Marisa Merz
by Rudi Fuchs 

From Marisa Merz (catalogue of Marisa Merz’s solo show at Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Villa Delle Rose, 1998), Hopefulmonster, Tuin, 1998

With regard to Marisa Merz and her work, it is perhaps more appropriate to begin somewhere else. But where? She herself enjoys mystification; once she told me that she was born in Hongkong. As I came to know her better, I found she liked such coyness. She likes to hide or obscure the origins and motives or her work. The few things she has publicly said about it are very private, metaphorical, mystifying. Most of the time the work itself is difficult to find, almost hidden; when it appears, occasionally, it reveals itself to be fragile and evasive as if it preferred to disappear again as fast as possible without leaving a trace.

Sudden disappearance, however, would not benefit the tantalizing slowness of its appearance. Marisa Merz is an enigma. Usually, a body of work, an œuvre, after so many years of working on it, has a particular form and substance.

Themes and forms are developed, patterns evolve over the years, inventions and variations unfold. In such cases one could traditionally start at the beginning, the first work in the first exhibition which took place in Turin in June 1967. She presented a strange, large three-dimensional work: airy and shining forms of aluminium, light and round and hollow, like pieces of hose, very agile and flexible, hanging from the ceiling and the walls, bending and curling like a fat snake.

I did not see that exhibition. My knowledge (or impression) stems from the few photographs that exist (all of them rather dramatic and full of chiaroscuro) and, also, from having seen the original aluminium material more than ten years later in a corner of the large studio in Turin that Marisa sometimes shared with Mario Merz. As the aluminium pieces hung there in the cool morning light, they had a strange magic: that work was no longer a work but had once been one and maybe could, one day, become one again.

And now, writing this text without quite knowing where to begin, and reflecting upon what I have seen of Marisa's work since that studio visit (including the wonderful fairy tale she spun last summer in the Galleria Stein in Milan), I wonder whether, in her case, that traditional œuvre, substantial and well-defined, really does exist. I remember the forms of aluminium hanging in the Turin studio. I also remember her installing a drawing in the Castello di Rivoli. The drawing, rather large, was very beautiful: representing the graceful features of a face emerging from an intricate web scribbled in soft pencil lines. Yet she insisted that it could not just be hung on a wall. It had to be placed on a high, narrow table, then leaned against the wall. Even the simple drawing became incorporated in an elaborate installation as if to indicate that it was only material, an element, perhaps literally only a figure of speech.

I have seen Marisa install work on other occasions as well, deeply concentrated, handling the objects with extreme tenderness and choosing locations with great care – slowly, like a child placing little figures in a Christmas crib. Indeed perhaps, Marisa Merz has, over the years, collected material (little sculptures, found objects, copper knitwear, drawings) which she keeps and cherishes until the time is ripe. Then an installation come into existence (an invitation she cannot refuse) and persists for a certain time: an intimate display of personal gestures, fragile and discreet. The œuvre, in this case, possibly transcends these occasional installations, their intimacy and the care and prudence of their texture (one could even say: their hand-writing), than the things of which they are made. Thus the œuvre is material and yet immaterial; sound and silence alternating, or an œuvre of whispering voices.

Let me begin somewhere else, with Mondrian. One afternoon, Marisa and I were talking in Milan. Therefore it was a hazy afternoon in the fall, and that morning it had been raining. I have seen the front of a house, the rhythm of windows and the door, through the branches of a tree, Marisa said, and then I also saw the tree through the façade of the house. She smiled.

She has this wonderful, slightly mischievous smile. I looked through the window at the trees in the park across the street, opposite the apartment. You mean, I said, you saw the trees reflected in the windows, and the reflections of the trees interrupted, intersected, by the wall of the house? That would make sense. No, she said, I saw the trees through the house and the house through the trees. The conversation, as it went on, reminded me of another conversation we once had, many years ago, in the cafeteria of the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.

We were looking out over the sea. I cannot remember in detail what exactly was said. It was a long conversation, quite intense, about the endlessness of the sea, about the deep blue-grey colour of the sea, about the horizon dissolving into the haze and into the sky. The conversation drifted on like the slow swell of the sea itself and never came to a conclusion. In later years, when we met, we would occasionally return to it, to the contemplation of the sea, of the sea's movement, waves taking on a shape while moving along and losing that shape, never having one particular shape, and of the formless and restless existence of the blue-grey sea. However expressed, by whatever metaphor, that idea of shapeless form, of shapes continuously absorbing other shapes always intrigued her.

At one point I may have shown her a small drawing by Piet Mondrian, made before his work became abstract, and now kept in the museum in The Hague. It is a sketch of the sea in wavering pencil lines, occasionally brisk, catching the rhythm of the waves. The horizon is a thin, not quite straight line. The sky shows vague indications of clouds. Around this image Mondrian had loosely sketched an oval, probably to give the almost shapeless image a little substance. But I can never forget, when I see the drawing, that the oval also evokes the shape of the eye. (If Mondrian were Magritte the drawing could also be the reflection of the sea in an eye).

