[moMs] museum of MODERN space
'Critual' Graham Budgett & Sebastian Mendes 1977
crit of a crit [at Saint Martin's School of Art]
steel sculpture, surveillance video, image/text, photography,
'safety' posters, music score, choreography, props, etc
motive: abreaction [local myth revisited as global]
At Saint Martin's School of Art in Central London in the mid-1970s they spoke a lot about space, form, & gravity; partly a reaction to the anti-gestural, recently 'expanded field' of The New Sculpture, partly localized morphology. SPACE was more contingent matter than void, FORMALISM the critical method, GRAVITY a tolerated impediment. Sir Anthony Caro necessarily affirmed gravity & 'groundedness' in his work and his pedagogy, he was the Champion of welded metal sculpture; but a defiance of ground and gravity always remained on the agenda in the Saint Martin's critique and critical discourse. A quarter-century on, virtual space simulates conditions ideal for Caroesque sculpture unencumbered by terrestrial gravity. Weightlessness, Zero-G, flotation... we call it levity, the opposite of gravity; but gravity's inverse is actually outer-space, the ideal environment for formalist spatial experiment.
Announcing the first off-earth Sculpture Park. At moMs gravity no longer prevails on the immanence of human spatial consciousness and it's history. Here levity rules. A small step from the pedestel for Rodin's figures extends to a giant leap into the void for Modern Sculpture.
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