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ou’ve probably driven past it on your way to the Botanical Garden or Museum Hill Café and wondered, what the hell is that? The tiny structure resting on a patch of auxiliary parking, it turns out, is a 1:25 scale copy of a now gone Spanish flour mill. It was built by Catalán artist
for
, SITE Santa Fe’s seventh International Biennial in 2008 and somehow landed in the permanent collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.
As of last week, it’s gone. At least in theory.
"It's bittersweet," Merry Scully, head of curatorial affairs for the museum, says, standing alongside a small demolition crew last Wednesday. "It's like having your parents move out. You know it's the right thing, but it still hurts."
The nature of the mini structure, she points out, was always meant to be ephemeral. "It's not the same as if it were something that was supposed to be forever, you know? It's not like misgluing King Tut's beard on."
"It's better that way," Anson, who flew in to supervise the demolition, says. His trip, layovers and a memorable encounter with customs later, took close to 20 hours. Being present for the momentous occasion was important given that he was a banner man for the ill-fated movement to save the original 19th century CA Fàbregas i de Caralt factory.
"At the time, there was this controversy over tearing down the building, or moving it to put in a mall," Scully says. "At the same time as that was happening, Martí was asked to participate in Lance Fung's biennial. And so, he took one of those solutions for the flour mill controversy and brought it here."
Defying the odds, the site-specific structure remained perched atop the hill long after the international art event's end. "Like with all kinds of things, there arose an attachment to it and it stayed up," Scully says, braving the chilly morning wind. "Because it was built to be a temporary structure, there have been some issues with it in terms of preservation and conservation and as we started to look at it—when it first came to my attention that we needed to look at this—there really was no way to conserve it or restore it in a way that wasn't a substantial change."
After a Skype session with Anson, the idea arose to look at the work as a conceptual piece, removed from its brick-and-mortar self and, as Scully says, "think about ways that it can exist still in our collection but maybe be rebuilt. What would the rules or ideas on how that would be rebuilt be and take this structure down? The other alternative was to surround it with fencing, but it seemed to me to be out of character with the original intent."
The original edifice in the town of Mataró, 19 miles northeast of Barcelona, was disassembled and remains in perpetual limbo.
"The políticos in my city are better than me," Anson, clad in a black leather jacket, says in a thick Iberian accent, as he walks around the perimeter of his soon-to-be leveled work and documents every moment on video. "They cut the factory in pieces and they put it in a place, waiting to find a site to rebuild again."
After myriad demonstrations arose to preserve it, the hole where the shopping center was to be built remains empty due to the emergence of the global financial crisis.
"It's an interesting and fortuitous richness that both the buildings now exist in kind of this same space," Scully waxes.
It was important to have Anson witness the process, the curator points out, so that he could be directly involved in how the essence of his project might return in the future.
"There are a couple of ways," Scully explains, "He could say it can only be rebuilt exactly the same way and I have to be the one to build it—and this is the part we're working on—he could say, these are the parameters for how it has to be built, it just has to be in proportion and you can make it out of any material."
In order for the replica to be replaced in the collection, those parameters, she says, must be established. "It's not dissimilar to say, a Sol LeWitt drawing. We have one of those in our collection, and the piece exists as a set of directions; essentially straight lines, drawn at random. Having that certificate constitutes the artwork. Exhibiting the artwork constitutes following those directions."
She continues, "It addresses the question, where does the art exist in the object? Does it exist in the bricks? Does it exist in the ideas? Does it exist in the physical location? Once we've changed the parameters or the status of this object, does it only have to be seen in Santa Fe? Could we lend it to someone and they can build it in Fresno?"
As the foreman ties a chain to the façade, with hopes that it'll come down in one fell swoop, the razing begins. The masonry proves too much for a compact skid-steer loader. The chain goes up on different openings, producing the same result. CA Fàbregas i de Caralt Jr., it seems, intended to stay put. A battle royal then ensued between the building and the machine's excavator arm, which bangs it, banging over and over on its side until the first pieces start to crumble.
For Anson, it marked an end of an era and a study in gentrification. "This factory represented industry in the 20th century and the last part of the 19th," he says. "Political, social, economic things in the city have changed. The city has changed, and now all the factories that we had are empty."
Some four hours into the process, the scrappy facsimile that took a month and a half to build was but a pile of rubble. Asked if he felt anything, the artist remained stoic.
"No tears," he said.
Perhaps, I suggest, he should take a brick back home as a souvenir.
"Yeah, so they can stop me in the airport?" he swiftly responds with a chuckle. "They'll be, like, 'What's your explanation?' and I'll say, 'It's a brick of a building that I did.' They'll believe that."
Santa Fe Reporter