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Piotr Uklanski,
Untitled (Dance Floor),
1996.
Plexiglas, colored lightbulbs, raised floor structure, computer-controlled sound system, one of five unique version, dimensions variable.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee and Sustaining Members.
2006.7.
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Piotr Uklanski (b. 1968, Warsaw) has assembled a heterogeneous body of work that includes sculpture, painting, film, photography, and installation. While his art defies neat categorization, it is frequently characterized by an embrace of spectacle and cliché and a blurring of the boundary between high and low culture, often in ways that deliberately set out to provoke or create misunderstandings. Uklanski is perhaps best known for his 1996 installation Untitled (Dance Floor), which crosses a modernist grid with a fully functioning, sound-synchronized disco floor. The work has been adapted to various museum and gallery spaces over the years (including MoMA’s sculpture garden, pictured here in 2000). On one level, it is a clever Pop (or kitsch) spin-off of Carl Andre’s comparatively austere, Minimalist metal floor sculptures. But Dance Floor also creates a convivial space for social interaction, which ultimately depends on the viewer to complete the piece, much like the installations of one of Uklanski’s contemporaries, Rirkrit Tiravanija. Uklanski explains that he set out to create a work “that would be all generosity and no ideology. An object that would give and give and give but that would, at the end of the night, be unknowable, as its true nature resides in our own pleasure.”
—Ted Mann
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