“This piece based on my old living room in my old apartment. I recreated many of the objects that existed in that space, chairs, side tables and other nick nacks out of thread and hung them from the ceiling so that they were layered on top of one another, mimicking the space in my old home. Each of the objects were created on a 1 to 1 scale. The objects act as a trace or record of a space that used to exist. Part shrine or monument, the thread drawings act as tribute to a room that once was.
This piece was shown at Come Up to My Room at the Gladstone Hotel in January 2011. I have come to think of my rental apartments as places of temporary stay, which I why I thought the Gladstone was an appropriate place to display the work. Hotel rooms are places that are home for a brief period of time; they have a bed and a night table, things that sort of reference a sense of home but really aren’t the real thing. I think that this piece acts the same way as a hotel room does, it references or reminds you of a place like home.”
“In my work, I use a sewing machine to create thread drawings and installations by sewing into a fabric that dissolves in water. This fabric makes it possible for me to build up the thread by sewing repeatedly into my drawn images so that when the fabric is dissolved, the image can hold together without a base. These thread images appear as though they would be easily unraveled and seemingly on the verge of falling apart, despite the works actual raveled strength.
I am interested in the vulnerability of thread, its ability to unravel, and its strength when it is sewn together. I am interested in the connections between process and materials and the way that they relate to images and spaces. Tracing actions and environments through a process of repetition, translation and dissolving, I hope to trace absence. My work is a process of making as a way of tracing and preserving things that are gone, or slowly falling apart.”
“Since 13th of November the large-scale sculpture “Tiger and Turtle - Magic Mountain” in Duisburg Wanheim (D) is accessible for the public. It overtops the plateau with the artificially heaped-up mountain* by 21m | 23yd so the visitor can rise by more than 45m | 49yd above the level of the landscape and enjoy an impressive view over the Rhine.”
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“Even from a far distance one recognizes the curvy formation sitting ponderously enthroned on the green hill. The first impression points to a rollercoaster but actually the piece seems to be too exposed and stands there without the signs of a fun fair. No car rattling across the track, no luminous advertising, no screams of the public in a rush of adrenalin. The more one looks into the matter, the more this abstract attraction is irritating. It rests self-contained like autonomous sculpture. And in fact it is an outdoor sculpture that Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth especially created for the site of the Heinrich-Hildebrand-Höhe in Duisburg where it will be completed in winter 2011. The paradox construction Tiger & Turtle – Magic Mountain is a rollercoaster for pedestrians. An approximately one metre broad steel pathway of 220 metres in length and 15 metres in height guides the public along several curves and slopes – along spectacular vantage points and to spots on which, by foot, one literally cannot turn the corner. But exactly there image and reality meet, absurdity becomes gesture. Appropriate for an art project, Mutter/Genth formally put the walkable sculpture on the green pedestal. From afar one wonders what actually appears more artificial: the elegant turns, that even may remind one of Stella or Moore, or the supporting mountain; a tree-free, evenly overgrown grassy hill, like modelled - one couldn’t imagine a better base for the gigantic, abstract sculpture. Indeed the mountain was there already, but it is all the same artificial – it conceals an accumulation of problematic substances, thousands of tons of toxic zinc-slag have been piled up within just one year, then afforded with a “green coating” and finally complemented with “art in public space”. “There is so much heavy metal in the hill”, said Ulrich Genth, “one used to joke that we could get all the power for our project out of the hill by just pouring acid on it”. Mutter/Genth as artists are slyly enough to meet such situations and deal with the danger of exploitation by environmental politics, with irony and paradox instead of helpless, moral gestures. First, they roof the accumulated residual waste with a rollercoaster, the epitome of the fun and leisure oriented society to then transfer it into a sculpturally slowed down fairground of art. The core idea is to affirmatively top the toxic hill with an attraction that enables, in its literal sense, to overlook everything – this is not without any comicality and works as laconic comment probably more conclusively as with any attempt to critically commentate on this location. One notes a certain ambiguity in the title: Formally talking up the style of the martial name’s tradition of the rollercoaster, their operators like to christen their fairground rides Kolossos or Steel Dragon. Tiger & Turtle refers, so Ulrich Genth, in its content to the “paradox of Achilles and the turtle, so, on one hand, to the turtle as a symbol of slowness and, on the other hand, to the tiger as a symbol of capitalism. The thing only looks fast from far away, but then, it is a struggle to climb it with one’s own feet.” And even more, as a pedestrian, one encounters, next to the fantastic outlook, an actually impassable loop; this confronts the walker with the absurd comicality of the limiting experience of the speed of walking.”
Installation view of The obliteration room 2011 as part of ‘Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever’, Gallery of Modern Art, 2011.
The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots.
As with many of Kusama’s installations, the work is disarmingly simple in its elemental composition; however, it brilliantly exploits the framework of its presentation. The white room is gradually obliterated over the course of the exhibition, the space changing measurably with the passage of time as the dots accumulate as a result of thousands and thousands of collaborators.
