Marlborough Contemporary

Transcription

1 Marlborough Contemporary Mike Bouchet 1970 Born in Castro Valley, California Education 1994 UCLA, California Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany Biennials 2016 Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland th São Paulo Biennial, Brasil rd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy nd Moscow Biennial, Russia th Berlin Biennial, Berlin, Germany st Ghent Quadrennial, S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium Solo Exhibitions 2017 Tender, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA 2016 Bounty, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany Push, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, Germany MR2, Alaia Exhibitions, Paris, France 2015 Y ask Y, Kostyal, Stockholm, Sweden 2014 Power Lunch, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany

2 Double Deck, in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, Marlborough Gallery, Monaco Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model, in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany Spanish Donkey A-Hole Sport Drink Bilbao Sunscreen Model Drawings, in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, Germany 2013 Flood, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA 2012 Simulated Personal Rescue Enclosures, Hotel Gallery, London, UK The Untitled Video, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, Germany 2011 Hollywood Deals, O.P.A. (Oficina para Proyectos de Arte), Guadalajara, Mexico Argento Lawn Chairs, Art Basel Design Fair, Cumulus Studios, Basel, Switzerland Impulse Strategies, Galerie Georges-Phillippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, France 2010 HARD ON, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, Germany New Living, COBRA Museum, Amstelveen, Netherlands Neues Wohnen, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany Retreat, BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna, Austria Diet Cola Works, The Box, Los Angeles, California, USA 2009 The New New Age Film Festival, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany Sell and Destroy - Redrawing the Bottom Line, Frieze Projects, London, UK 2008 New New Age Film Festival, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt, Germany CANBURGER, Galerie Georges-Phillippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, France 16x9 Action Film, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 2007 Almost Every City in the World, Galerie Vallois, Paris, France Fat Slices and Conscious Primers, MC Kunst, Los Angeles, California, USA Reaction Time, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, California, USA Shitrock Crate and Tapestry Cartoons, The Box, Los Angeles, California, USA 16x9 Action Film, MOCA Los Angeles, California, USA 2006 Recent Jacuzzis, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Germany 2005 Top, Back and Bottom of Mind Awareness, Maccarone, Inc., New York, USA New Jacuzzis, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria 2004 Carpe Denim, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Germany 2003 Overhead Baggage Treatment, Maccarone, Inc., New York, USA

3 1999 Business on Sunset, BOSS Exhibitions, Los Angeles, USA Group Exhibitions 2016 'Prototypology, Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy History of Nothing, White Cube Gallery, London, UK Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland Impromptu, The Box, Los Angeles, USA Omul Negru, Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest, Romania Omul Negru, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA SMS SOS, Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, New York 2015 Paulin, Paulin, Paulin, Gallery Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France The World is Made of Stories, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway American Esoterica, Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv, Bulgaria Brunch over Troubled Waters, Plutschow Gallery, Zurich Six Advertisements, Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, New York EAGLES II, Marlborough Madrid, Madrid, Spain 2014 Sigmund Freud and the Play on the Burden of Representation, 21er Haus, Vienna, Austria The Go Between, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy Group Spirit, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany 2013 'Bald Eagle, Haubrok projects, Berlin, Germany 356 Sculptures, 356 Mission Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 2012 EAGLES, Marlborough Madrid, Madrid, Spain PRIVACY, Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, Germany TRACK, S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium Made in Germany Zwei, Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, Germany 2011 Everything Must Go, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, USA Commercial Break, GARAGE Center of Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Venice, Italy A painting show, AUTOCENTER, Berlin, Germany Notes on Notes on Camp, Invisible Exports, New York, New York, USA Informellnatur, Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, Germany My Beautiful Mongo, Thomas Brambilla Contemporary Art, Bergamo, Italy Strictly Global, Deutsche Bank Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany Involuntary, Ford Project, New York, New York, USA Das Meer: Traum and Wirklichkeit, Eres Stiftung, Munich, Germany 2010 TRANSZENDENZ INC, AUTOCENTER, Berlin, Germany During Office Hours, VGF, Berlin, Germany Auteur/Amateur, Layr Wu?stenhagen, Vienna, Austria Vaxination, Xippas Gallery, Athens, Greece

4 The Traveling Show, La Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico Where do we go from here?, selections from the Jumex Collection, CAC, Cincinnati, USA The New New Age Film Festival, selected films, LICHTER Festival, Frankfurt, Germany 2009 Where do we go from here?, selects of the Jumex Collection, The Bass Museum, Miami Rotating View, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway Making Worlds, 53rd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy Remap 2, Athens, Greece Nothingness and Being, 7th Interpretation of The Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico Quand la premiere ivresse des suces bruyants..., CAPC Musee d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France When the mood strikes... The Collection of Wilfred & Yannicke Cooreman-De Smedt, MDD Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium 2008 Anthology, Otero Plassart, Los Angeles, USA Meet Me Around the Corner, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Sweden No Leftovers, Kunsthalle Bern, Berne, Switzerland Walls in the Street, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade Working Men, Analix Forever, Geneva, Switzerland The Practice of Everyday Life, Feinkost Gallery, Berlin, Germany Hotel California, Galerie Georges-Phillippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, France An Unruly History of the readymade, Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico Group Show, Sebastian Guinness Gallery, Dublin, Ireland Timer, Hollesgard, Hollesgard, Denmark Pawnshop, e-flux, New York, USA Mind Hacking II, Wewerka Pavilion, Mu?nster, Germany Quotidian, BUIA Gallery, New York, USA New Economy, Artists Space, New York, USA Moscow Biennial 2, Moscow, Russia Verbale, Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria Uncertain States of America, Herning Kunstmuseum / Warsaw / Copenhagen / Beijing / Prague / Germany Billion Years, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France Uncertain States of America, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland E-flux Video Rental, Seoul, Korea, Antwerp, Belgium Uncertain States of America, Serpentine Gallery, London Mobile: Suro Collection, Triangle Project Space, San Antonio, Texas, USA Uncertain States of America, Bard Curatorial Center, New York, USA Sculpture Park, Offenburg, Germany Nice Fine Arts, curated by Axel Huber, Städtische Galerie Laar, Lahr, Germany Von Mäusen und Menschen / Of Mice and Men, 4th Berlin Biennial, Berlin, Germany Palm D'Or Television Pitch, Frankfurt, Germany Space Boomerang, Swiss Institute, New York, USA 2005 Strich, Zeichnung, Bild, BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, Austria Uncertain States of America, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway Off Key, Kunsthalle Bern, Berne, Switzerland

5 La Vista Hermosa, Liste, Basel, Switzerland Do You Like Stuff?, Swiss Institute, New York, USA Greater New York, MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, New York, USA Situational Prosthetics, New Langston Art Center, San Francisco, USA E-flux Video Rental, Kunst Werke Berlin Germany, Frankfurt, Germany 2004 Dedicated to a Proposition, Extra City Center for Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium Sculpture Now, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Germany Kotzrohr and Popular Ceramics, Video Program, Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK E-flux Video Rental, e-flux, New York, USA 2003 High Desert Test Sites, Los Angeles, CA, USA Hands up, baby, hands up!, KVO, Kunstverein Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany 2002 Out of True, Santa Barbara University Art Museum, Santa Barbara, California, USA 2001 Casino, S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium 2000 Sebastian Clough and Mike Bouchet, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, USA Life After The Squirrel, Location One, New York, USA 1997 Snowball, collaboration with Jason Rhoades and Peter Bonde, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy 1996 Size Matters, Special K Projects, Los Angeles, California, USA 1994 Common Denomination Language Expo, FAR, Los Angeles, California, USA Public and Private Collections Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Francois Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy The Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico LVMH Collection, Paris, France Moderne Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway FNAC, Fonds National D'Art Contemporain, Paris, France Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria Bernard Arnault Collection, Paris, France CAPC, musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France DekaBank, Frankfurt, Germany Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt, Germany Permanent Floor at Deutsche Bank AG, Frankfurt, Germany DZ Bank, Frankfurt, Germany The Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida, United States Sammlung Boros, Berlin, Germany

6 Sammlung Axel Haubrok, Berlin, Germany Ullens Collection, Beijing, China Monographs Mike Bouchet, Selected Works , published by Sternberg Press, 2009 Mike Bouchet, "New Living, published by Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, 2010 Mike Bouchet, "Retreat", published by BAWAG foundation, Vienna, 2010 Mike Bouchet, The New New Age Film Festival Saint John of God of Ghent Pall Mall Empire Psychiatric Center Agreement Guide, published by S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2012 Mike Bouchet, FLOOD, published by Marlborough Chelsea, 2013 Mike Bouchet, Power Lunch published by Peres Projects publications, 2014

7 What Gives Money Its Distinctive Smell? One Chemist Tried to Find Out A German perfume expert, hired by an artist, has bottled the elusive aroma of the U.S. dollar, which has hints of inky cotton, leather wallets, metal cash drawers and hundreds of sweaty palms; crazy complex Artist Mike Bouchet smells money during a visit to Marc vom Ende at the perfumer s lab in Holzminden, Germany. PHOTO: CHRISTINA WITTER/SYMRISE By KELLY CROW Jan. 18, :41 a.m. ET Grab a dollar bill and sniff. What does cash smell like, really? Customs agents and chemists around the world have long been curious about the exact aroma of the U.S. greenback. The hunt is complicated by the fact that a dollar s scent evolves as it circulates from an inky-cotton fragrance fresh from the bank to an earthier, greasy-palm smell that should remind people to wash

8 their hands more often. Marc vom Ende, a chemist and senior perfumer with German flavor and fragrance house Symrise AG, thinks he has hit on the precise blend. Starting with base notes of cotton, soap and ink, Mr. vom Ende says, the scent sweeps in odors derived from more than 100 volatile organic chemicals. It includes whiffs of leather from time spent in wallets and handbags, a metallic tang that evokes cash registers, salty human sweat and even bacterial and bathroom smells. Mike Bouchet, a Frankfurt-based artist who commissioned the scent search, said the first time he stuck his nose into an early sample, I felt a bump, like a jolt of electricity, because it smelled just like money. It was invigorating. Companies in the $25 billion flavor and fragrance industry maintain elaborate databases of more than 10,000 smell-able materials, such as foods or flowers that can be squeezed down to their essential oils, like oranges, as well as aromatic, molecular compounds patented by perfumers. Mike Bouchet Until now, the smell of U.S. dollars hadn t been inventoried. When Mr. Bouchet approached Symrise, based in Holzminden, Germany, two years ago with his idea to re-create the used money smell, executives assigned the project to Mr. vom Ende, its 48-year-old senior perfumer who designs scents for diffusers in the interiors of Mercedes-Benz cars as well as European perfume companies. Mr. vom Ende smelled a challenge. Money takes something from everyone who uses it, he said. That makes it crazy complex, but that also makes it interesting to detect. To begin, the perfumer inserted a wad of new and used U.S. paper money in denominations of $1, $5 and $20 into an airtight chamber containing activated charcoal. Like a sponge, the charcoal absorbed elements in or around the dollars in the trapped air, allowing molecules from the money to be extracted. (Different currencies have different smells.)

