Clarissa Tossin
White Marble Everyday

White Marble Everyday
White Marble Everyday
White Marble Everyday
ArtistBrazilian, born 1973
CultureBrazilian
Titles
  • White Marble Everyday
Date2009
Place depictedBrasília, Brazil
MediumTwo-channel video, edition 1/5
Dimensions5 minutes, 42 seconds
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Chaney Family Collection
Object number2012.468
Not on view

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Description


With White Marble Everyday Clarissa Tossin explores and deconstructs the utopian ideals embodied in high modernism and the particular history of Brasília, the federal capital of Brazil. Constructed to displace the historic capital of Rio de Janeiro in 1960, Brasília has been celebrated internationally for its radical conception of a utopian city, following the master plan of Lúcio Costa and shaped by the visionary architecture of Oscar Niemeyer.  White Marble Everyday focuses on the soaring, sculptural forms of Niemeyer’s Federal Supreme Court Building, while tracking the anonymous laborers tasked with keeping the marble pristine. Tossin finds grace in the elaborate choreography of this arduous and repetitive task, compressing the daily four-hour ritual to less than six minutes. A champion of Brazil’s Communist Party, Niemeyer declared his architecture was “for the people,” but as Tossin demonstrates, his creations can only be sustained by the people Niemeyer claimed to serve.



ProvenanceThe artist; [Sicardi Gallery, Houston]; purchased by MFAH, 2012.
Exhibition History"Nowhere Near Here: Works by Texas Artists," Houston Center for Photography, March 11 - April 24, 2011.

"Building Arts," Sicardi Gallery, Houston, October 15 – November 12, 2011.

"Thought Cloud: Young Latino Art, Mexic-Arte," Austin, June 17 – September 25, 2011.

Also note: White Marble Everyday is scheduled to be featured in several upcoming exhibitions, including What time is the place?, 2013, at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, México, and And you slip into the breaks and look around: Strategies of time in Contemporary Art, 2014, at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston

Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Printed labels: CLARISSA TOSSIN / White Marble Everyday, 2009 / Two-channel HD video projection, 5:42 min, looped, color and sound / The white marble floors of the Brasilia's Federal Supreme Court building, designed by / the architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1957, are cleaned every day. This video explores this daily ritual, choreographing it as a wasteful process that maintains the monumentality of the structure and the utopian promise of the city's plan. / edition 1/5

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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