Monica Bonvicini: art without limits

On my morning commute through Soho, I pass four fetish shops. In the windows are mannequins triumphantly clad in whips, chains, dog leads and leather thongs. On the adjacent streets, workmen dig the roads into a tarmac patchwork, creating a perennial soundtrack of drills, chains and colliding metal.

Today, I’m thinking about an ongoing project by Italian artist Monica Bonvicini, which started in 1999 (when the contents of adult stores were still more likely to be found behind bead curtains in dingy basements). “What Does Your Wife/Girlfriend Think of Your Rough and Dry Hands?” (among other questions) begins as a questionnaire distributed in construction sites, usually in cities where Bonvicini is about to stage a show. She asks site workers questions about sexuality, gender roles and workplace culture. The responses, then framed and displayed within her exhibitions, describe their sexual exploits and fantasies, often in jarringly crude language. Bonvicini’s interest lies in the macho, misogynistic attitudes embedded in male-dominated construction sites as a conduit to the patriarchy of the built world.

When I get ready to speak to Bonvicini that afternoon, I’m nervous, itchy. I only get like this for two reasons: I really like an artist’s work, or an artist has previously spoken about their work being misread. For Monica, it’s both.

She appears on Zoom from her studio in Berlin. The video is crystal clear, the audio sounds like she’s transmitting a message from a deep-sea submarine, but we’ll make do.

When Bonvicini moved to Berlin in 1986, it was everything that Venice, her place of birth, wasn’t: grey, ugly, bleak, creative, but in the rawest possible sense. She was enamoured. “When I came to Berlin, I was poor, everybody was poor,” she says. “We did a lot of self-organised shows because there were so many empty spaces. There were no galleries for young artists like me. Then everything became more bureaucratic.”

Her current studio is in Berlin’s “gentrified” Kreuzberg district. “It’s not posh, but it still feels original and honest somehow,” she says. “It was important for me to be in the centre of the city and not on the periphery.” Even through the screen, I can see how the light drenches the space, bouncing off mirrors, metal and glass works displayed in her studio, which is so pristine it could also be a gallery, showroom or architecture studio. I’m sure there must be some mess somewhere, but I don’t see it. “When it’s sunny here, it feels a little bit like you’re in the south of France”, she says.

Behind her is a wall-mounted iteration of her bottle rack sculptures (a nod to, or subversion of, Duchamp) draped with purple glass blobs. On either side are two mirrored text works that read ‘Desire the Absolute’ and ‘Shero’s Coming’. Bonvicini has long enjoyed messing with words – reading, underlining, noting, citing, sampling, deconstructing, recontextualising. “Language is changing too fast for me. I love it,” she laughs. “I wanted to become a writer when I was younger. But like everything else, you have to do it every day, right?”

Depending on who you are, these words might mean nothing, or everything. You might get it or not, whatever. “I want [my work] to be out there, and I want to say something to the public. I very rarely do things just for myself, for the fun of it.” She pauses and gestures behind her towards Desire the Absolute: “Actually, this one’s for me.”

Relatively recently, Bonvicini featured in the critically divided group show ‘Hardcore’ at Sadie Coles in London. It encompassed, you got it, some pretty hardcore shit; whips, chains, blood, gore, that’s-Mistress-Velvet-to-you kinda stuff. Everything that’s dirty and debauched and once-taboo was in there, at full volume. Bonvicini’s contribution to the show was Breathing, a huge pneumatic whip made of leather belts that thrashed so fervently against the concrete floor, I wondered how long it could hold. I tell Bonvicini that all I wanted to do was touch it, or get touched by it, I wasn’t sure. “That’s an incredible compliment,” she says.

I liked the show a lot. But on reflection, I wondered if it inadvertently fed the most common misinterpretation of Bonvicini’s work, something that’s followed her since the early 2000s when she began using fetish-related imagery. “I was directly talking about the fetishisation of art, using material that was coming from the fetishism underground,” she tells me. “I was using a sort of S&M aesthetic, but I wasn’t only talking about sex.”

What she was talking about, more fundamentally, was the architecture of power and ulterior systems of control. This is delivered bluntly, with dry humour and deft ambiguity – a word in a mirror, a chain fence, a building decimated. In Wallfuckin’ (1995–96), one of Bonvicini’s most discussed early video works, an unidentified woman is seen masturbating by rubbing her exposed crotch against a wall. In 1998, she created Destroy, She Said. It looked at the imposition of architectural spaces on women in film. In the installation, viewers move through a maze-like space where clips from films by directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ulrike Ottinger were projected. The title itself was sampled from Marguerite Duras’s 1969 novel and film Détruire, dit-elle. The environments encasing the actors functioned as props, not like movie props, but literal props; to expose how architecture and cinema – two structures of power – shape the way women are seen, controlled, disciplined and desired.

Of course, it seems as though the online space could solve many of these problems. The promise of uninhibited expression, limitless movement. “It seems to be full of freedom, without limits. And then, and it’s not, it’s and it’s very dangerous,” she says. “The experience that we all have, between humans, between things, it’s still very much a physical one.”

In her recent installation, ‘It is Night Outside’, Bonvicini took a different approach to the restlessness of prescribed space, drawing on Chantal Akermann and Samuel Beckett’s take on confinement and the claustrophobia of domesticity. She was also inspired by an article written by author and activist Rebecca Solnit after Trump was re-elected. “It was something a little bit motherly, but actually about resistance and about not giving up,” she says of the text. “What does it mean to be in a space that is not what we like, what we wanted, and how can we give ourselves the courage to still be there, and still resist somehow?”

In the film, shown at Capitain Petzel gallery this summer, three female performers are seen rearranging furniture around an ambiguous space for an unclear purpose. It could be an office, a home, a rehab. We don’t know if it’s day or night. What decade we’re in. Who these women are and what their relationship to each other is. We do know that they’re uncomfortable. “The language is the violence, and the brutality of the furniture has been constantly moved,” says Monica.

Bonvicini has often talked about misinterpretations of her work. How it’s been flattened into a BDSM-infused provocation; how it’s been reduced to “feminist anger”; how, in some contexts, its visual allure has been taken at face value. Of course, there’s so much more. My reading is that misreadings are an inevitable side effect of one of its greatest powers: how her work can turn on you, make you complicit. How does your body fit in this space? What are you looking at? Are you feeling pleasure or pain? Who made this for you?

We live in a time defined by an illusion of freedom. But digital constructions are just as policed, restricted, censored and violent as physical ones, particularly for women. “It seems to be full of freedom, without limits. And then, it’s not, it can be very dangerous,” says Bonvicini. Sure, these days you might be less likely to get wolf-whistled walking past a building site, but objectification hasn’t disappeared, it’s just changed shape; we’re still getting fucked by walls.