9 Perfumer Marc vom Ende at his Symrise lab. PHOTO: MIKE BOUCHET/MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA After subjecting the extracted elements to additional chemical tests, Mr. vom Ende detected more than 100 ingredients. The biggest group were aliphatic aldehydes, a dominant smell in soap, linen and a key smell in Chanel No. 5, he said. People typically find such compounds appealing, he added, unless it gets too strong, and then we think it smells like vomit. Next, he found high amounts of alkanes, or compounds we often find in gasoline or ink. The rest were largely animal-derived, he said, coming from body oils, skin cells and decay. He also found the presence of butter, cheese and hay as well as indole molecules, which are commonly found in fecal matter. I found more than I expected, he said. One material he perversely hoped to find but didn t was cocaine, he said. Having read a 1997 study by Argonne National Laboratory that found 78% of U.S. dollar bills circulating in the Chicago and Miami areas contained traces of cocaine, he wondered if he would find at least a few drug-related molecules in his samples: Sadly, no.

10 The Symrise scent lab. PHOTO: MIKE BOUCHET/MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA Mr. vom Ende took six months before he felt he had re-created the smell of freshly minted money, relying on several colleagues known as evaluators to sniff-and-approve his efforts. It took an additional eight months before he felt he had conjured money that had been in heavy circulation. New money is easy, but to make the smell of used money? That s where the creativity comes in, said Pamela Dalton, a cognitive psychologist who studies smell at Philadelphia s Monell Chemical Senses Center. The final formula could prove tempting to counterfeiters seeking to make their fakes smell authentic, she added. The Secret Service, which oversees efforts to stem financial crimes like money laundering, was intrigued by the idea of recreating the smell, but said the odor isn t one of the tools experts currently use to weed out counterfeit currency. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving, which printed 7.6 billion new notes for the Federal Reserve last year, said that the notes odor isn t proprietary, even though some of the manufacturing processes used to make them are protected. Microsoft executive Patrick McCarthy hired a nose, or perfumer, to help him design a new money-like fragrance for men and women in The result called Money smells like a sudsy cloth infused with musky or fruity accents.

11 Cotton, soap and linen? That s a smell you can really build off of, he said. Used money? Not so much. Equipment used in testing scents at Symrise. PHOTO: MIKE BOUCHET/MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA For now, the results of Mr. vom Ende s olfactory detection will be able to be inhaled in only one place: New York gallery Marlborough Chelsea, where the perfumer plans to come to turn over his vial to Mr. Bouchet, the artist who paid Symrise to produce it. Mr. Bouchet is known for making wry artworks exploring commercial processes. He has created his own bluejeans, cans of hamburger and flavored cola. On Thursday, he intends to diffuse the smell throughout the gallery as a work of art. To him, the gesture turns the entire space into a sculpture, a spare, white gallery that seems empty yet smells like an invisible vault. Money is a symbol of power, and yet we never think about how it smells, which I find fascinating, Mr. Bouchet said. Even handling money makes people want to buy more luxury goods. His dealer, Pascal Spengemann, said Mr. Bouchet s piece, titled Tender, will be offered for sale for $75,000. The buyer would own the right to reproduce the smell and get unlimited refills and diffusers to emit it. Should people take a whiff and feel inspired to buy something else, he added, I ll have other artworks on the second floor.

12 Mike Bouchet's "Sequel" to Moulin Rouge Is a Contradiction of Baz Luhrmann. by Rebecca Voight October 21, :30 pm I ve wanted to do this in Paris, said the Frankfurt, Germany-based artist Mike Bouchet of his MR2 Cabaret that took over Galerie Azzedine Alaïa Wednesday night for a dinner spectacle. "It s been in my head since 2001." A Dada-esque fantasy of a Parisian cabaret by a Southern Californian artist who has been living in Germany for the past 15 years, MR2 apparently tickled Azzedine Alaïa s fancy. He gave Bouchet carte blanche for the show, which kicked off with a motorcycle stunt rider doing perilous wheelies in the gallery s small old stone courtyard. The dinner for 150, prepared by the Alaïa kitchen under Bouchet s direction, included sticky dinner rolls washed down with Pouilly-fuissé, poured by a crew of nervous black-suited waiters from Cherry red plastic jerrycans.

13 Consumerism is Bouchet s favorite subject, and he will go to extremes to make art about it. In the past he's created a mosaic of 10,000 porn videos (Untitled Video, 2011); concocted his own sticky formula for Cola Lite, with which he painted with and filled the rooftop pool of Chelsea s Hotel Americano in 2013; and produced his own brand of jeans in a Colombian sweat shop in 2004, pairs of which he subsequently dropped from a plane back down on the town where they were manufactured. For his Zurich Load, at last summer s Manifesta 11 in Cologne, Germany, Bouchet took 80,000 tons of feces the entire, um, output of the city of Zurich for one day mixed it with cement and lye and pressed it into bricks to make a smelly grid that had the biennial s neighbors complaining. MR2 Cabaret, or Moulin Rouge 2, was Bouchet s response to Baz Luhrmann s 2001 film Moulin Rouge. There s been three versions: one in the 30's, a film by John Huston in 1952, and then the last one which I thought was such a crazy trainwreck of sentimentality and sickening, layered up nostalgia," Bouchet said, pulling no punches. "The film was just shellacked with cultural tropes, so I decided to make a sequel. Wearing a "Make Cabaret Great Again" trucker cap and a candy-striped tie over a fake paunch, Bouchet acted as the evening s MC, a ranting, exploitative creep who stage manages the club s wanna be star. There are simulated sex scenes on a turntable stage, interrupted by bouts of French kickboxing sailors, accompanied by music from an outof-tune band featuring by a talentless German Leider singer and a troupe of wobbly cancan dancers. Red was the evening s dominant color. Bouchet s Big Red Zero poster painting and others plastered with gooey-looking plastic maraschino cherries and French fries lined the walls with an embroidered packet of Pall Mall cigarettes on a red banner, a Call of Duty: Big Red faux film poster, and cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling stamped with "MR2 Fucking Entertainment" in bright red lettering. Red wasn t the origin of this, but I started to think about the color and cherries, which are an extremely potent symbols of sexuality and childhood innocence, explained Bouchet. Maraschino cherries actually became a public health issue in 1901, the same year cabaret had its heyday in Germany, inspiring Dada theater. They were the first mass-produced candy invented in France in the early 20th century. It was a huge business. The fruit was bleached, dyed, totally fake and so bad for you. There were health warnings about them in the U.S., but people kept eating more and more. Nobody cared.

14 Craft/Work Shitting Bricks: The Dada Heritage Of Mike Bouchet's Zurich Load Barnaby Smith, September 24th, :31 At Manifesta 11, amidst celebrations of the Dada centenary, Barnaby Smith finds some very dirty art in one of Europe's cleanest cities All images: Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load, Löwenbräukunst. Photo (c) Camilo Brau

15 For many years I was quite turned off by the idea of visiting India. For one thing, I was wary of the cliché of following in the footsteps of any long-out-dated hippie trail and for another, such a trip, for people I knew and from things I read, often meant misguided pilgrimages to visit dubious gurus in the name of spiritual improvement. Then the opportunity arose, and I took it. A couple of years later I returned. To my surprise I found myself infected with this so-called India bug, a vague wistful reverie that involves thinking of the place every day, fantasising about returning and swooning in a general awe at the country s complexities and yes, dammit, the colours and smells, the sensory overload. As a consumer, I was sold on the product. But it wasn t the culture, the land, the food, the sights or even the people that got to me most. It was the mess. It was refreshing coming with a perspective born of Western complacency and being used to apparent order and cleanliness to visit a place where waste was not recoiled from and denied, where excrement and grime and discharge and husk are not hidden and unacknowledged. It seemed a lesson in humanity s wholeness, where there was little separation between public and social personas and the shit we produce (both literally and otherwise). The men shitting in the trees by the railway lines near Dehradun, the dead cat in the street in Kochi with its intestines strewn out several feet from its chewed-up belly, the open sewer that is the tracks between the platforms at Delhi station. This attitude a reflection really may seem inappropriate given the nation s perilous environmental quagmire, ongoing sanitation deficiencies and grievous poverty on its massive scale. But I lived in Zurich for a year, with its pristine avenues, spectacular standards of organisation, delight in bureaucracy and relentless niceties. A visit to India in the wake of this was a blast of worldly reality that, as a tourist, represented a kind of reconnection with the immediate physicality of life, and the people were unapologetic. Shit happens, everywhere, all the time, so why pretend it doesn t. Of course, these impressions could only be momentary before the magnitude of India s aforementioned dysfunctions snaps you out of it. Zurich regularly hovers around the top of those lists that rank the world s cities for quality of life (one recent such league table by Mercer had it second). My experience was of an impenetrable city of inflexible social traditions, a monument to and celebration of wealth, a widespread baulking at the counter-cultural and largely conservative ideas of beauty and art. If ever there was a city that might squirm at facing its own shit, it was this one. As part of Manifesta 11 for 2016, Frankfurt-based American artist Mike Bouchet insisted that Zurich did exactly that with his thought-provoking, powerful installation, The Zurich Load. Bouchet s piece saw eighty tonnes of human excrement packed into a series of large brown bricks spread out to cover an area of 79 x 840 x 3,040 centimetres at Lowenbraukunst, a converted brewery on the banks of the Limmat river that was home to

16 the majority of Manifesta s offerings. The load had been mixed with cement, lime and pigment, and there was a notice near the entrance stating that the sludge had been made safe for public presentation. My visit occurred about eight weeks into Manifesta, and thus the worst of the smell had dissipated I was told by a local, however, that residents in the neighbourhood complained vehemently when the piece was installed and the stench was somewhat riper. Now it was, surprisingly, not overpowering and more like the smell of manure on a farm than human sewage. Also striking was the dryness, with the slabs resembling peat briquettes used for fuel. The fact the bricks were immaculately laid out in perfect order seemed a nod to Zurich s glorification of neatness and symmetry. Manifesta takes place in a different European location every two years, making an effort to avoid any city that can be regarded as an international hub of contemporary art. Manifesta s emphasis is on peripheral scenes. Since its inception in 1996, it has been hosted by Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Ljubljiana, Murcia and St Petersburg among other places, and has never visited the UK. Each version of Manifesta has a theme, with Zurich 2016 being What People Do For Money: Some Joint Ventures. To serve this concept, curator Christian Jankowski arrived at the idea of pairing an international artist with a member of the Zurich workforce so that they might work together to create art based on a particular profession. So as you wandered through the multi-venue exhibition, you d find works in all manner of mediums (from photography to

