These opposites are typically combined in one hybrid structure, as though only their reconciliation can solve the ecological problem that confronts us all, and that Merz’s art engages as its main interest.
Materially, Merz’s works are a mix of prehistoric (natural) and historic (manufactured) materials, ranging from fruits, vegetables, hay, stone, and wood to neon tubes, glass, Plexiglas, and metal. Merz’s igloo stabilizes what exists unstably in Wright’s building. Indeed, the Fibonacci series, used repeatedly by Merz, is, in effect, a mathematical quantification of spiral movement, a theoretical way of articulating it that forecloses on the experience of it as an opening to the infinite.
The key difference is that in Frank Lloyd Wright’s structure, the romantic sublime still lives, existing in all its difficult, idiosyncratic glory in Merz, it has become a matter-of-fact code. Merz frequently employs a similar spiral in, among other places, the microcosmic, two-dimensional igloos. Over and over again the works reflect the museum’s spiral, which at its base implies a macrocosmic infinity and at its apex a microcosmic one, its movement linking the two. The first thing that strikes me about this exhibition is that it is one of the best uses of the Guggenheim space that has ever been made by an artist.
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