Social Pool
Alfredo Barsuglia’s Social Pool is an eleven-by-five-feet wide pool in the Southern California desert, open for anybody to use. White, unadorned and geometric, it is formally reminiscent of a Minimalist sculpture. Located in a remote and scarcely populated geography – visitors are advised that several hours of driving from Los Angeles, plus a willingness “to walk a long distance to reach the pool from the nearest road,” are required to reach the destination – its location nods toward the phenomenon of large-scale Land Art installations in deserts around the American West, like Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field in New Mexico, Robert Smithson's famed Spiral Jetty, or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah. Conceived in the 1970s by artists in and around New York, already then the epicenter of the contemporary art scene, these works bore a critical response to and refusal of both the increasing commodification and institutionalization of art and the rampant destruction of the ecological environment. While Barsuglia's endeavor does share a palpable and explicit idealism as such – he suggests that the drive and walk to the pool should provide “time to reflect on social values, dreams and reality” – Social Pool is not a nostalgic affair.
On the contrary, the work embodies the massive socio-economic changes that have taken place in the last forty years. It thus understands itself as the product of an economy in which privacy and immateriality have been fully commodified. For many a consumer, art is expected to operate according to the principles of the service economy rather than following humanist ideals of intellectual or moral stimulus and education. Museum visitors, for instance, increasingly expect a readily prepared experience rather than a contemplative and self-motivated dialog with an artistic object. Social media is designed to “share” emotions and insights that aren't granted the time and thought to actually register. The revival of live performance, has largely been simultaneous with its being subverted into a sellable asset and tool of entertainment, despite its (former) intrinsic potential to circumvent commercialization.
Text: Stephanie Weber, Assistant Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Social Pool closed to the public on September 30th 2014.
There are no current plans to reopen the pool. The project was presented by Alfredo Barsuglia in cooperation with the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House.