17 sculpture to video art to sound art and more) the result of collaborations between an invited artist and the likes of firemen, construction workers, doctors, prostitutes and in one case dog groomers. Bouchet worked with Werdhölzi Wastewater Treatment Plant, with his raw material being all the human sludge that the 400,000 denizens of Zurich produced on March 24, One of my first thoughts when stood in front of The Zurich Load was of India. How strange it must seem to anyone from there that such a thing would be monumentalised in this way, made an artefact for aesthetic contemplation. In Switzerland, where waste and muck is alienated, such a thing might seem subversive. It isn t though. This is partly due to Bouchet s attitude to his own work, which was affectionate and playful. In an interview, he said his hope was to make human excrement more benign and less threatening and also celebrated the fact this was a genuine, almost lovingly constructed, collaboration with the entire population of the city. The Zurich Load is also something of a democratic social leveller: the faeces of millionaire bankers mingled and mixed with that of immigrants, refugees and drug addicts. While challenging to the notions of decorum that define this city, ultimately there is little that is shocking, edgy or even particularly experimental in either the finished piece or Bouchet s intention. That is not to say it does not have its layers (so to speak). For example, it s difficult to look at a work made out of shit and not be reminded of the simple age-old idea of artistic process as purgation. Bouchet s piece presents very literally (and impishly) the idea of the work of art being the result of the artist(s) digesting his or her psyche or experience the catharsis. A further dimension emerges when you consider some of Bouchet s previous works and artistic concerns. Preoccupied by consumerism and its consequences, and clearly influenced by Warhol, his Ask For More (2013) is simply the Pepsi slogan printed eighteen times on a white background. Untitled Video (2011) is a mosaic of 10,000 porn videos. For Carpe Denim (2004), Bouchet had his own brand of jeans made in a Colombian sweatshop, and then, having loaded them on to a plane, rained them down upon the city in which they were manufactured. In the wake of these pieces, The Zurich Load seems to consolidate the idea that all consumption must have its final act of digestion: defecation. Too much consumption, for Bouchet, will necessitate overwhelming volumes of shit actual, existential, cultural, and spiritual. It is telling that Bouchet also noted that while the residents of Zurich produced 80 tonnes of waste in a day, New York City s figure is 1,600, enough to fill Yankee Stadium.

18 Indeed, the fact this is everybody s waste is what sets Bouchet s work apart from some of history s more notable examples of excremental art. Arguably the most famous is Piero Manzoni s Merda d artista ( Artist s Shit, 1961), which consists of ninety cans all containing thirty grams of Manzoni s own doings. As well as asking provocative questions about the production and consumption of art and certainly designed to shock, Manzoni was cultivating a strange kind of intimacy by allowing his stool to be employed in this way (although some accounts claim the tins are actually full of plaster). There is nothing personal about Bouchet s piece, which relies on the waste of others. He is more the facilitator of a come together message. There is something confessional about using your own. The Zurich Load is also not a work of nihilism nor does it have ambitions towards iconoclasm, as did Santiago Sierra s notorious 2007 London installation of sculptures made from human faeces that was collected, as it happens, by low-caste scavengers in India. Sierra, by the by, was among the invited artists at Manifesta 11. One of the reasons Zurich was selected as the host city for Manifesta 11 was the fact that 2016 marks 100 years since the Dada movement was born at the city s fabled Niederdorf nightclub Cabaret Voltaire. Exhibitions and events are taking place throughout the year in the city (including a terrific Francis Picabia retrospective at the Kunsthaus), with Cabaret Voltaire playing a role in Manifesta by hosting performances from anyone willing to

19 walk in and step up. Aside from this there was disappointingly little connection between the biennial s vocation-inspired installations and Dadaism s ideals, with the possible exception of The Zurich Load. Dadaism, of course, was in thrall to shit, disgust, and destruction. Indeed, seminal Dada figure Tristan Tzara said, Dada remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates For the Dada founders, excrement and the grotesque represented life, with Bouchet s piece a gentle reminder to Zurich that to excrete is to be alive. Furthermore, with Zurich s Dada history being celebrated all around him as he worked with the public water works, Bouchet must have had Duchamp s Fountain on his mind as he forged his smelly construction (which could admittedly be said for ninety-nine percent of conceptual artists over the last hundred years). Now that Manifesta is over, The Zurich Load will be destroyed as, I suppose, it would have to be. But as Antoine Lavoisier famously wrote, Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes, which seems to be part of the point Bouchet was making. Every load lives on somewhere. Manifesta 12 will be held in Palermo, Italy in Francis Picabia: A Retrospective runs until September 25.

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22 MANIFESTA 11 & FRANCIS PICABIA // KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH by Terry R. Myers I ve got the brains, you ve got the looks. Let s make lots of money. Pet Shop Boys, Opportunities (Let s Make Lots of Money), 1986 Who doesn t want a partner in crime? Before arriving in Zürich this summer for the opening of Manifesta 11, I hadn t thought too much about the rich harmonic (and, better yet, dissonant) convergence that would come from pairing the latest version of The European Biennial of Contemporary Art with a Francis Picabia retrospective that opened at the Kunsthaus Zürich just a few days before (it will travel in November to MoMA in New York). The story goes that one of the key reasons that Zürich was chosen to host Manifesta 11 was because 2016 is the centennial of the city s contributions to the Dada movement. The story of Zürich Dada is fantastic, even epic, full of antics and misadventures, refusals and resistance, friends and enemies, and the lasting impact of some killer works of art none more devastating (in the best way) than some of Picabia s from the early period of his far-reaching career. What could be better for accompanying yet another international biennial than the lasting edge and high energy of Dada, as represented in the work of artist who kept on going? Talk about an opportunity. Picabia s exhibition is a triumph and Manifesta was not a disaster. Unprepared for the level to which the sustained energy of the former would overwhelm the substantial ambitions of the latter, the two exhibitions demonstrated the skewed relationship between the general and the specific in contemporary art today. I spent the afternoon before the Manifesta press preview with Picabia; by the time I got to the second room, I was already berating myself as to why the exhibition had not figured in my plans to cover the biennial perhaps I was too focused on the surprising selection of an artist, Christian Jankowski, as its curator. The surprise was not that it was him, but that an artist was selected at all. Though, given Jankowski s perpetual collaboration with those outside the art world in his own work, he has kept the door open for such an invitation since the beginning of his career. This is not a negative assessment rather, following Jankowski s work over the years has more often than not been engaging.

23 During the press conference, I asked what he would think if some of us came away concluding that Manifesta was in fact the largest Christian Jankowski work of art to date. Like most good artists, he sidestepped the question very well. Manifesta 11, Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load, Löwenbräukunst. Photo (c) Camilo Brau Overall, the exhibition, refreshingly subtitled What People Do For Money, kept to its criteria. Its core section, The Historical Exhibition: Sites Under Construction, co-curated with Francesca Gavin, made an admirable attempt to be as broad as possible, setting a wide range of historical art works alongside new commissions, most of which were presented in the white cube spaces of the Löwenbräukunst and the Helmhaus. At its best, it pulled double duty by setting up the remaining components of Manifesta spread out across the city by creating moment after moment of varying collaborations between works of art rather than artists, in pairings such as Andreas Gursky s photograph Karlsruhe Siemens (1991) and Trevor Paglen s NSA-Tapped Undersea Cable, North Pacific Ocean (2016). Alternately, in an observational collusion, the exhibition made the extra-meta move of bringing Sharon Lockhart s multi-part photographic mural Lunch Break Installation, Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life, 14 December February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003

24 (2003) face to face with its real thing, Duane Hanson s hyperreal sculptural tableau Lunchbreak (1989). While presented mainly on a scaffold-type structure across the many spaces, the historical component did not overtake the presentation of the strongest new works commissioned for Manifesta. These included Mike Bouchet s The Zurich Load (2016), 80,000 kgs of sludge made from one day of Zürich s human waste and presented as a set of eye-nose-and-throat stinging black cubes; and Carles Congost s faux-documentary film Simply the Best (2016), done in collaboration with members of the Zürich Fire Department, about a fictional fundraising concert that would star Tina Turner and provide the city a new slogan. Striking a perfect balance of fantasy and labor, the film not only satisfied the exhibition s theme, but also likely became even more resonant in its simultaneous presentation in a fire station in the city. Manifesta 11, Jon Kessler, The World Is Cuckoo, Satellite Photo (c). Manifesta11/Wolfgang Traeger Of the thirty satellites, where each artist brought the work they made back to the territory of their collaborators, those that I did visit paid off: The World is Cuckoo (Clock) (2016), Jon Kessler s elegant and mad kinetic sculpture, churning in the working basement of a high-end watchmaker s shop; Muthoscapes (2016), Aslı Çavuşoğlu s

25 poetic installation of paintings in the display cases of the central station tourist office that depict the Swiss Alps excavated, with the help of a conservator, to reveal the mythical lost continent of Mu, thought to have been a cradle of several civilizations; and, quite directly, Halbierte Western (Halved Vests) ( ), Franz Erhard Walther s bright orange uniform produced for staff at the Park Hyatt (in collaboration with a textile developer) reminiscent of the avant-garde clothing of the time of Dada. (I saw two staff members wearing them in the hotel s lobby. They did not seem pleased.) Despite the impossibility of getting to most of these satellites, the next component of the exhibition thirty short films produced by Jankowski, each artist, a filmmaker from the local art school, and a teenage detective who was given the task of following each artist made clear that the satellites were the circulatory system of the exhibition. It seems as if Jankowski was influenced by the historical section of Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev s Documenta 13 called The Brain, located in the center of her exhibition in Jankowski s most brilliant move was the Pavilion of Reflections, a temporary floating island on Lake Zürich, that became the nervous system of Manifesta. Elegantly constructed of wood, it contained a bar, swimming hole, and cinema for the perpetual screening of the aforementioned films. However, while sitting through nearly a third of the screenings over two days, all of which were insightful and even entertaining, Jankowski became too present. This, of course, is something that happens to curators of international biennials all too often though, here, given that Jankowski s own artistic production is so dependent upon highlighting the tensions and resolutions between art and, let s say, life or artists and others the films suggest the thin line between an accomplice and a third wheel. Put another way, what good is a partner in crime who always gets in the way? I left before the last part of Manifesta kicked off: the re-deployment of the Cabaret Voltaire as the home for a new guild for artists, which provided Manifesta a place to go completely off script. In this case, it meant anyone could sign up to give a performance, acknowledging the bar s history as the place to be for the Dadaists in Zürich, including, for a time, Picabia. (It was a good sign that the antics began with the always-reliable group of tricksters known as Gelatin.) Maybe Jankowski was reminding us that he is an artist, not a curator after all. I ask again: who doesn t want a partner in crime? Picabia s exhibition demonstrates that early on he most definitely did. Like so many other artists of his generation, he started with Impressionism, becoming financially successful while still breaking the rules by relying upon photographs to make his paintings and then quickly junked it all for

