House Where The Bottom Fell Out
This project proposal presents House Where The Bottom Fell Out as a remote Hawaiian "House Art" sculpture that turns architectural failure into a total metaphor for economic, ecological, and personal collapse. The work is a plantation-style house with its floor removed, impossible to enter and yet theatrically available to view through doors, windows, cracks, and the exposed underside of its own ruin. Williams links the missing floor to the subprime mortgage crisis, global financial breakdown, environmental precarity, and the larger collapse of the idea of home. The proposal deepens the project through references to embodied metaphor, Cezanne, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Wally Hedrick, and Dale Eldred, whose fatal fall through a studio floor gives the piece a devastating personal charge. Its bleak genius is to make the world's broken foundation literal, picturesque, and impossible to stand on.
- DATE:
- November, 2008
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Dale Eldred; George Lakoff; Paul Cezanne; Wally Hedrick; Gordon Matta-Clark; Robert Smithson; James Lovelock
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Estate of LG Williams; Happy Valley; Maui; Hawaii; Iao Valley; Kansas City Art Institute
- KEYWORDS:
- floor removed as economic metaphor; House Where Bottom Fell Out as architecture of collapse; plantation house as sculptural grammar; financial crisis made spatial; metaphor literalized; bottom fell out as civic truth