Deserts of Comfort
The Come-in show created by Stuttgart Institute of International Connections and presented by the Goethe Institute at the Kyiv Contemporary Arts Center has a subtitle, Interior Design as a Media in Germany’s Contemporary Arts. Such an applied-oriented exhibition looks new for the center only at first glance. This tendency is characteristic for contemporary art in general, not only its patterns traditionally exhibited next to Kyiv Mohyla Academy: a modern artist, above all, strives to create some environment for the potential spectator and/or customer.
The artists’ goals can vary from cloying comfort to shock. However, today’s public is difficult to surprise. The process of modern arts is perceived as a kind of amusement park, where the most elevated ideas and most primitive pleasure impulses work side by side. Design has long ceased to be just a narrow service craft, while the aspirations of highbrow installation and performance artists look more and more like interior design projects.
In fact, this is how the Come-in exhibition was created — in the borderland between the design and artistic concept. The simplicity celebrates victory; intelligibility is made a principle. There is nothing to insult one’s gaze in Stefan Kern’s Cola Light Sculpture: a bench resting on boxes with the mentioned drink meaning nothing more than it actually is. The Revolving Chair by Heide Deigert looks equally standard. Four plastic seats like those one can find in the waiting room at a railroad station, arranged on a single revolving basis, are not as much a chair as a compact household merry-go-round. However, nobody had the courage to use it in this capacity.
An exhibit by Claus Fottinger, a small semicircular bar with a huge McDonald’s M on it, inlayed with pictures of German roadside cafes, was immeasurably more attractive for the exhibition’s visitors. The same ideas of combined elegance and utility dominated in the works by Eva Hertzsch and Adam Page. A turnstile constructed of identical elements can be easily transformed into various types of security equipment, according to the press release.
Another group of participants, named the Insiders, allow themselves the luxury of an ironic gesture. Peter Rosel created the branchy Monstera, Rubber Plant, and Yucca planted in pots made of scraps of police uniforms. Such things would fit for an office or a villa of some rich eccentric. The same refers to Dorothee Golz’s gaudy artifacts. The uncomfortable chairs each cut in half, coffee cups turned into communicated vessels (you can probably pour something into them but not drink from them), a provoking kitsch standard lamp would make a beautiful decoration for a businessman wanting to look with it.
From such a point of view, a complete denial of any interior experimentation is also possible. Christina Doll is probably recalling bourgeois elephant and pseudo-Chinese cast figures when creating her porcelain Lilliput. Her gleaming white miniature lockers and well matched human figures portraying real people are not modeling an interior but a mocking imprint of it.
The Come-in House subgroup of exhibits presents fragments, drafts, and reminiscences of buildings that used to be. A gigantic Please Don’t Disturb sign, familiar to everybody ever staying at a hotel, is composed by Erik Schmidt of various landscapes and scenes of a city’s everyday life. The same visual material fills Johannes Spehr’s Waiting Booth: a plywood pen is painted with pictures of city construction works. A Model of Aachen by Tobias and Raphael Danke represents a retrospection of their childhood: fragments of the backs of the chairs the future artists used to play in, along with photos of typical houses, and gardens of the 1950s.
Andree Korpys and Markus Loffler’s Set represents a contrast to this idyll. At first glance there is nothing to write home about in it: a couple of mattresses with pillows with no pillowcases and blankets, a few posters hanging on the walls, an ancient television set, a couple of armchairs, bookshelves with files, and a typewriter. Everything is plain and undistinguished, with one small exception: this is exactly how the famous RAF terrorist group’s secret headquarters looked like 25 years ago. A weird vessel made of logs of different size carries a doll passenger, watches, guitar, picture, and a copy of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. A monitor next to it shows an absurdist happening shot by the artist himself during his trip along the Weser River.
Probably the most significant object of the exhibition was Gregor Schneider’s video documenting a journey inside his Uhr House. This long-term project, an unserviceable house which is gradually turning into a labyrinth due to the artist’s efforts, won the Golden Lion at the last year’s Venice Biennial. A spectator going through Schneider’s creation, even if not feeling any catharsis, leaves it with an absolutely new sensation. The original multidimensional house gradually changes any one of its visitors, looking like an exception in the row of other exhibits.
As mentioned, Come-In can hardly be considered a purely artistic collection. Rather, it is a detailed plan for totally acceptable comfort. Maybe this is how we all are going to live some day. Nothing is excessive; nothing strikes one’s eye: a soft and comfortable desert.