26 Cubism. The exhibition reunites his well-known pair of outrageously over-sized contributions to the genre: Udnie (Young American Girl; Dance) (1913), and Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) (1913). Picabia then hits Dada head-on, creating so many works of so many types, including paintings, constructions, as well as handbills like Funny-Guy (1921) on which he proclaims: FRANCIS PICABIA N EST RIEN! Despite all of the ways in which he truly was a partner in crime with the other Dadaists, Picabia was already his own best accomplice before moving on to new adventures. This notion, of one being one s own best co-conspirator, is echoed within the exhibition s subtitle, borrowed from Picabia himself: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction. Manifesta 11, Carles Congost, Simply the Best, Löwenbräukunst. Photo (c) Manifesta11/Wolfgang Traeger Anyone up on the machinations of modernism and post-modernism is well aware of the consistent ascendancy of Picabia s reputation over the past three decades. As this exhibition demonstrates, we are just beginning to assimilate the depth of his work s complexities. To see each decade of his enterprise impeccably presented room by room is to witness genuine staying power. First he resorted to the industrial look and feel of Ripolin enamel paint to return to neoclassical forms in paintings such as The

27 Spanish Night (1922) and Animal Trainer (1923). Then he dipped briefly into assemblage with a witty concoction like Toothpicks (c. 1924), and immediately followed up with a group of monster paintings like Idyll (c ). This work is a pictorial and material mash-up of the prior twenty-or-so years of pretty much every other modernist painting. Picabia outmaneuvered much of Surrealism in works like Untitled (Spanish Woman and Lamb of the Apocalypse) (1927), from his Transparenices series of paintings that takes him through the 1930s, then into the unapologetic kitsch realism of Spring (c ), and, finally, to the anything-but-pure abstraction of what would become his last works, paintings like Selfishness (1950) and the aptly-titled Salary Is the Reason for Work (1949). This last painting is a star. Arguably, in some ways, a wicked return to Dada, the way in which it caps a career that looks today as if it never stopped is nothing short of remarkable. I left the exhibition thinking that even Picasso and Matisse don t have that today. Duchamp? Maybe. It seems unfathomable that Picabia could have predicted how his ways would become the way for so many. He remains, on his own, a potent challenger to everything from the wishful thinking about the death of painting to the shelter of the herd mentality that too often afflicts large-scale group exhibitions. The lesson? Never stop being your own partner-in-crime. Manifesta 11: What People Do For Money runs through September 18, 2016 and Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction at the Kunsthaus Zürich runs through September 25, September 20, 2016 Filed under Art Seen: International and tagged with Christian Jankowski, Kunsthalle Zurich, Manifesta 11, Terry Myers.

28 From Turrell to Hockney, 8 Artists Who Designed Extraordinary Swimming Pools ARTSY EDITORIAL BY ABIGAIL CAIN AUG 29TH, :05 PM Few things evoke summer better than the swimming pool, its inviting blue water offering a respite from sweltering heat. Pools have also served as an unexpected medium for artists, including David Hockney, Katherine Bernhardt, and James Turrell. From filling them with diet soda to painting them with signature patterns, these eight artists have designed extraordinary if not always functional swimming pools around the world. Mike Bouchet, Flat Desert Diet Cola Pool, 2010 Bouchet, Flat Desert Diet Cola pool, 2010, production still. Photo courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Chelsea. In the case of Bouchet s Flat Desert Diet Cola Pool, it s what s inside that counts. In 2010, the artist filled an entire California swimming pool with Cola Lite, his homemade, sweetener-free soda, then invited a group of art-world denizens over to cavort in the syrupy liquid. Bouchet later repeated the experiment on the roof of Chelsea s Hotel Americano, hiring two female bodybuilders to splash around while gallery-goers looked on. Both installations are part of a series employing Bouchet s carbonated beverage as a medium; other works include watery brown canvases painted with soda (the artist terms it colachrome ).

29 OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS: MANIFESTA 11 EMPLOYS THE WORKING CLASS BY Mostafa Heddaya POSTED 08/03/16 11:12 AM Manifesta 11 s Pavillion of Reflections. COURTESY MANIFESTA Bernini may have once shared a sketchbook with Pope Alexander VII in the gardens of the Vatican, but the German-born artist Christian Jankowski sought a more sensational collaboration when he alighted on the Holy See some centuries later. His 2011 reality television-style video work Casting Jesus enlisted Vatican staff as jurors

30 selecting an actor to play the role of Christ. Relieved of the cassock of ideology, Jankowski s is an art of deftly constructed capers that trade in an element of surprise. So it is with the artist s first curatorial effort, the 11th Manifesta Biennale, in Zürich (on view through September 18), for which he commissioned 30 joint ventures between contemporary artists and the working professionals of Switzerland s largest city. Titled What People Do for Money: Some Joint Ventures, Jankowski s turn at the helm of Europe s itinerant biennial of contemporary art occupies four main locations in Zürich three sprawling floors of galleries at the Löwenbräukunst complex in the deindustrializing Zürich-West neighborhood, the entire Helmhaus center in the city s Old Town, a pavilion constructed of unpainted wood floating on Lake Zürich, and Dada birthplace the Cabaret Voltaire, as well as numerous satellite locations, where participating artists have embedded their projects in the working spaces of their professional collaborators. The first two venues, the biennial s largest, display the outcomes of the collaborations as well as a parallel selection of historical art, organized by Francesca Gavin around the relationship between art and work. All told, there are 130 artists: 100 in the historical section (covering the past century, though heavily weighted toward postwar and contemporary work), plus those 30 commissioned by Jankowski. These dispersed joint ventures form the biennial s core, and through them Manifesta s artists express assorted guises of art s interdisciplinary, or at least interoccupational, possibilities. Some treat the professions of their chosen collaborators as one might a spice rack in an unfamiliar kitchen, adapting new ingredients to existing artistic recipes, like photographer Torbjørn Rødland bringing his eye for tightly composed disequilibrium to a dentist s office for the prints in Intra- & Extraoral. Others cede considerable ground to the domain of their professional interlocutor. Santiago Sierra s intervention laid siege to the exterior of the Helmhaus venue, which, following the recommendations of security advisor Marcel Hirschi, he fortified with enormous sandbags, plywood, and barbed wire for the self-explanatory work Protected Building. (On a second visit to Zürich, in mid-july, this work had been taken down, apparently at the behest of local authorities who were concerned about pedestrian traffic.) In The Zurich Load, a day s worth of the city s human waste was processed for safe public display and arranged into a gridded rectangular expanse by artist Mike Bouchet and water treatment engineer Philipp Sigg. The gallery housing the resulting 80 tons of scatological minimalism delivers a maximalist olfactory thrill, industrialscale ventilation notwithstanding.

31 Mike Bouchet in the Zürich sludge storage hall in MIKE BOUCHET Ideologies have no part to play in my preparations; I trust in the artists and the art, Jankowski writes in the catalogue s introduction. The notion of unfettered play that Jankowski favors, particularly in the context of a European biennial enlisting the participation of white and blue-collar workers in Switzerland, emits more than a whiff of ideology. As The Zurich Load demonstrates, the constraints of the biennial mean these collaborations have little breathing room to explore the durational aspects of what people do for money, let alone the negation of doing in refusal or strike. Despite being a yearlong project and an impressive logistical feat, Bouchet s project dead-ends with an auratic object. Unlike Mierle Laderman Ukeles s decades-long engagement with the New York City Department of Sanitation in the name of what she terms maintenance art, Bouchet s assimilation of technical expertise, like much of the work in the biennial, enforces an artistic authorship at arm s length from socalled specialized labor. And no matter how fun or interesting, these agreeable transactions between artists and professionals have undeniable advantages in terms of satisfying a general audience s desire for relatable novelty while pleasing governmental and institutional patrons eager to see art orchestrate harmonious social encounters. This isn t an accusatory observation. The catalogue does, after all, include a tract by the Marxist theorist Franco Berardi, who notes that the social order based on salaried work is already vanishing and argues in favor of a Swiss universal basic income, a proposal rejected by 77 percent of the electorate in a referendum that coincided with the biennial s opening days. Nevertheless, Georgia Sagri was the only participating

32 artist to turn her attention to the assumptions of Jankowski s scenario. She did so both in the work she produced, Documentary of Behavioral Currencies, two identical installations (one shown in the exhibition space, the other at the office of her collaborator, a female private banker), and in her participation in the show s catalogue and its campy making-of documentary, which screened daily at the lake pavilion. I question Manifesta 11 s curatorial approach, which defines a profession as a de facto process for the construction of identity, Sagri writes. Work is not the decision of a free person, of a free will. On the contrary, it is a barrier to living freely. For her own part, the banker with whom Sagri worked, Dr. Josephin Varnholt, observes that Georgia was as organized as a chief executive. Professional, well prepared, like a businesswoman. Sierra s Protected Building. COURTESY MANIFESTA Sagri s calculated disruption of Jankowski s curatorial scheme was unique among her cohort, but it should be noted that some of the most insightful material to emerge from Manifesta at large is to be found in the organic written reflections on each joint venture offered by the collaborating professionals in the catalogue. Indeed, much of the biennial s discursive force is generated not by art professionals but by the gainfully employed citizens of Zürich, some of whom have also been invited to give weekly gallery talks. Even the more anodyne commissioned efforts like novelist Michel

33 Houellebecq s decision to have himself medically imaged and analyzed in Is Michel Houellebecq OK? are redeemed, at least partially, by the opportunity to open the catalogue (displayed at some of the satellite venues) and read about the work from an informed critical perspective distinct from that of the artist or curator. ( Beforehand I was told that Michel is pretty special, Dr. Henry Perschak writes. That was hardly necessary: as a doctor I m used to dealing with all sorts of people on a daily basis. ) Connections forged between art and specialized fields of work have come with varied and mutually incompatible effects. There has been collaboration but also antagonism, cobranding as well as critique. Employees of the RAND Corporation told John Chamberlain to GO TO HELL MISTER!! during his 1970 residency there, as Elvia Wilk notes in a relevant recent essay that touches on past outcomes of such encounters. This dynamic range, absent in the mostly congenial content in Manifesta 11, is sampled but not digested in the biennial s sprawling historical component, The Historical Exhibition: Sites Under Construction. Sharing the galleries with the biennial s new works in the two main exhibition venues, this element of Manifesta avers that it eschews a fixed narrative, which simply means that the curatorial project doesn t reference important precedents, like Helen Molesworth s 2003 exhibition Work Ethic at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and that its works are presented in only a loosely thematic way. Despite the absence of practitioners who may trouble the orthodoxy of productive labor like Claire Fontaine and Mladen Stilinović key works by the Artist Placement Group, Oscar Bony, Louise Lawler, Sharon Lockhart, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jill Magid, and Sophie Calle make the cut all the same. Torbjørn Rødland, Intraoral no. 3, Löwenbräukunst. MANIFESTA 11/WOLFGANG TRAEGER