Another, earlier and equally mystifying drawing by Mondrian brings us back to Marisa's trees and house. The upper half of the drawing shows a low farmhouse seen through a screen of high trees. Below there is water, in which the tree tops are mirrored darkly. Of course we know that the trees stand in front of the house, yet we see both elements simultaneously; maybe one even sees the house before one sees the trees. This and other drawings by Mondrian remind me of some of Marisa's drawings – like the one she so carefully installed in the Castello di Rivoli: the female head and face appearing slowly in a web of curling, graceful, long drawn-out lines, thin like hair (and curling, one recalls, like the aluminium shapes in the first show in 1967).

Marisa Merz is fascinated by Mondrian's art (as she is fascinated by the sea) but her drawings are, of course, not like those of Mondrian. Their intention and determination are quite different. In the development of Mondrian's œuvre the small drawings I quoted were explorations of transparency and thus formal points of passage. He, the symbolist and abstract artist, was interested in creating an ultimate and lasting form. Marisa Merz's interest is, I believe, the opposite: her real goal is to postpone final shape. Naturally, that is impossible: but the dedication to that unattainable goal precisely characterizes Marisa's almost mystical determination.

Obviously the choice of materials and her use of them is also characteristic of this attitude. The materials are soft and malleable. Particularly cherished are wax and a pliable fabric made of thin copper thread; materials that hardly have shape or weight in themselves (like, also, the aluminium used in the early work) or in which shapes are volatile and inconsistent.

Whatever exists visually has shape. What we call shapeless is just a shape we cannot properly describe and for which we then invent a suitable symbolic image such as a ball of fire for the sun, of which the "real" shape is absorbed by the tremendous intensity of its explosive light. In the context of Marisa's imagination, she would be more concerned with the waves of light then with the even, symbolic shape of the sun – just as she is more obsessed with the extremely continuous and seemingly endless intricate web of lines, a real labyrinth, than with the face that is produced by it. Looking at these enigmatic drawings it strikes me that even the apparently long process of making them is in itself a metaphor for an "endless" image – an image that never quite finishes, never comes to a conclusion. Even though they appear to be finished for at least a moment and occasionally exhibited in different and changing installations (which in themselves bring into question the idea of any definitive form), every drawing could easily be continued; such is the way the drawings are constructed.

The head's shape and its facial features are not defined beforehand, as if the model were there – before the artist's eyes – to be "caught". Shape and features grow while drawing and change while drawing and can change more as long as the drawing continues to develop. In this long, elaborate process there is no particularly logical point at which the drawing (that is: the image) could be called finished. So the manner itself of Marisa Merz's drawing can be understood as a metaphor for endlessness, for the postponement of final shape.

The impossible dream that motivates her work, like an obsession, is about making what cannot be made but which possibly can be expressed metaphorically: as shapeless form, or at least as shapes that conform to circumstances, in constant mutation, and to the strange shapelessness of pliable materials – without becoming trapped in a formal definition that would end creative process itself and, consequently, the process of continuous change. I understand very well Marisa Merz's reluctance to exhibit. An installation represents a definition and a conclusive statement.

But she conceives of her art, as of life, as the continuation of change and of growth. In her opinion every shape must in itself be capable of becoming a different shape – like the sea, and the clouds in the sky. Ten years ago, in Eindhoven, I organized an exhibition about Mozart's Don Giovanni. I invited a number of artists to apply their art in order to transform the rooms of the museum into imaginary sets for particular scenes from the opera. Marisa Merz was asked to provide the protagonists to make masks. I remember asking her to produce something on a basis of those lace­like drawings of "faces". After a few days of plotting and contemplating she asked for candles and little pans and a small gas-burner. In the middle of the museum (in the room where the masks would eventually be displayed) she set up her kitchen and started to melt down the candles. She made wonderful and delicate tiny heads – somewhat in the tradition of Medardo Rosso.

What struck me, however, was that the heads had hardly if any individuality. They were more like masks. Naturally there were differences among them. One head was rather flat, another one rounder, another one more elongated. Indications of mouth, nose, eyes and ears were minute or almost absent. She refused, of course, to name the heads. Which of them represented Don Giovanni or Donna Anna or Leporello remains a secret. All the heads together were really phases of one head which of course was a non­existent mystification just as the changing shapes of a cloud, sailing through the sky do not result from a nominal or central shape. Such a shape does not exist. The shape of the cloud is "defined" by all the metamorphoses that occur during its life-span. Watching Marisa Merz making those heads, forming the wax with the delicate, caressing movements of her hands, was a fascinating experience. I think it made me understand the microcosmos of her art; and I understood the significance of her copper knitting. The magic of a single, thin thread, the quiet simple movements of two needles, the concentration, the slowness. But most important is the idea and the reality of the single thread that can give life to changing shapes of unlimited variety. In principle that thread is endless if only life would allow it. Thus art meets life.