Proposals for a Habitat

Absalon’s oeuvre is a personal and introspective reaction to the industrial, machine-like world in which we live. Throughout his artistic career – cut short by his untimely death – he addressed modernist architecture and minimalist art, thus forging a unique language that takes a critical look at society and its rules of behavior. Many of his works are concerned with relations between simple geometric forms that seem to have no functional purpose. The Museum has two of his 1990 Proposals for Habitats, a series that offered an inventory of forms, or vocabulary of the artist’s work. Proposals for a Habitat from 1992 is a set of six cubicles: clean rectangular shapes connected by joints that resemble construction pipes. As in his other works, these pieces are painted white. In Western culture, white symbolizes purity and spirituality; in some Eastern cultures, it represents death. With Absalon, white takes on medical associations (heightened by the neon light above) and makes his objects seem like sterilized entities that have been cleansed of disease. They also evoke protective shelters or monastic cells. Geometric shapes were the core of the artistic language of such modernist artists as Malevich and Mondrian, as well as the architecture and design of the Bauhaus school, which broke with the superfluously decorated buildings that were so much a part of European high culture prior to the 20th century. Although connected closely to these visual concepts, Absalon’s work is at variance with the Bauhaus commitment to social ideals and its vision of the improved world of modernity. Instead, he proposes seclusion: the individual should leave the world for an isolated, asocial existence.