34 Artists have been in the dog salon, with the police, with the fire brigade, Jankowski reflects in the catalogue, surveying the labors of his commissioned artists. They have collected sewage sludge, given citizens therapy, looked for death, life, the perfect orgasm. The late critic Leo Steinberg described the identification of art with other domains of work in his well-known 1968 essay Other Criteria, framing a dominant impulse in postwar American art with a fusillade of bracing declarations: Not art but industry ; Not art but technological research ; Not art but objects. What was once an exceptional manifestation in the polymathic interests of Renaissance artists, Steinberg stated, has now become institutional within the field. Neither hermetic nor de-skilled, artists under the influence of the postindustrial West have long mastered the flexible managerialism Jankowski espouses, what the banker who worked with Georgia Sagri observed in surprised metaphor. While Manifesta doesn t add much to the longstanding identification of art with non-art subjects, it does offer a rare opportunity for those subjects to talk back. This is no small thing: that identification may be open-ended, but it still privileges the artistic, its discourse remains generally top-down. The exceptional authorial role accorded to the biennial s non-artists, though relegated to the catalogue, occasionally threatens to upstage Jankowski s entire project. Writing about the artist who had chosen to work with him, Jorinde Voigt, whose piece concerns an historical account of Rousseau meditating on freedom upon a Swiss lake, the boatmaker Melchior Bürgin delivers an elegant and devastating rejoinder: Presumably Rousseau lay in a fishing boat, not a racing boat like the ones we produce. My work has to do with competitions, with team sports, collectives who strive towards their goal. How to reconcile that with the self-imposed isolation of Rousseau is something that Jorinde will have to resolve in another work. I won t have anything to do with that. I formulate my thoughts more prosaically: I try to build a boat. And that boat needs to float. That in itself is fascinating. Copyright 2017, Art Media ARTNEWS, llc. 110 Greene Street, 2nd Fl., New York, N.Y All rights reserved.

35 Money, sex workers and an awful stench in Zurich Compacted excrement, a poker game between transgender prostitutes, and a floating wheelchair all vie for attention at the jampacked art biennial Manifesta 11 Thu, Jul 7, 2016, 05:00 Updated: Thu, Jul 7, 2016, 10:17 GEMMA TIPTON The Zurich Load by Mike Bouchet. Copyright Camilio Brau. Europe and the European project are going to remain in the news for some time. Integration versus diversity, community versus edicts, free markets versus social support... It s not always clear what the European project means, but it is important that the conversations, and the thinking, continue freely. The same could be said for Manifesta 11, the roving European biennial exhibition, which takes place this year in Zurich, a city in a country that s geographically at the centre of Europe but not a

36 member of the EU. The exhibition is spread across two main venues with 30-plus satellites (which aren t actually galleries), a floating pavilion-cum-cinema-cum-swimming pool-cum-bar, and a series of outdoor sculpture commissions. It s hard to get a grasp of what is actually going on. The central idea, and tagline for the exhibition, is What people do for money. In pursuit of this, artist and curator Christian Jankowski invited 30 artists to collaborate in what are called joint ventures with professionals: from the police to sex workers, dog groomers to chefs. The results of these projects are shown as artworks, films in the pavilion, and in some of the shops and offices where the collaborations took place. No wonder it feels confusing. Some of the collaborations work better than others. Mike Bouchet, working with the Werdhölzi Wastewater Treatment Plant, has created The Zurich Load, an epic sculpture that consists of a day s worth of human excrement, compressed into a grid of minimalist blocks. I m reminded of the persuasive presence of Donald Judd s pristine aluminium boxes and the calm poetry of Walter de Maria s permanent SoHo installation, The New York Earth Room, until the pungent smell of the beautifully ordered waste, of beautifully ordered Zurich, drives me from the room. Outside, exhaling deeply, I realise the hidden ugliness behind everything human. It s how we deal with that face it or hide it that matters. Local feature Videos of the collaborations are shown at the beautifully named Pavilion of Reflections, a wooden structure designed by Tom Emerson, floating on Lake Zurich. It s a great spot, and the combination of swimming pool and bar isn t so outlandish when you take a walk round town; these are a local feature. Parked up beside the pavilion is a wheelchair on a raft. This is the work of ultra-famous and frequently shocking artist Maurizio Cattelan, who had announced in 2012 that he was giving up art, but evidently didn t. Cattelan teamed up with Paralympic athlete Edith Wolf-Hunkeler for a performance piece in which she appears to walk, like Jesus, on water except she s gliding in her wheelchair. The idea is gorgeous and the promotional photographs perfect. I searched for someone who had seen it for real, but to no avail. Stick around the pavilion, because you never know. Another project that was perhaps better in concept than execution was Guillaume Bijl s collaboration with dog stylist Jacqueline Meier. They set up Hundesalon Bobby on the premises of art gallery Greider Contemporary. So far so good, except a sign on the door reads To the performances of Jacqueleine Meier you can t bring your own dog for a haircut. Thank you for understanding. Maybe it s the rigid social codes of Zurich that make us want to react against the rules (see panel), but we immediately started to look around for someone else s dog to bring. The idea of comparing artists at work to workers at work loses its intensity after a while,

37 and as with all exhibitions, what becomes more interesting are individual highlights rather than the overarching agenda of the curator. The exhibitions in the main venues of the Löwenbräukunst and Helmhaus also include further artworks and objects, including, oddly, a copy of the kitschy Calendario Romano, which features monthly pictures of moody priests (buy yours online at calendarioromano.org). The best art here includes Teresa Margolles s Poker de Damas (2016). A collaboration with sex worker Sonja Victoria Vera Bohórquez, it s a video of a conversation over poker with transgender prostitutes, which is tender, unsettling and ultimately tragic. Art commodification At the other end of the spectrum, Jonathan Monk s gold leaf This Painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant ( ) is a perfect comment on the commodification of the art world. Fernando Sanchez Castillo s short film Pegasus Dance: Choreography for Riot Trucks (2008), which sees a pair of water cannon trucks flirting, at first seems opportunistic, but let it grow on you and you start to find yourself realising the loneliness of hostile positions. Peppered throughout the Löwenbräukunst are Pablo Helguera s cartoons. The New York-based Mexican artist worked with weekend newspaper supplement Das Magazin, and created a series of drawings based on the pretensions and absurdities of the art world. They should be required reading at all art colleges. Overall, Manifesta 11 is jam-packed but patchy. There s a cacophony of work and information, so it can be hard to spend time with the ones that really sing. I could have given Jon Rafman s Open Heart Warrior hours, were it not for the omnipresent press of more to see, not all of which was worth seeing. Rafman s collaboration was with a health spa, but his immersive video piece was a world away from the sunlit forest and whale song staples of such places. Instead you lie on a reclining chair and are treated to a three-channel video of hideous apocalypse. You wander in an endless fog... the voiceover goes. It had to end and it did. What is the point of it all? Sometimes artists are simply asking us to pay attention to things that don t seem important until we think about them. In Imbissy, American-born artist John Arnold is teamed up with a Michelin-starred chef, Fabian Spiquel of Maison Manesse. Their project recreates lavish embassy dinners from history in street food stops and kiosks. Sounds like an arty excuse for a fancy dinner? Possibly, but watching the film, I learn about the 1897 visit of the king of Siam to the Grand Hotel Victoria in Bern. It was the first time any Thai royal had left their kingdom. The purpose was to stave off the threat of colonisation. They talked as well as ate, and the visit was a success. Thailand is the only country in that region never to have been under colonial rule. The project is about alternative forms of diplomacy, suggests the exhibition text. We need them now more than ever. Manifesta 11 continues until September 18th. manifesta11.org

38 Wake up and smell the Manifesta: piles of poo and a look inside Houellebecq's head The art biennial known for pushing boundaries of taste has outdone itself in Zurich, sculpting a day s worth of excrement, medically exhibiting the French author and making a Paralympic champion wheelchair on water Adrian Searle Friday 17 June EDT Lingering whiff Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load at Manifesta 11. Photograph: Camilo Brau, 2016, I am standing in a room full of shit. Nothing new there, I hear you say. Deposited by the population of Zurich, an entire day s worth of processed human faeces stand in a gridded arrangement of compressed cubic blocks. Californian artist Mike Bouchet s The Zurich Load

39 was made not just by the inhabitants of clean, well-ordered Zurich, but in collaboration with the Werdhölzi Wastewater Treatment Plant, where the day s 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 s most prestigious commercial galleries. Good thing the extractor fans are working. There is a heavy door at the entrance, along with a warning sign. Some visitors back out even as they re going in. The space reeks of ammonia, and there is a back-taste as psychological as it is physical. A unique fragrance has been developed to transform the viewer s experience, the guidebook tells us. Consider me transformed. If you resist the urge to heave and leave, you do get used to it, only to spend the rest of the day wondering if the whiff is still with you. Bouchet s work, as any Freudian could tell you, must have something to do with money. Titled What People Do For Money Some Joint Ventures, and devised by the biennial s guest curator, multimedia artist Christian Jankowski, the latest incarnation of Manifesta involves collaborations between artists and more than 30 professions in the city. The previous two editions in St Petersburg and a former mining town in Belgium both dealt with the social situations of their respective venues. Paralympian Edith Wolf-Hunkeler in Maurizio Cattelan s work. Photograph: Wolfgang Traeger 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 water, why not an athlete in a wheelchair? The Paralympic champion glided, or perhaps churned, across Lake Zurich, her wheelchair mounted on a raft powered by the wheels of the chair itself but after I left Zurich. Some things work just as well as rumour.

40 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 dog stylist Jacqueline Meier. I can t speak of the artistry of the doggy hairdos, but the kitschy, tongue-in-cheek parlour is amusing enough. Normally this place is part of a commercial gallery. If only others diversified so usefully. Tom Emerson s Pavillon of Reflections floats on its pontoon in Lake Zurich. Photograph: Ennio Leanza/EPA As well as the Löwenbräukunst and the Helmhaus museum, Manifesta 11 takes us to more than 30 outlying venues and collaborations around the city, including a cemetery, a public hospital, a school, a tourist office, 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 architect Tom Emerson, the skeletal wooden structure doubles as outdoor cinema and swimming pool, complete with changing rooms, lockers and hairdryers. It s like a spa, but with ashtrays, a barbecue and a bar, the perfect place to get Bouchet out of my system. Is Michel Houellebecq OK, readers of the troubling French novelist often ask. Well, Houellebecq has checked himself in to one of Zurich s leading private clinics so upscale the row of clocks behind the main desk are set to the time-zones in Dubai and Stellenbosch, South Africa as well as Switzerland and had a bunch of scans and blood tests. His charts are printed up in great piles for visitors to take away, though you have to edge round anxious patients in the lobby to get at them. I can t make head nor tail of the novelist s haemoglobin levels. Nor does he offer us copies of the bill for his check-up, probably a heart-attack inducing sum.

