Manifesta in the Dog Salon Bobby What Art Can Not Do
I am standing in a room full of shit. Naught new there, I hear yous say. Deposited by the population of Zurich, an unabridged twenty-four hours'due south worth of candy human faeces stand in a gridded organisation of compressed cubic blocks. Californian creative person Mike Bouchet'southward The Zurich Load was made not but by the inhabitants of make clean, well-ordered Zurich, but in collaboration with the Werdhölzi Wastewater Treatment Found, where the day'southward worth of sludge was collected and mixed with concrete.
Bouchet's 80,000 kilos of excremental minimalism is installed in the Löwenbräukunst, one of the main sites of the 11th Manifesta art biennial. This converted brewery is also home to both the Migros Museum and many of Zurich'due south near prestigious commercial galleries. Good thing the extractor fans are working.
At that place is a heavy door at the entrance, along with a alert sign. Some visitors back out fifty-fifty equally they're going in. The space reeks of ammonia, and there is a back-taste as psychological as information technology is concrete. "A unique fragrance has been developed to transform the viewer'due south feel," the guidebook tells us. Consider me transformed. If you resist the urge to boost and get out, you exercise get used to it, only to spend the residue of the solar day wondering if the whiff is however with you lot.
Bouchet's work, as any Freudian could tell y'all, must have something to do with money. Titled "What People Do For Coin – Some Joint Ventures", and devised by the biennial'due south guest curator, multimedia creative person Christian Jankowski, the latest incarnation of Manifesta involves collaborations betwixt artists and more than 30 professions in the city. The previous 2 editions – in St Petersburg and a former mining town in Kingdom of belgium – both dealt with the social situations of their respective venues.
So, fitfully, does this. Maurizio Cattelan, who had announced he was giving up art on the eve of his Guggenheim Museum retrospective in 2012, has been working with wheelchair racer Edith Wolf-Hunkeler. If Jesus could walk on h2o, why not an athlete in a wheelchair? The Paralympic champion glided, or mayhap churned, across Lake Zurich, her wheelchair mounted on a raft powered past the wheels of the chair itself – but after I left Zurich. Some things piece of work just as well as rumour.
I did visit Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl's fully functioning dog grooming parlour, Hundesalon Bobby, where local mutts can get the latest in canine coiffure from canis familiaris stylist Jacqueline Meier. I tin't speak of the artistry of the doggy hairdos, merely the kitschy, tongue-in-cheek parlour is amusing plenty. Normally this place is role of a commercial gallery. If only others diversified so usefully.
Too as the Löwenbräukunst and the Helmhaus museum, Manifesta 11 takes u.s. to more than thirty outlying venues and collaborations around the city, including a cemetery, a public hospital, a schoolhouse, a tourist function, a Swiss clockmaker's shop, and out on to a floating Pavilion of Reflection on the lake. Designed and built by the studio of London and Zurich-based builder Tom Emerson, the skeletal wooden structure doubles as outdoor movie theater and pond puddle, complete with irresolute rooms, lockers and hairdryers. It'south like a spa, but with ashtrays, a barbecue and a bar, the perfect place to go Bouchet out of my arrangement.
Is Michel Houellebecq OK, readers of the troubling French novelist often enquire. Well, Houellebecq has checked himself in to one of Zurich'south leading private clinics – and then upscale the row of clocks backside the main desk-bound are prepare to the time-zones in Dubai and Stellenbosch, Southward Africa as well as Switzerland – and had a bunch of scans and blood tests. His charts are printed upwards in corking piles for visitors to have abroad, though you lot have to edge round anxious patients in the lobby to get at them. I tin can't brand head nor tail of the novelist's haemoglobin levels. Nor does he offering united states copies of the bill for his check-upward, probably a eye-attack inducing sum.
Back at the Helmhaus, disturbing scans of Houellebecq's head are on display. There'due south the skull beneath the skin, and some squirmy stuff that looks every bit if parasitic worms have invaded his brain. They probably write his books. On my visit, creative person Santiago Sierra, who has also worked in the by with human excrement, had only begun barricading the entrance to the Helmhaus with the help of a local security consultant, who brash the artist how all-time to ensure the building would be safety from whatsoever possible car bombs, snipers and other attacks. Sandbags were on the style, but no razor-wire every bit yet uncoiled.
Everywhere is a war zone now, Sierra is saying. Side by side stop, the dentist. To tell the truth I ran away from the surgery, having already seen plenty of Torbjørn Rødland'southward graphic photographs of open mouths and dental procedures in the Löwenbräukunst. There are even pictures of teeth embedded in sugary foodstuffs, grinning through the patisserie. There'due south more photos in the waiting room.
Unfolding through both the Helmhaus and Löwenbräukunst, a parallel "Historical Exhibition", curated by Francesca Gavin, is a trove of photographs, paintings, sculpture and conceptual works organised by theme, paralleling Jankowski'southward "collaborative ventures". Very often it upstages the new commissions. In the department Suspension Hour is an installation of Duane Hanson's 1989 Lunchbreak, a group of life-sized, lifelike structure workers, lounging, smoking, staring blankly, hanging around. That'southward builders for y'all.
In Portraits of Professions, Baronial Sander's photographs of labourers and singers, artists and seamen, sit adjacent to the film of astronaut Chris Hadfield singing David Bowie'southward Space Oddity while orbiting in the International Infinite Station. This is fun, and though Hadfield has released an album, his artistic career has probably peaked. In Professions in the Art World, I came across oversized hollow papier-mâché heads of curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and New York art critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz. The cartoonish heads grin knowingly. But what do they know? I feel like snatching 1 upwards and inserting my own head, to get some inside noesis.
At one time playful and serious, and providing both context and counterpoint, Gavin's testify rambles through both principal venues, with dozens of historical and contempo works arranged on freestanding open structures that sidle through the galleries. Without it, much of the current Manifesta would look a fleck thin. But there are high-points, including the riotous, scrabbly drawings that cover a huge wall in the Löwenbräukunst, the upshot of a collaboration between Andrea Éva Györi, a "sexpert" and a psychologist in clinical sexology.
Györi'south drawings are a bacchanalia of masturbating women and explosive fantasies, a ribald affidavit of female sexuality. Nearby, at that place is a vicious gouge in the wall. Information technology looks similar an injury, and was made by Sonja Victoria Vera Bohorquez, a Zurich-based transgender prostitute. Bohorquez is working with Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, who concluding calendar month organised and filmed a poker game in a hotel basement in Ciudad Juárez, United mexican states, with a group of transsexual sexual activity workers. Nosotros watch them discuss their unsafe lives, and the unsolved murder of their friend and colleague Karlita in the city in Dec last twelvemonth. Margolles has also organised a farther Poker de Damas, including Bohorquez, in a Zurich hotel, where Manifesta visitors to ask questions and chat. An insight into other lives, Margolles' projection is 1 of the best, and toughest, here.
Over at Cabaret Voltaire, original dwelling of the Dada movement, at that place is an open call for anyone to submit performance proposals. "A performance could consist of an creative person kissing a clown or a real estate agent selling an artist's studio," advise Jankowski and the cabaret's guildmaster. I creative person has already proposed a collaboration with a contract killer, while Viennese performance group Gelitin have provided a drawing of the performance group engaging with various professions, including an alien, in a Sadean coprophagic orgy. Where are the sewage men when you need them most? Get me to the clinic. Take me to the spa.
- Manifesta 11: the European biennial of contemporary art is in Zurich until xviii September 2016
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/17/manifesta-11-zurich-review-sewage-sculpture-michel-houllebecq
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