House Where The Bottom Fell Out
Dr. Julia Friedman | November 2007

Where The Bottom Fell Out (2007) by the American artist LG Williams is a work of self-proclaimed 'House Art' (i.e., Site-specific art), located in a remote area of Maui, Hawaii, called Wailuku. Williams considers this installation to be one of his most important artworks to date.

Description
The site-specific sculpture, House Where The Bottom Fell Out, is one plantation style house, approximately 2010 square feet, with the entire floor completely removed from the building. The structure is unique in that it is cantilevered alongside a great valley rift; and, as a result, the site offers an opportunity for viewers to see the entire artwork comprehensively as a whole.

The suspended building's artistic modifications make the primary nature and intent of the site-specific sculpture perfectly clear: one can view the house, not only from above, ground-view, or below, but also from the exterior into the interior space (through doors, windows and cracks), and further still, back beyond through to the exterior background landscape. For viewers, the result is a distinct interactive experience of walking around and viewing the sculpture's changing features.

The sculpture cannot be walked on or in--as the artwork's title illustrates, the artwork does not have a floor to stand on. As one surveys the sculpture, shifting one's perspective, additional key formal elements of the sculpture appear: the massive sculpture's perceptive materiality and spatiality changes drastically from opaque, semi-transparent and transparent. Similarly, one can look at, into and through the structure to the surroundings and breathtaking vistas of the sacred Iao Valley.

''House Where The Bottom Fell Out'' is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible near the house, especially during sunset and sunrise. In order to provide this opportunity, sculpture administrators offer early morning and evening visits during the months of May through October.

Privately commissioned and permanently maintained by Telephonebooth Gallery, Kansas City, and LG Williams, ''House Where The Bottom Fell Out'' will soon be recognized as one of the early 21st century's significant works of art.

Meaning and significance
Aside from its sheer bold presence and audacity, the installation’s witty and comprehensive puns, cultural and personal references make it a remarkable, unforgettable artwork. Coupled with a many-faceted, metaphorical presence, the sculpture also becomes a powerful political and social image to consider.

From the start, Williams's choice of the term 'house art' is itself a highly loaded, coy pun; in that, Williams, a caucasian artist, spins the word-play 'House Art' against 'House music', a style of electronic music developed for dance clubs in the late 1970s and early 1980s and popularized primarily by blacks and Latinos. Additionally, this jest can also ring true when one considers that house music was ''not'' vital in a 'house', but in dance clubs; whereas Williams's 'house art' is ''strictly'' residential. In fact, this 'house art' is an 'art house'.

Furthermore, in this local region of Hawaii, the word 'house' (pronounced: how-z) wittingly evokes the term Haole, (pronounced by a caucasian as: how-le), which in the Hawaiian language means "foreign" or "foreigner" <ref>Haole|See Wikipedia: Haole</ref>. This, in itself is a poignant but humble, self-referential proclamation by the artist as "an artist and a tourist" in this sacred, magical Hawaiian setting. In fact, this theme is amplified by the notion that the viewer must always remains outside of this artwork, unable to enter it as the house has no floor to stand on.

As a perpetual tourist/outsider to this artwork and remarkable territory, the sculpture subtly posits the notion that one will forever remain on the outside, personally, artistically and culturally, in this site-specific aesthetic situation. Thus, if follows that, and one cannot avoid considering -- while visiting and experiencing this artwork -- the 100 years dispossession of native Hawaiians of their land and their sovereignty, wherein Hawaii's citizens were automatically made U.S. citizens, prodded to drop their own identities and to accept "Americanism." The great sense of loss of Hawaiian sovereignty, land, and its "dropped identities" is again articulated imaginatively in the bottomless rooms and hallways of this highly reflective, evocative, but ultimately transparent artwork.

