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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE "Ultra Peau", un voyage sensoriel" April 25 - June 21, 2006 Cream me up! A slow release for sensitive skin. Acting artist, as a mean to slide into that exhibition space, work the spectacle for that world fair feeling. No need for a release text, no need to explain, claim or justify, nor for the pretense objective institutional voice. This sophisticated installation annuls any need to educate or inform about the experimental, ground breaking display, with its references to the history of exhibition, simply a given - a generous 'here you are'. This piece of paper, the release, a membrane between artist and visitor, has here been replaced by a more realist, literal one - skin colored fabric, sensuously undulating, meandering across like dunes. Along an appropriative tradition, the installation contains pieces of art. The names of the individual artists have been pushed back for the bigger picture, just as the corporate logo. The format of the checklist, available at the exit, is used to indicate or claim the ontological existence of art. Consider the Corporation a beginner artist, some tolerance deserved, the company remains logoless in the background, not vulgarly insisting on presence sponsor style or regular ego driven action. The creative process has been highlighted like the puppet-show next door. A slide projection, with a jagged timing a la Chris Marker, take us straight behind the scenes, displayed on a monitor cunningly placed 'behind the scene'. In this physical collapse of levels of discourse, we see the advertising company develop the ideas for the set in heated collaborative discussions. Compared to many majestic and mastodont current exhibitions, even ones using vaseline as its subject-matter, this corporate budget is miniscule, rather showing off a wealth of ideas in how to activate and engage the visitor with a multi-facetted inventiveness where the use of the product has been made redundant. Subliminally setting up for life experience via olfactory sensation. Non-objectal 'smell art', elegantly and consistently avoiding to introduce the real product. By using the other gaze, looking to the side, fast assemblage, relaxedly building a functioning stage, an attitude of badly put together. Punk corporate exhibition designers working with more suave trashy guts than many a sci-fi artist. This creation Brechtianly reveals itself as one walks around the various tents or thematic stations. The entire space is wrapped in an off-white - not black - fabric, pointing at the expected caucasian racial pre-dominance of the visitors. The holes cut in the fabrics for the viewing of the images, function both as frames and a meta frame, revealing the wall and the scaffolding behind. This exhibition contains its own making, its theatricality comes off as brutally honest, displaying a deep structural understanding of viewing and the body. Viewers move around freely in and out of the various stations; smelling old skin, exploring diverse infomercials, playing with surface using glow in the dark readings. They crawl in between two narrow sheets of transparent material, old and young, to watch a projection, resting in horizontal body position for long durations of time, naked skin flashing by. The viewers interact without instructions, following their gut understanding of the use of the space - not necessarily the intended one. Behaving real relational, in the mecca for a re-take of this sixties museological philosophy, with a package packed with information, in a rare combination of entertainment coupled with a meditative quality. Pushed into squatting the space of the release, where real-life scaffolding turns clear, here is ample swing-room to play. FOR IMMEDIATE LEASE, for unknown fees, the space of the exhibition |