Collection Study

Monika Sosnowska, Pipe, 2016

As part of Monika Sosnowska’s Roberts Institute of Art residency in 2022, RIA commissioned Tom Emerson co-founder of 6a Architects, to respond to Monika’s work in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, Pipe (2016).

Text by Tom Emerson

THIS IS NOT A PIPE

If only I could assume you are reading this printed on paper, my task would be a lot easier. Held in your hand, I could rely on the materiality of the paper to communicate something that I cannot say in words. I could end the piece by asking you to tear a narrow strip off the bottom of the page and feel/see how the paper would naturally curl, how the edges of fibres behave — feathered and irregular in one direction, neat in the other.

Tearing paper is an action of failure; an unsatisfactory draft, unwelcome message or a secret to be destroyed. It is easy, decisive and quick. But why tear a steel pipe? Well, to start with Pipe (2016) is not torn. It is cut (probably by an oxy-acetylene flame) and bent, deliberately twisted over a form to appear as if it were torn even if the forces involved in making Pipe are unrecognisable to the fingertips that roll, fold and tear paper at will, without the need of a guiding eye. Sosnowska shifts the familiar tear into an epic ferrous territory.

Steel is the material of modernity or Modernism to be more precise. Concrete and glass might claim the role, but they have existed for far longer, since antiquity. It is steel that made concrete and glass dance to the twentieth century beat; as reinforcement in the former and framing the expanding planes of the latter. Before modernity, steel did not exist. There was iron, cast iron, wrought iron, but none do strength and bending to the exacting standards of the Modern project. Mild steel is new.

Before working (predominantly) with steel, Sosnowska had, for a long time documented the deep social and political structures embodied in Modernism, especially in the Soviet-era Modernism of Warsaw and eastern Europe. With a roving eye for urban photography, she has photographed the abstract and rational lines of repeating structures of the modern city, teasing from them both utopian and authoritarian desires.¹

1. Monika Sosnowska, Photographs and Sketches, published by Schaulager Basel and Steidl, 2008

Her images capture the everyday life of Modernist planning and design. Grids, prefabrication, open space overlaid with the patina of age and decay; the cold reality of snow and sky that gleams brighter and whiter than the faded structures of industrial Socialist society. Steel was not the subject yet was always present somewhere in the scene like a proof of the Modern. And Sosnowska’s images testify to another icon of modernity: the flaneur, drifting across the city collecting small details par hazard. The images are not dated but record the end of something, so I would guess they span a couple of decades from the early 1990’s. No route is discernible, nor is a predominant subject, material or typology. Interiors are equal to urban wastelands or sunsets. Maybe it is about retaining mementos of a world quickly disappearing under the greedy hand of post-Socialist liberal capital, but the project is not that rigorous. It is as if she is searching for something invisible or at least not noticed by a distracted eye, perhaps the thin line of fissure or breakage where the promise of modernity turns to pathos.

But Sosnowska is not looking for images. The photographs are simply aide-memoires along a more embodied quest to give material reality to modernity’s invisible process; its troubled journey from promise to disappointment, of progress and resignation. She makes sculpture by subjecting structure to unreasonable force. Metaphor turned physical. Her structures oscillate between iconic and authored objects and anonymous infrastructure. But steel is the recurring, but not exclusive, material. Temporal specificity, that is, the twentieth century, combined with malleability, give steel the pass key to unlock the gate that connects success with failure, abstraction to figuration.

Modernist building structure crunched like a car after a crash. A steel spiral stair fails with the melancholic grace of wilting autumn leaves. Mies van der Rohe’s pioneering curtain wall façade at Lake Shore Drive rolled up like an old newspaper. And Moscow’s Shukhov tower rudely folded and crushed to fit the museum foyer.

It is one of the strange pleasures of works by Monika Sosnowska that one can experience the plastic distortion usually associated with failure without losing the epic idea(l)s of their conception. Georges Perec, another scholar of the everyday, asked why are trains only visible when they derail? Why do we need failure to make reality visible?

Sosnowska creates replicas and models. Using construction documents, she makes scale models in card — perhaps very much like the authors of the original structures — which she then, I assume, presses and pulls until a new form emerges. These are extremely precise distortions measured by touch as much as by the eye. The new form promises a new reality just as Brassaï² made rolling and tearing a bus ticket into an ‘involuntary sculpture’; fingertip subversions of everyday objects produced by industrial society.

2. Brassaï, Sculptures Involontaires, 1932

The architectural fragments used by Sosnowska are fabricated. Both the original buildings working in the world that provoke the works, and the replicas being subjected to stress and distortion, are made of small parts that are assembled and welded into three-dimensional structures of slender steel angles or L-sections.³ The assembly is engineered to optimise their collective strength with the lightest means. New sculptural form and space emerges as the objects are twisted and bent. Every piece of angle distorts in its own unique way in continuous communication with the next it is bound to. The paper model is the reference for finding form, but reality imposes its own corrections. It is a dangerous process. The elasticity of steel threatens to spring a violent return.

3. Structural steel is produced in linear sections, profiled for specific structural performance. The most common are angles rolled in an L-shape, I-sections or rolled steel joist (RSJ) used mainly as beams, channels in the shape of a C, H sections normally used as columns. Each section comes in a range of sizes listed in tables with exact dimensions, weight and structural properties published in beautiful booklets much like the old trigonometry tables. Every architect, engineer and fabricator would have these booklets to hand alongside set squares and measuring tapes.

Modernity provides Sosnowska with a spectrum of objects for transformation. There are the famous works by engineers and architects like Mies van der Rohe or Shukhov, then there are the anonymous yet carefully designed and made elements of architecture that furnish our environment like stairs, handrails and windows. These elements are designed. They should not fail. Sosnowska’s works project an alternative fate.

Then there is Pipe (2016), which is in many respects a departure from her previous work. The constructed steel elements shared with other architectural works are of a fundamentally different category. Physically, Pipe is a single continuous piece of material. Culturally, a steel pipe was never made to be seen or touched. It is the opposite of the refined rhetoric of Modernism. Pipes originate out of site, below ground in infrastructure, possibly the real engines of modernity. Whether in a wire, pipe or rail, modernity expresses itself in vectors and movement. Electricity, gas, oil, water, sewage, people and goods moved around further, faster, in greater quantity than ever before. There lies the promise. To tear a pipe is to break the flow.

These architectural pieces evoke a benign nostalgia for mid-twentieth-century optimism, faded on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Pipe is altogether more contemporary and violent in its making and meaning. It suggests extraction, fossil fuel, energy and power. Although made five years before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Pipe appears today like a weapon of our times. It speaks of climate crisis, Nord Stream and all the lopsided and expedient geopolitical deals that threaten peace. It is an infrastructure that distributes power, influence and wealth as much as it supplies energy and removes waste. It is the kind of pipe that crosses continents to carry precious resources to sustain cities, economies, political structure and military might. The steel pipe used by Sosnowska, approximately one metre in diameter and one centimetre thick (observed not measured) is an involuntary monument. Yet here, cut and rolled, painted a luminous white accentuating the thin darkness of the tear, it stands light and fragile. From one angle it even has a tilt and spiral slightly reminiscent of Tatlin’s Tower.

Pipe is like a model in reverse. While the delicate models made by Sosnowska for her architectural works approximate steel structure with paper, Pipe simulates the behaviour of card torn and rolled by the artist’s hand in steel. The weight, thickness and power of the steel pipe has been neutralised by mimicking paper. It is not a pipe. No traces of forklifts, oxy-acetylene flame, chains, levers and ratchets. No resources to move. Just a tear and roll, like Brassaï’s bus ticket deep inside his pocket.