In contemporary, personal and social terms, ''House Where The Bottom Fell Out'' highlights the present-day plight of the Subprime mortgage crisis, which occurred when a sharp rise in home foreclosures started in the United States during the fall of 2006 and became a global financial crisis during 2007 and 2008. In effect, during this crisis the "bottom fell out" of the entire US housing market and many families lost their homes. And indeed, during this period the artist, himself, lost his home, too. The 'bottom fell out' when he was personally betrayed by his closest friends in Los Angeles, California, and tossed out of his house with only a plane ticket and a $200 loan. As a result, the artist took to living in the streets and abandoned buildings and beaches of Maui, Hawaii. This is the story of how the artist first came across the abandoned building and future artwork which for a while was the artist's house and shelter. The unmistakably sad and destitute nature of ''House Where The Bottom Fell Out'' clearly harks to the artistry of another fellow Californian, the musician Tom Waits, specifically the song, 'House Where Nobody Lives'.

The artwork's bleak imago and prognostication is counterbalanced by its strategic, picturesque placement. Nestled upon an ancient valley between breathtaking mountains and the Pacific Ocean, ''House Where The Bottom Fell Out's'' jarring contrasts invariably leads a viewer to a quick realization, a contemporary assessment of human society's 'home' at-large. Quoting James Lovelock, "any efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, in fact, it is already too late." In effect, says Williams, "the bottom has fallen out from the home that houses all of humanity; in that sense this artwork is a memorial." Macro and micro merge within the viewer, and there is hell to pay.

It is this rich layering of image, puns and metaphors that distinguish Williams's, ''House Where The Bottom Fell Out'', from traditional, cut or paste approaches to architectural sculptures like those of Gordon Matta-Clark, and the conventionally episodic themes consuming human history like Partially Buried Woodshed by Robert Smithson. Instead, Williams's imagery, ambition, and multi-faceted transformative artistic agenda clearly beckons the artist Paul Cezanne, especially in light of Cezanne's innovative practice of using spatial planes, and his exploration of visual perception intersecting with the human imagination. One can see these conscious artistic concerns clearly in a series of paintings of houses and landscapes by Cezanne of Montagne Sainte-Victoire|Mont Sainte-Victoire from 1880-1883 and others of Gardanne from 1885-1888. Furthermore, the learned observer will note the House's subtle, inverted reference to Williams's colleague Wally Hedrick (1928-2003). In contrast to Hedrick's War Room (Artwork) (1967-2002), where the destructive artistic force directs the viewer skyward (ceiling opening), thus emphasizing the transcendental quality of space, Williams’s House forces the viewer's gaze to plummet earthward (floor removed).

Williams's own persistent emphasis upon the centrality of 'embodied' metaphor in this artwork relies on the pioneering research and writings of the artist's friend, George Lakoff.

Outrage Over Price of LG Williams's Artwork

2008-05-19 By US Art Today

Everyone Offers a Reason: Inventory is Low, Big Collectors are Smart and Fearless, Artist is Greedy

For Immediate Release:

Collectors facing spiraling art prices on the first long holiday weekend of the summer are on their own, gallery and museum officials say, with one warning that "market forces" and green policies may drive the price for LG Williams's artwork to $40,000 a painting.

As prices jumped above $30,000 a painting at most art galleries yesterday, an art gallerist said future price hikes are inevitable if the frenzy continues to demand art from Williams.
"Everybody here knows LG and that the price of his art is dictated by market forces," somebody told the Art Investigator, accusing the detractors of being "hypocrites" for complaining about LG?s art prices while he continues to toughen his aesthetic measures while surmounting his earlier accomplishments.

"Its just bullshit. People make lots of noise and they deny it, but those are the facts. Under the current low concept / demand aesthetic ... the price of high calibre art like that from Williams will rise by 60 per cent," the spokeperson said. "They may want to go back and talk to their own collectors and see if they can get a resale LG Williams artwork, which they can get for $20,000 - $50,000 depending on the artwork."

