Anita Molinero, Sans titre (Rendez-vous !), 2008. Cabines téléphoniques, poubelles en polypropylène, 243 x 192 x 142 cm. Collection MAMCO Genève. © Adagp, Paris, 2023 .
Anita Molinero and extruded polystyrene bites
“Pull up your chin, Happy. You're liable to step on it.”[1]
Apple Annie
The 20 Rendez-vous telephone boxes were shown for the first time at the Le Havre Biennial in 2008, in various locations across the city. The curator, David Perreau, first heard of them during the planning stage in 2003 at a public procurement committee for an impersonal campus. Anticipating the negative effects of a surge in uncontrolled privatisation at France Telecom (leading to France’s first major dismantling of public infrastructure and a spate of suicides among employees[2]), Anita Molinero stripped the boxes of their call function and gave them a new status, renaming them SMS sculptures. Populated by ever-mutating organic larval forms, they have experienced a metamorphosis. Positioned within a honeycomb structure (a feature of the 601 SP module), the three France Telecom units are transparent, providing a striking view of the dustbins which have been melted, liquefied, licked and pierced by a blowtorch. Displayed at the front, the shape-objects – in red, blue, greeny-yellow, black, etc. – are suspended and illuminated, visible at first glance, and a clear meeting point: RV Cab Alien (Alien Box Meet-up). While the artist often compares the transmutation of plastics from solid to liquid to the special effects employed in genre films such as Terminator 2 and Alien 3, this is also seen in literary works, such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda. These sculptures lean towards the informal without ever fully succeeding (ultimately we know it is a dustbin) through their ability to excite the eye. On this point, Anita Molinero goes one step further in her 1% order report: “it [the sculpture] causes the eye to react like a sexual organ, as Bataille would say; the eye at the head of the penis and/or the open eye of the vagina (take a quick look).”
Perspective 1 of the telephone box was designed to welcome, protect and separate us from the rest of the world, thus creating a hard prosthesis or an architectural shell. Their ghostly presence extends across an entire industrial city – or, now, a gallery – like in 1993 at the Chapelle des Lazaristes, CCC, Tours, when the dirty yellow-orange foam mattresses resembled makeshift beds abandoned by drifters. In the words of Xavier Douroux, he and Franck Gautherot were unprepared for what they saw at this exhibition. The place was hellish, the exhibition impossible and he didn’t know what he’d seen. The co-founder of the Consortium discovered acts revealing a fervent stubbornness, demonstrating a fierce determination to... refuse: refuse to sculpt the beautiful, the spectacular, the idiotic; refuse scholarly sculpture. Anita Molinero left these things (as she liked to call them in the beginning) to accumulate on the floor, mimicking the state in which they were found, or even a state of rootlessness, according to Xavier Douroux, during the Country Sculpture exhibition in 1994, at the Consortium with Stella, Chamberlain, Grosvenor, Visser and Pages. As a young artist, she held onto a determination to unlearn all logic and language, continually reviving the flow of satisfaction (with the sculpture). And yet, even consigned to a state of abandonment, all these things compel one to handle or kick them away after walking into them; they reveal the traces of bodies and conjure cries and indistinct words. They are a precursor to language, like the cruel drawing-poetry produced by Antonin Artaud (a former mental health patient at the Rodez hospital, exposed to all-powerful psychiatrists) for which we were also unprepared.
Following the arrival of heat guns in 1995, she placed a growing emphasis on industrial materials. From this point on, she saw her previous pieces as controlled and attached arrangements, feeling only weariness for them. Next came the distortion, melting and burning of the walls of Venilia (a green, black and red tricolour wall at the Bordeaux gallery Triangle in 2000 and the spectacular wall at SPOT, Le Havre, in 2001). The extruded polystyrene sheets in faded blues and pinks were showcased at the Grand Café in Saint Nazaire, contradicting the tendency to sterilise cities by prioritising security ideology in the urban design process. It was to Sophie Legrand-Jacques that Anita Molinero entrusted her research into effect sculpture, a duel in the sun where the artist revels and berates while tackling the permanency of polystyrene. “You can’t get rid just like that, as with bronze,” she says. In the workshop, she explores an interest in tongue play versus a play on words, allowing her libidinal imagination to flow as she sets to work. Bulging eyes, furious tongues and twisted mouths take shape alongside frustrated cries suggesting (unlike rational language) the incomprehensible and intolerable: “The unrelenting muteness of shape,” says Anita Molinero, “forced the material to twist violently, with an exposed and convulsive tongue at the bottom of the bins... I’m essentially continuing to research the tongue within language and externalising it in my sculpture[3].”
[1] Annie, the lead character in Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (1933) sells apples in Times Square where she lives from hand to mouth.
[2] See the brilliant analysis by Fanny Lopez, A bout de flux, Ed. Divergences, Paris, 2022.
[3]“Interview”, June 2004 in Catalogue Anita Molinero, co-published by FRAC Limoges, Grand-Café Saint-Nazaire, SPOT Havre, Parvis, Ibos, 2004, p.74.
[1] Annie, the lead character in Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (1933) sells apples in Times Square where she lives from hand to mouth.
[2] See the brilliant analysis by Fanny Lopez, A bout de flux, Ed. Divergences, Paris, 2022.
[3]“Interview”, June 2004 in Catalogue Anita Molinero, co-published by FRAC Limoges, Grand-Café Saint-Nazaire, SPOT Havre, Parvis, Ibos, 2004, p.74.