Interactivity became an important component of Kusama’s work in the mid to late 1960s, when her solo public performances expanded into participatory happenings. A product of the postwar Avant-garde, which almost immediately crossed over into popular culture, or at least underground counter culture, happenings developed as unconventional performance events increasingly relying on audience reaction and direct participation. Kusama’s happenings, known as ‘body festivals’ — or ‘orgies’, as they were often sensationally reported in the mainstream press — typically provided platforms for spontaneous and improvisatory behaviour within conceptual and aesthetic frameworks determined by the artist. Often involving public nudity — the artist hoped to contrast the beauty of the youthful human body with the violence of the US–Vietnam War — they challenged prevailing moral frameworks. (from Yayoi Kusama; Look Now, See Forever)
“One aspect of my position as a photographer here at the Walker is to document the exhibitions. This has been an ongoing process dating back to the beginning of the Walker Art Center. While reviewing images of past exhibitions, I began to notice something now absent in the galleries, potted plants. Up until the opening of the Barnes building in 1971, potted plants were a staple in the galleries. While there are few exhibition views containing patrons, the plants were always present. In these images they seem to act as the stand-ins for the patrons, sometimes aloof and in the background or congregating around the radiator as if in discussion. And then there are those that are really into the work, standing in front of a sculpture’s light, their shadows enveloping the work.
Due to a multitude of reasons, plants only reappear in the galleries if they are part of the artwork. Many of the plants seem to have been around for many years and well taken care of by the staff. Enjoy this look at Exhibition Photography and Plants from the Walker archives.” – Gene Pittman for The Walker Art Centre
“BarRectum, Arsch Bar, Asshole Bar, Bar Anus. While the translations sound different, the form is universally recognizable. The bar takes its shape from the human digestive system: starting with the tongue, continuing to the stomach, moving through the small and the large intestines and exiting through the anus. While BarRectum is anatomically correct, the last part of the large intestine has been inflated to a humongous size to hold as many drinking customers at the bar as possible. The anus itself is part of a large door that doubles as an emergency exit.”
“Gold is part of an installation series created to expose audiences to a particular idea through the power of typography and demonstrate how it could communicate and represent outside of the usual screen and print based forms.
Gold is a piece that criticizes a very popular fast food company and its contribution to the obesity problem facing our society today. The piece was created by using the popular golden French fries.
The word chosen gold has different meanings, it portrays the main color of the logo of this company, the color of the popular fries and it also portrays the associations made between the brand and society, especially the marketing campaigns which depicts this food as something very desirable, especially for kids, creating a society with really bad eating habits that have lead to an obesity problem.”
“The project ‘Map’ is a public space installation questioning the red map marker of the location based search engine Google Maps. “Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.” With a small graphic icon Google marks search results in the map interface. The design of the virtual map pin seems to be derived from a physical map needle. On one hand the marker and information speech bubble next to it cast a shadow on the digital map as if they were physical objects. When the map is switched to satellite mode it seems that they become part of the city. On the other hand it is a simple 20 px graphic icon which stays always at the same size on the computer screen. The size of the life size red marker in physical space corresponds to the size of a marker in the web interface in maximal zoom factor of the map. Where is the center of a city?
In the city center series ‘Map’ is set up at the exact spot where Google Maps assumes to be the city center of the city. Transferred to physical space the map marker questions the relation of the digital information space to every day life public city space. The perception of the city is increasingly influenced by geolocation services.”
“With a lot of support from old and new friends, I turned the side of an abandoned house in my neighborhood into a giant chalkboard where residents can write on the wall and remember what is important to them in life. Before I Die transforms neglected spaces into constructive ones where we can learn the hopes and aspirations of the people around us.”
“People fill the floor of their homes with furniture and walls with paintings and pictures. So why are the ceilings left empty? Decorating ceilings was a celebrated art form in the past centuries that somehow got lost through the reductionism of modernism. People don’t look at the ceiling anymore. It’s a dead space. So I wanted to bring a small wink to this space. I also liked the idea that somehow there’s a parallel world which coexists with ours.”
“The Minimum Monument project is a critical reading of the monument in the contemporary cities. In a few-minutes action, the official canons of the monument are inverted: in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral ice; in the place of the monumental scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies.
The project started with solitary figures, later a multitude of small sculptures of ice were placed in public spaces of several cities. The memory is inscribed in the photographic image and shared by everyone. It is no longer reserved to great heroes nor to great monuments. It loses its static condition to gain fluidity in the urban displacement and in the change of state of the water. It concentrates small sculptures of small men, the common men.”
When someone puts in a coin, and selects an object, the piece will fall to the bottom, shattering into a million tiny pieces. The artist contends that this act will make you feel better.
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