[Image: Three pictures of the art installation as described below.]

cavetocanvas:

Cildo Meireles, Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals), 1987

The finest piece from the post-1984 period is Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals) (1987), which was shown at the ICA in London in 1990. This is the most visually spectacular of all his installations, and the most explicitly religious. It was made for an exhibition exploring the Jesuit missions to South America between 1610 and 1767, when the Jesuits were themselves suppressed by the papacy. Around 600,000 coins are laid out like a square carpet on the gallery floor, and from the mid-point, a thin column of communion wafers rises around eight feet into the air where it meets a matching suspended square canopy made from 2,000 bones. Meireles has explained: “I wanted to construct something that would be a kind of mathematical equation, very simple and direct, connecting three elements: material power, spiritual power, and a kind of unavoidable, historically repeated consequence of this conjunction, which was tragedy. I wanted a sky of bones, a floor of money, and a column of communion wafers to unite these two elements.” Here, as so often in Meireles’s work, mathematics is moralised and given a troublingly tangible architecture. (via)

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