41 French author Michel Houellebecq ponders his X-rayed skull at Manifesta 11 in Zurich. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images Back at the Helmhaus, disturbing scans of Houellebecq s head are on display. There s the skull beneath the skin, and some squirmy stuff that looks as if parasitic worms have invaded his brain. They probably write his books. On my visit, artist Santiago Sierra, who has also worked in the past with human excrement, had just begun barricading the entrance to the Helmhaus with the help of a local security consultant, who advised the artist how best to ensure the building would be safe from any possible car bombs, snipers and other attacks. Sandbags were on the way, but no razor-wire as yet uncoiled. Everywhere is a war zone now, Sierra is saying. Next stop, the dentist. To tell the truth I ran away from the surgery, having already seen enough of Torbjørn Rødland s 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 s more photos in the waiting room.

42 Torbjørn Rødland, Intraoral no. 2. Photograph: Wolfgang Traeger/Manifesta11 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 s collaborative ventures. Very often it upstages the new commissions. In the section Break Hour is an installation of Duane Hanson s 1989 Lunchbreak, a group of life-sized, lifelike construction workers, lounging, smoking, staring blankly, hanging around. That s builders for you. In Portraits of Professions, August Sander s photographs of labourers and singers, artists and seamen, sit next to the film of astronaut Chris Hadfield singing David Bowie s Space Oddity while orbiting in the International Space 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 one up and inserting my own head, to get some inside knowledge. At once playful and serious, and providing both context and counterpoint, Gavin s show rambles through both main venues, with dozens of historical and recent works arranged on freestanding open structures that sidle through the galleries. Without it, much of the current Manifesta would look a bit thin. But there are high-points, including the riotous, scrabbly drawings that cover a huge wall in the Löwenbräukunst, the result of a collaboration between Andrea Éva Györi, a sexpert and a psychologist in clinical sexology. Györi s drawings are a bacchanalia of masturbating women and explosive fantasies, a ribald affirmation of female sexuality. Nearby, there is a vicious gouge in the wall. It looks like an injury, and was made by Sonja Victoria Vera Bohorquez, a Zurich-based transgender prostitute. Bohorquez is working with Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, who last month

43 organised and filmed a poker game in a hotel basement in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with a group of transsexual sex workers. We watch them discuss their dangerous lives, and the unsolved murder of their friend and colleague Karlita in the city in December last year. Margolles has also organised a further Poker de Damas, including Bohorquez, in a Zurich hotel, where Manifesta visitors to ask questions and chat. An insight into other lives, Margolles project is one of the best, and toughest, here. Over at Cabaret Voltaire, original home of the Dada movement, there is an open call for anyone to submit performance proposals. A performance could consist of an artist kissing a clown or a real estate agent selling an artist s studio, suggest Jankowski and the cabaret s guildmaster. One artist 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 18 September 2016

44 Three to see at Manifesta in Zurich Our pick of works from the roving European biennial by GARETH HARRIS 14 June 2016 Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load (2016) at Manifesta. Photo: Camilo Brau Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load (2016) Anyone who excreted faeces in Zurich on 24 March contributed to Mike

45 Bouchet s site-specific sculpture made with human waste. The artist created the pungent piece in the Werdhölzli wastewater treatment plant. Philipp Sigg, an engineer at the plant, described the work as spectacular. Löwenbräukunst

46 VISUAL ARTS / FAIRS / ARTICLE Mike Bouchet Brings The Zurich Load" to Manifesta 11 BY RACHEL CORBETT JUNE 13, 2016 Mike Bouchet, "The Zürich Load," on view at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art ( Camilo Brau, 2016) It smells, but the smell has been reduced a lot, artist Mike Bouchet says of the 80-ton sculpture made entirely of human waste he is presenting at Manifesta 11, which opened this past weekend in Zurich and runs through September 18. I m not interested in entirely erasing the smell but I didn t want it to be a total turnoff. Reactions to the work, titled The Zurich Load, have been mostly positive, Bouchet notes. Some of his gallery neighbors in the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, where the piece is installed, expressed concerns about the

47 smell lingering in the hallways, where they will be greeting clients and curators throughout the biennial. They told him, It s not our favorite thing to deal with, Bouchet says, adding that, overall, however, they were willing to work with me. You imagine most museums would say, No way, are you kidding me? But they didn t give me that at all, Bouchet says of the Migros staff. Visitors, too, often have immediate reactions of revulsion once they discover the work s content from the wall text or the farm-like aroma. But they re not necessarily put off by it, he says. The shape has a seductive side the scale, color, and materiality. The whole presentation. It reminds him of Mayan architecture, or constructions of other ancient civilizations that combined shit and mud to make bricks. To create the blocks of hand-pressed waste, arranged into a minimalist grid of 23-by-100 feet, Bouchet worked closely with the Zurich sewage-treatment facility. Many of the biennial s artists collaborated with local workers on joint ventures as part of Manifesta s curatorial theme, What People Do For Money. Water treatment workers were not on the list of possible professionals supplied to artists, but Bouchet was struck by how clean Zurich was and began to wonder where the waste ended up. He took a tour of the plant and realized, wow, the volumes of material we produce every day is staggering, he says. When you see so much of it all together you don t think of it as something that s so dirty. It just seems so much more natural and elemental. Bouchet worked with a team of specialists to preserve the brown color, prevent mold and bacterial growth, and reduce the smell. They mixed together Portland cement, pigment, and calcium oxide into an amalgam that Bouchet says is reminiscent of the one used by Renaissance fresco artists. He considers the work a collaboration between himself and the 400,000 residents of Zurich, who supplied the eight tons of raw material on the day he collected it, March 24, If that sounds like an impressive amount, Bouchet notes that New York City produces 1,600 tons a day. And already he s imagining the possibilities: You could probably fill up Yankee stadium with that.

48 Mike Bouchet is working with the local sewage plant to create a monumental work, entitled The Zurich Load (2016), using the human waste created by the citizens of Zurich, which will sit in one of the largest exhibition spaces in the city, the first floor of the Migros Museum. Weighing 80 tons, the final installation will indeed have a monumental quality to it, but how and why did Bouchet get this idea off the ground? Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load, 2016

49 At Manifesta, Christian Jankowski Radically Reimagines Modern Labor ARTSY EDITORIAL BY BEN EASTHAM JUN 10TH, :34 PM The 11th edition of Manifesta, the itinerant European biennial of contemporary art, takes as its curatorial theme the question of What People Do for Money. It opens in Zurich less than a week after the Swiss population went to the polls for a referendum to make the provision of a basic income which it was suggested would be equivalent to around $2,560 per adult, per month a constitutional right for every citizen. The petition failed to pass, but it succeeded in imagining a future world in which basic needs are provided for by the state, and in which no one is obliged to work. In this brave new world, work would become an activity that was chosen by, rather than forced upon, the individual. Our careers would function as expressions of our personalities, rather than as chores to be endured for the sake of evenings and weekends in which we can indulge ourselves. Installation view of Jon Kessler s work at Manifesta 11. Photo courtesy of Manifesta 11.

50 This hopeful interpretation of work as a dignified activity over which we exercise a degree of control, which shapes us as people, and which inspires professional pride is shared by Christian Jankowski, who leads Manifesta's curatorial team this year. With the help of cocurator Francesca Gavin, he has paired artists with professionals from a variety of different fields, asking that a new work is developed as a joint venture between the two. The resulting collaborations are exhibited in two parts: at one of the two main exhibition venues (as part of the historical exhibition, which combines the commissioned pieces with a curated selection of work that addresses the relationship of art to labor), and at one of the host venues across the city that typically double as the professionals workplaces. So it is that, to view the American artist Jon Kessler s contribution to the biennial, you have to enter a luxury watch shop and politely ask an assistant some variant on the question where is the art? You will be pointed in the direction of the basement, in which is installed a vaguely monstrous sculptural hybrid of flickering digital screens driven (it seems) by a carefully calibrated mechanism of clicking springs, gears, and wheels. The work was developed in collaboration with the master watchmaker Officine Panerai. Through a glass screen beside the work an employee in a white coat can be seen dutifully fiddling with the innards of an expensive-looking timepiece. You wonder what he thinks about all the fuss in his shop. A second, similarly conceived but less baroque iteration of the collaboration is presented as part of the main group exhibition at the Löwenbräukunst complex, home to the Kunsthalle Zurich. Installation view of Yin Xunzhi s work at Manifesta 11. Photo courtesy of Manifesta 11. Elsewhere, in the bizarrely themed Wings Airline Bar & Lounge on Zurich s riverside, a kitschy, Chagall-esque diptych by the Chinese painter Yin Xunzhi hangs over purple upholstery. This is the fruit of a collaboration with a Swiss air hostess, realized as a series of

51 portraits that pastiche da Vinci, Modigliani, Klimt, and Warhol, among others. Yin hails from Dafen village, a community of artists working in China to produce cheap reproductions of famous oil paintings by the greats of Western art. (A knockoff version of Picasso s Dora Maar au Chat, 1941, will set you back $85.) He now aspires to a more conventional artistic practice. For all the charm of his collaboration, though, his career to this point is the more eloquent expression of the fragile systems of faith in the notion of individual genius, in the fetish value of the original that underpin the art market. It s possible to read the collaboration between Mike Bouchet and a local waste process engineer as a more caustic commentary on the belief systems of the art world. A total of 80,000 kilos of human feces, produced by Zurich s population on March 24, 2016, has been dried and packed into heavy square blocks, exhibited at the Löwenbräukunst. What might have been a facile stunt is made extraordinary by the formal and sensory visual and olfactory power of the installation, a vast grid of square blocks that recalls the minimalist grandeur of Richard Serra or Carl Andre, but shorn of the machismo. Taking inspiration from an earlier turn in the digestive cycle, American artist John Arnold has collaborated with a Michelin-starred chef to create Imbissy (2016), which takes the humble fast food booth (or Imbiss in German) and transforms it into a diplomatic site, bringing politicians, artists, and members of the public together for banquets that combine haute cuisine with takeaway traditions. With these two works, Jankowski s stated ambition for his biennial that the audience becomes the artist, not only consuming but producing art suddenly seems uncomfortably literal. Installaion view of Mike Bouchet s work at Manifesta 11. Photo courtesy of Manifesta 11. These, and the many other collaborations on view, are illuminated by an affecting series of documentary films about the making of the work presented by local high school teenagers and Media degree graduates. These art detectives follow the artists around as they meet

52 and begin to develop a relationship with their working partners, asking the refreshing questions of both parties that only a teenager would dare to ask (but which everyone wants to hear). The pleasure of these short films is that they do not disguise the awkwardness or indecision of the artists when placed in this unusual position. Quite a number of these projects fail as works of art as is inevitable of such an ambitious undertaking but succeed in their broader determination to allow non-artists to consider and discuss their labor in the reverential terms usually reserved for art. When the relationship clicks as between Bouchet and his partner, who is visibly enthused and engaged these joint ventures emerge as worthwhile, even radical, initiatives. The short films are projected onto a large screen at the Pavillon of Reflections, a timber construction resembling an illuminated floating castle on Lake Zurich. Designed and built by Studio Tom Emerson for the biennial, the pavilion serves as a place to reflect upon the work exhibited. In practice, it will serve as a bar, swimming pool, and spectacular addition to the city s waterside. Finally, the famous Cabaret Voltaire the birthplace of Dada, which celebrates its centenary in 2016 is transformed into an artist s guild for the performance of more joint ventures between artists and non-artists. Anyone can sign up, and Jankowski estimates that there will be over 1,000 performances over the course of the biennial. The Pavillion of Reflections, Manifesta 11. Photo courtesy of Manifesta 11. Manifesta has a reputation as the most forward-thinking of the European biennials, a place for experiment. For all the novelty of its joint ventures, the most radical aspect of Jankowski s focus on collaboration and participation is its sincerity. The dignity he affords to work in this age of economic precariousness, zero-hour contracts, and job instability feels curiously nostalgic.

