Michael Asbury ///

Anna Maria Maiolino: Order and Subjetivity.

Over a career that spans almost 50 years, Anna Maria Maiolino has continuously re-appraised her production, initiating new lines of enquiry, often accompanied by the use of new media. It may at first seem surprising that despite such 'new-beginnings', her production appears so coherent. Indeed seen in retrospect, it maintains a narrow relation with the pressing issues of its time whilst keeping its own internal logic, appropriately defined as a demarcation of 'territories of immanence'. Productive tensions have operated throughout the stages of her career forming a contextual matrix that ranges from the personal to the historical, the quotidian to the monumental. Subjectivity thus accompanies the work's relation to the wider history of art, guiding the ambivalence between the artist's innate modesty and her impossible desire for completeness, a stubborn search for a sense of totality in the work.