But the reality of $50,000+ artworks for LG?s art was nightmare enough for San Francisco art collectors pulling into his exhibition yesterday.
Still, buying an artwork at his Los Angeles gallery, Paul Wilson estimated the visit would cost him $40,000.

"The art is just freaking killing me," he said. "It's just murder. It's just unreal. The cost is ridiculous?.but shit I GOTTA HAVE ANOTHER LG ARTWORK!"

Jennifer Harris said big collectors should have seen it coming.

"It's always like this," Harris said as she filled her SUV with LG?s art. "They spiked it up again this month, the fucking dealers. They spike it up even on the off-season, during the summer. They always have an excuse. It's output problems, or it's terrorism in the Middle East, or hurricanes. Or, LG is on vacation in Hawaii. Art is mostly bad everywhere else, but this is no reason for spiking LG?s prices."
Some experts agree with her.

Conservative art watchdog Dan McTeague said art galleries and museums are now making a 60-cent profit on every LG artwork sold. Hugh Mackenzie, an art policy analyst with the American Centre for Art Alternatives, wrote in a report last week that consumers are paying 15 percent an artwork more than justified by costs and historic industry profit margins.

"Art pricing is pretty simple," he said. "It's about charging what the market will bear."
At some blue-chip art galleries the price was up to $40,000 for LG Williams's art, renewing calls for tougher legislation to prevent anti-competitive behaviour from the art galleries and museums.

LG Williams, 2008: Abandoned Gallery Installation, Wailuku, Hawaii

Abandoned Gallery To Debut First Major Hawaiian Retrospective Of The Work Of LG Williams

WAILUKU, March 3, 2008
by Abandoned Gallery, Wailuku, HI

LG WILLIAMS: IF YOUR NOT LAUGHING AT THE MORONS YOUR TOO BUSY DRINKING is a comprehensive examination of Williams's remarkable and cohesive oeuvre, assembling key selections and bodies of work from throughout his nearly twenty-year career. The exhibition represents the full range of Williams's art, from the early paintings of the 2000s, to the artist's renowned "specific and general" works—works using language that have characterized his art since 2008. Also included are works on paper, films, videos, books, posters, multiples, and audio works. In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of Williams’s films will be screened at Wailuku’s Anthology Film Archives.

As co-curator Don De Salvo remarks, “By jettisoning the most fundamental notions about the art object and its dissemination, LG Williams arrived at a form that has made it possible for him to insinuate his art into the world—the arena he sees for his work. His works exist on the façades of buildings, as song lyrics, as tattoos on bodies, and of course on the walls of galleries. A compilation of these efforts reads more as atlas than exhibition catalogue.”

Williams has defined art as "the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings," and that premise remains at the core of all of his work. As a pioneer of Hawaiian-conceptual art, Williams began in the 2000s to create works that were central to the ongoing debate on the nature and meaning of art. Williams was at the forefront of a radical shift in which language or text emerged as a primary medium for the making of art. These artists challenged the “object status” of painting and sculpture, proposing that the idea and intention of the artist were as important, if not more important, than the object that resulted.

As co-curator Akana Goldstein writes in the accompanying catalogue: “Williams’s employment of language allows the work to be used by its receiver. It is purposely left open for translation, transference, and transformation; each time the work is made, it is made anew. Not fixed in time and place, every manifestation and point of reception is different—each person will use the work differently and find a different relationship to its content.”

This exhibition examines Williams's work from his first studio-based manifestations (as Williams refers to the realization of his works), which were included in his landmark 2008 book, to later works that address the physical and cultural landscape, and introduce figures of speech, punctuation, and graphic devices. The installations at both the Abandoned Gallery will be designed in close collaboration with the artist. Williams’s practice expands into the world – from the spaces of the gallery to the streets of the city.

LG Williams, For Your Consideration

2007 Artwork Of The Year, LG Williams "House Where The Bottom Fell Out"