House where the Bottom Fell out

House 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 21th 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" . 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 distinguishes 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 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 (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.

This enormous, important sculpture was inspired by and dedicated to the Los Angeles gallerist Merry Karnowsky.

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