53 Mike Bouchet s new series of oil paintings are based on photography about the collapse of human waste. Placed alongside his monumental glass sculpture installation, this body of work investigates the collective materialism and consumer habits of our society within the aesthetic confines of art. With this vibrant visual tableau, Bouchet captures solid waste in the fragile instant before it is processed to become homogenous sludge. These works stand as predecessors to Bouchet s 80-ton sculptural installation made of such human sludge, presented at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art in Zurich as a part of Manifesta 11, curated by Christian Jankowski. Mike Bouchet, Bounty (Will), Photo by Trevor Good. Courtesy of Peres Projects.

54 Art World Mike Bouchet s Contribution to Manifesta 11 Is an 80-Ton Mountain of Poo It s a collaborative artwork, the artist told us. Amah-Rose Abrams, April 8, 2016 The production line for The Zurich Load. Photography by Camilo Brau, 2016 The theme for Manifesta 11, opening in June this year, is What People Do for Money: Joint Ventures and participating artist Mike Bouchet has taken a novel approach to the idea. Bouchet known for his process-driven installations, sculptures, and paintings wasn t interested in trades offered to him by the biennial, where artists are joining forces with hosts

55 who work in the city to conceive works, and felt much more curious about what people throw away, rather than what they make. The raw material. Photo: Camilo Brau. Bouchet is working with the local sewage plant to create a monumental work, entitled The Zurich Load (2016), using the human waste created by the citizens of Zurich, which will sit in one of the largest exhibition spaces in the city, the first floor of the Migros Museum. Weighing 80 tons, the final installation will indeed have a monumental quality to it, but how and why did Bouchet get this idea off the ground? I really wanted it to be something monumental and bigger, Bouchet told artnet News as we watched the final stages of production. It s a huge undertaking, on a lot of levels this is an impossible piece to make, he added.

56 The waste is mixed with cement, lime, and pigment. Photo: Camilo Brau. Bouchet and his team are currently fashioning the raw material into large bricks at a rate of 50 per day, a process that can only be done by hand. Which is precisely why making the substance safe to be around was the first challenge. I had to find sludge that was processed the same way as it is here. Every city has a different process, it s a totally controlled substance, he explained. First we were using polymers and then we got in touch with a university that was beginning to work with concrete. Then I spoke to an art conservator. Bouchet not only had to remove toxins from the waste, but also had to remove water, prevent it from rotting, and control the smell, which I have to say stayed with me for some time. The work can only be shown indoors, and when the exhibition finishes, it will be destroyed. On considering a work for the city of Zurich, Bouchet was struck by the stereotype often held about the clean Swiss. He was drawn to the idea of allowing viewers to get up close and personal with their waste, thus making it more of an approachable subject. With this work I like the idea of people being comfortable around it. There is reason why there s a taboo about waste that has built up over the ages, Bouchet conceded as we literally watched poo become an art material.

57 The only process that works on waste is hand pressing. Photo: Camilo Brau. It s a biohazard, Bouchet added. So what I m interested in making is a work that makes this base material something more benign and less threatening. Bouchet likens the process they are using to make The Zurich Load to the making of frescos, due to the use of cement and lime. He also worked with the conservator to preserve the deep earthy brown color of the material. Bouchet would not reveal what the final realized work may or may not look like. Viewers will have to head to Manifesta 11 on June 11th to see it for themselves. One can only imagine what happens when a town is confronted with its own shit, but Bouchet hopes it will be a harmonious union. I like that everyone in Zurich made it, it s a collaborative work and you know, everyone s contribution counts, it s a community artwork!, Bouchet laughed. I laugh and I joke about it, but I m also serious. I like that it s something that everyone helped make. Manifesta 11 will be on view across several venues in Zurich, from June 11-September 18, 2016.

58 ART WORLD 11 Uneasy Questions Raised by Manifesta 11 Hettie Judah, Monday, June 13, 2016 For its 11th edition, Europe's nomadic biennial finds itself in Zürich as the city celebrates the centenary of Dada. Under the direction of artist Christian Jankowski, "What People Do For Money" is a dense, complex, and ambitious venture that seeps deep into the fabric of its host city. With a commissioning and exhibiting system based on joint enterprise, and a theme exploring labor and remuneration, it is also a biennial mesmerised by its own processes. Manifesta 11 is less an exhibition of individual star turns than a dense mesh of related gestures that together generate questions and complications surrounding the relationship between art and the world it occupies.

59 1. Where does life stop and art begin? Manifesta 11 matched 30 artists to Zürich professionals of their choice, from pastor to prostitute, policewoman to Paralympian. Artworks were, theoretically, the product of interaction between artist and host, and exhibited both at the main biennial sites and at a satellite venue. While some of these joint ventures resulted in a clearly delineated "work" such as Santiago Sierra's Protected Building, for which a security specialist helped the artist barricade the biennial's Helmhaus venue as if it were under threat in many cases it is unclear where the interaction with the host ends and the work begins. Evgeny Antufiev's Eternal Garden entailed extensive correspondence with the pastor of the Wasserkirche. The result is a sprawl of artifacts, exchanged ideas and made objects: a work without boundaries that becomes an archive of its own avid production. 2. Who is the art for? As in Antufiev's case, intense encounters between artist and host can result in works that feel excluding rather than involving. Jiří Thýn's collaboration with a clinical pathologist resulted in a series of cut-up magazine photographs exchanged by the pair during correspondence, photographs by Thýn of her working spaces, and a series of text works applied to the windows of her hospital's atrium in coloured vinyl. The text is in English, suggesting that it is directed neither at the hospital's workers, nor its Swiss visitors, but is in fact an extension of the relationship between artist and host.

60 Mike Bouchet, Zurich Load. Courtesy of Manifesta 11, Camilo Brau 3. How does it feel to have your work shown next to 80,000 kilos of poo? For The Zürich Load Mike Bouchet collaborated with the city's sewage works, and by extension, with its entire population, forming a single day's load of human waste into a room full of vast dried dung blocks. Shown at the Löwenbräukunst, in a gallery with a heavy, well-sealed door, the work is rounded off with a turdy fragrance so emetic that few visitors last longer than they can hold their breath. That, however, is just long enough to notice that there are other works on show in the same gallery. Which unfortunate artist(s) had their work stationed next to The Zürich Load? We have yet to encounter anyone who got close enough to find out. 4. What's the deal with satellite venues? Expected to show work both at a satellite venue and in Manifesta's group exhibitions, some artists presented two editions of the same work, some sibling works, and others notably John Kessler research materials at one venue (the Helmhaus) and the work itself at the other (a cuckoo clock-inspired automaton displayed in a watchmaker's shop). Context had a transformative effect. Jon Rafman's Open Heart Warrior read as mere sinister play amid the

61 sensory overload of the group show. Generic virtual landscapes played on three screens, while grotesque and disturbing images from violent computer games bled in and out of the picture, often in the viewer's peripheral vision. Mood music and voice-overs played on a surround sound system, twisting the language of meditation tapes to negative vibe. Viewed in small cage at a floatation centre, Open Heart Warrior became a disquieting suggestion of the psychic impact of omnipresent violent imagery and belligerent narrative in film and gaming culture. Marco Schmitt, still from Exterminating Badges Courtesy of Manifesta Can artists and civilians ever just be friends or does someone always end up getting screwed? Some hosts seemed to enjoy their encounter with the art world the police amateur dramatics in Marco Schmitt's voodoo police fantasia Xterminating Badges in particular looked fun though it was less easy to see what the artist got out of the process. In other cases, the relationship between artist and public provoked moral queasiness. In perhaps the most uneasy and lingering work of the biennial, Leigh Ledare filmed 21 Zürichers engaged in an intense three-day group therapy process. Over dozens of hours of footage, participants confess, confront, argue, bully, and weep while Ledare sits at the side of the room taking notes responding to his own position as observer.

62 Pablo Helguera's "Artoons" for Manifesta 11. Photo courtesy of Hili Perlson. 6. Who forgot to check their privilege? Over the opening weekend, Pablo Helguera delivered a performance lectures on inequity in the art world at which participants played the "Dictator Game" and Helguera sung ballads of labor and protest by Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill, and Óscar Chávez. His rousing speech questioned the relevance of art to most people's lives, and how the rituals and structures of the art world serve to isolate it still further. Helguera's words led one to ponder how the prosperity of Zürich as a locale had perhaps skewered the participating artist's sense of relative privilege when dealing with their professional hosts.

63 Andrea Éva Gyoeri. Courtesy of Manifesta11 Wolfgang Traeger 7. Is there such a thing as too many pictures of women masturbating? Andrea Éva Györi's energetic watercolour paintings of women masturbating, their fantasies while doing so, and the details of their arousal or lack thereof were optimistic and charming when discreetly displayed at an upmarket lingerie store. At the Löwenbräukunst they fill almost an entire wall of the building, ceiling to floor, leading some visitors to quail at such a quantity of flesh and fingering. Now that we're dealing with a generation facing sexting, increased instances of coercion, and the side-effects of omnipresent online porn, the spectacle of women understanding and taking control of their own sexuality seems every bit as urgent as it was when Tee Corine published The Cunt Colouring Book (1975). Too many? No way. 8. What do Swiss curators do at 6.30am? Move over Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Brutally Early Club: throughout Manifesta, Adrian Notz the director of Cabaret Voltaire is opening each day with a Dada officium. On a rainy morning in June, he recited an essay by Man Ray in which Dada and its adherents were peddled in the language of a soap powder advertisement.

64 9. What does the job of "artist" entail? As per Man Ray, the artist's role has long entailed a degree of self-promotion. Georgia Sagri questioned what could and should be expected of her in her role as "artist" when approached by Manifesta to participate in their documentary project. First she proposed billing the biennial by the hour as an actress for the filming. Then, that if she were not being hired as a performer, but filmed as an artist, she be afforded complete creative control of the process. Sagri presented this correspondence and a related film as part of the parallel program, and in a performance lecture alongside her work Documentary of Behavioural Currencies. John Kessler for Manifesta 11. Courtesy of Manifesta 11 Wolfgang Traeger 10. What do people do for no money? Sagri also questioned the idea that a profession had primacy in bestowing identity over the aspects of life that are done for no money. Such as, for example: mothering, caring, making art, or volunteering to work at a biennial. The question of remuneration is a pointed topic for all of us working in the creative arts (or, as we are now known, "content providers") though not one widely explored in the commissions.

