The Irony of Marisa Merz

OCTOBER 124, Spring 2008, pp. 157–168 © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is difficult to provide a clear idea of the work of Marisa Merz as a whole, for inasmuch as it has been presented to the public only piecemeal, and then only at long intervals, its overall contours are not easily grasped. To be sure, her works have been documented—they have appeared in both individual and group shows since 1966—but such photographs are of limited value, providing only a rough idea of the works in question.1 By its very nature, her work is difficult to capture in photographs—the extremely subtle pieces made of copper wire or nylon threads, for example. Producing photographs that provide a sense of their presentation, their placement in context and in space, is even more difficult. The exhibitions have not been about quantity, that is to say staking out and occupying a given amount of space, but about realizing the experience of space as a quality. And this experience is not something that can be exclusively associated with a single artistic genre such as sculpture. In the work of Merz, it happens that each piece, whatever its nature, is first of all meant to be perceived as a phenomenon in space, one that sets its own parameters rather than deriving them from any particular genre. This means that for exhibition purposes, pictures and objects in space do not align themselves or intersect with central axes, using the space as background. Nor do the works create within a given space an autonomous internal space, as it were, in either the physical or psychological sense—a kind of space that follows its own rules, independent of the architecture, and forces its reality onto the viewer, whether within the shelter of the environment or in arrangements inspired by behaviorism or phenomenology.2 To a certain extent, Merz’s works abide by existing structural boundaries, cozying up against them and underscoring their function as determinants of an actual space. In their reciprocal relationship with the space—that is, in arrangements in which the works