65 11. How many Matadors are there in Zürich? A professions-themed film program offers special tickets to each screening according to the job portrayed in the movie. At a guess, I was a Swiss Banker(2007), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Station Agent (2003) will all be well subscribed.the Great Dictator (1940) and Matador (1986)? Perhaps less so. Follow artnet News on Facebook.

66 Mike Bouchet Brings The Zurich Load" to Manifesta 11 BY RACHEL CORBETT JUNE 13, 2016 Mike Bouchet, "The Zürich Load," on view at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art ( Camilo Brau, 2016) It smells, but the smell has been reduced a lot, artist Mike Bouchet says of the 80-ton sculpture made entirely of human waste he is presenting at Manifesta 11, which opened this past weekend in Zurich and runs through September 18. I m not interested in entirely erasing the smell but I didn t want it to be a total turnoff. Reactions to the work, titled The Zurich Load, have been mostly positive, Bouchet notes. Some of his gallery neighbors in the Migros Museum of

67 Contemporary Art, where the piece is installed, expressed concerns about the smell lingering in the hallways, where they will be greeting clients and curators throughout the biennial. They told him, It s not our favorite thing to deal with, Bouchet says, adding that, overall, however, they were willing to work with me. You imagine most museums would say, No way, are you kidding me? But they didn t give me that at all, Bouchet says of the Migros staff. Visitors, too, often have immediate reactions of revulsion once they discover the work s content from the wall text or the farm-like aroma. But they re not necessarily put off by it, he says. The shape has a seductive side the scale, color, and materiality. The whole presentation. It reminds him of Mayan architecture, or constructions of other ancient civilizations that combined shit and mud to make bricks. To create the blocks of hand-pressed waste, arranged into a minimalist grid of 23-by-100 feet, Bouchet worked closely with the Zurich sewagetreatment facility. Many of the biennial s artists collaborated with local workers on joint ventures as part of Manifesta s curatorial theme, What People Do For Money. Water treatment workers were not on the list of possible professionals supplied to artists, but Bouchet was struck by how clean Zurich was and began to wonder where the waste ended up. He took a tour of the plant and realized, wow, the volumes of material we produce every day is staggering, he says. When you see so much of it all together you don t think of it as something that s so dirty. It just seems so much more natural and elemental. Bouchet worked with a team of specialists to preserve the brown color, prevent mold and bacterial growth, and reduce the smell. They mixed

68 together Portland cement, pigment, and calcium oxide into an amalgam that Bouchet says is reminiscent of the one used by Renaissance fresco artists. He considers the work a collaboration between himself and the 400,000 residents of Zurich, who supplied the eight tons of raw material on the day he collected it, March 24, If that sounds like an impressive amount, Bouchet notes that New York City produces 1,600 tons a day. And already he s imagining the possibilities: You could probably fill up Yankee stadium with that.

69 ARTSY EDITORIAL BY ABIGAIL CAIN AUG 29TH, :05 PM Few things evoke summer more than the swimming pool, its inviting blue water offering a respite from sweltering heat. Pools have also served as an unexpected medium for artists, from David Hockney to Katherine Bernhardt. From filling pools with diet soda to painting them with signature patterns, these eight artists have designed extraordinary if not always functional swimming pools around the world. Bouchet, Flat Desert Diet Cola pool, 2010, production still. Photo courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Chelsea.

70 In the case of Bouchet s Flat Desert Diet Cola Pool, it s what s inside that counts. In 2010, the artist filled an entire California swimming pool withcola Lite, his homemade, sweetener-free soda, then invited a group of art-world denizens over to cavort in the syrupy liquid. Bouchet later repeated the experiment on the roof of Chelsea s Hotel Americano, hiring two female bodybuilders to splash around while gallery-goers looked on. Both installations are part of a series employing Bouchet s carbonated beverage as a medium; other works include watery brown canvases painted with soda (the artist terms it colachrome ).

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73 London s Frieze Art Fairs Begin Strongly The Frieze Art Fair and its sister fair Frieze Masters had a strong start. A look at three artists represented By MARY M. LANE Oct. 16, :53 p.m. ET Mike Bouchet s Square West, 2014 Mike Bouchet/Peres Projects Last year, numerous dealers in London for Frieze Art Fair likened the locale to a barn: roughly hewed wooden floors in a perpetually drafty building and lots of squawking from visitors with little intention to buy. But this year Frieze London, which began Tuesday and ends Saturday, and its sister fair Frieze Masters have both reported robust sales. London s White Cube sold David Hammons s 2001

74 multimedia Which Mike Do You Want to Be Like? for $4 million, and New York s Mnuchin Gallery sold a statue by Abstract Expressionist David Smith for $2.4 million within hours of Tuesday s private viewing for VIP collectors. Dealers say outside events galvanized the fair s opening. Christie s expanded its auction schedule, Phillips relocated its London offices in a move that makes it more competitive and Marian Goodman s first London gallery opened a seminal show of 82-year-old master Gerhard Richter. Below, a look at what three Frieze works indicate about the market. MIKE BOUCHET Many galleries like Berlin-based Peres Projects habitually rush to Paris hours after Frieze closes to set up for FIAC, a French acronym for International Contemporary Art Fair. Wealthy French collectors still favor it over Frieze. But the buzz outside Frieze London and its more professional décor this year helped boost owner Javier Peres s sales on Tuesday s opening. People kept coming in ready to buy immediately, he said. He sold Square West, a 2014 oil on canvas by California-born Mike Bouchet that depicts a greasy hamburger, for around $55,000. Martin Kippenberger s 15. Preis, 1987 Estate of Martin Kippenberger/Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne/Skarstedt

75 MARTIN KIPPENBERGER An appetite for drugs and alcohol fueled this German artist s career, leading to works that often cheekily comment on the commoditization of art. For many years collectors didn t really get what he was trying to do, says Bona Montagu, a partner at New York s and London s Skarstedt gallery. A 2009 show at New York s Museum of Modern Art helped change that. A collector on Wednesday at Frieze Masters placed a hold on Kippenberger s 1987 painting 15. Preis, priced at $1.5 million. The title references how the prestige of artworks is often tied to their prices. Ken Kagami s Oreos Ken Kagami/Misako & Rosen KEN KAGAMI This year Frieze expanded subsidies for small galleries. The move enabled more grass-roots galleries like Tokyo s Misako & Rosen to promote undiscovered artists like Japan s Ken Kagami for roughly $12,000 in floor space fees, a fraction of larger galleries cost. Misako & Rosen has already sold five everyday objects like Oreos, socks and tea bags that the 40-year-old Mr. Kagami dipped in bronze for between $2,500 and $4,900. Frieze wants young galleries to keep their edge up. Young galleries preserve their edgy brand. In return Frieze gives us discounted space. It s a give and take, says the gallery s co-owner, Jeffrey Ian Rosen.!

76 Stars + Stripes: American Art of the 21st Century from The Goldberg Collection 29 September 2014 Melissa Pesa The twenty-first century has seen the beginning of a new cycle in contemporary American art with artists taking self-expression and the artistic process into uncharted territory. For the first time in 47 years Australian audiences will have the chance to witness such contemporary American art in Stars + Stripes: American Art of the 21st Century from The Goldberg Collection, a major touring exhibition premiering at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery this month. In 1967, Australian audiences were introduced to a groundbreaking touring exhibition with the New York Museum of Modern Art s Two Decades of American Painting. The exhibition showcased works by a new generation of American artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. It was this period of the s where radical experimentation gave rise to many of the practices and aesthetics underpinning contemporary art today, providing countless blueprints for artistic innovation by younger generations.

77 Stars + Stripes: American Art of the 21st Century from The Goldberg Collection introduces us to a new generation of equally groundbreaking American artists through this group exhibition. Curator Richard Perram OAM, and the Director of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, expresses how significant it will be to see these works in the flesh and not just through reproductions in print. Drawn from the private collection of Sydney-based Lisa and Danny Goldberg, the exhibition brings together 57 works across the mediums of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. Perram describes the exhibition as a fascinating snapshot of recent contemporary art from North America and provides a unique opportunity to present works and artists not easily accessible to Australian audiences. The 33 exhibiting artists are primarily based in New York and Los Angeles, but recognised internationally as having a strong influence on the emerging art world in the United States and Europe alike. Notable exhibiting artists include Tavares Strachan, Haim Steinbach, Richard Aldrich, Sterling Ruby, Allora & Cazadilla, Davina Semo, Dylan Lynch, Elad Lassry, Cory Arcangel, Jeff Elrod, Seth Price and Walead Beshty. This new generation of American artists engage the world and their audiences in vital and surprising ways informed by the trajectory of late twentieth century abstraction and the emergence of sophisticated software and print technologies.

78 With breadth of media at their disposal, artists are able to draw on sources ranging from pop culture, politics, ethnicity, nationhood, environmentalism and social conditions and personal experiences. Exploring the psychological, aesthetic, cultural and ritualistic aspects of objects as well as their context, these artists radically redefine the status of the object in art and push it to its full potential, as seen with Dylan Lynch s Sucked in Juice Box (2013). This exhibition demonstrates the American exploration of artistic styles across a variety of disciplines and its impact on both local and international audiences. A new generation of contemporary American artists who push the boundaries further than their predecessors, testing their creative limits continually changing, redefining and shifting their technique to investigate the nature of our perception and the meaning of the contemporary image. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery 3 October to 16 November, 2014 New South Wales Mike Bouchet, Refresh Everything, 2010, artist produced diet cola on cotton, x cm Dylan Lynch, Sucked in Juice Box, 2013, acrylic on steel, 53.3 x 66 x 71.1cm Courtesy the artists, The Still House Group, Marlborough Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth!

79 DOUBLE DECK... MARVEL AGAIN WITH MIKE BOUCHET AND PAUL MCCARTHY By: AMP MONACO The Marlborough Gallery, like Paul McCarthy and Mike Bouchet, need no introduction. But I'll give it to you all the same. The first opened in 1946 in London, with branches in New York, Madrid, Monaco, Barcelona, and Santiago, and is one of the largest galleries in the world. Created at the threshold of the end of World War II, it has become leader in the world of contemporary art thanks to taste and sense of what makes a masterpiece. Bouchet and McCarthy are the pests of contemporary art, united by an artistic communion where the monumental brilliance of one meets the sense of irony and colour of the other. Over the years the two artists have established an artistic dialogue that has turned into ironic, goliardic, extreme, and comforting projects in the forms but abyssal in content. The Marlborough stages their double exhibition, entitled "Double Deck," which opens June 10th and will remain on display until September 10th on the Gallery s white walls at number 4 of Quai Antoine 1er. Do not expect the usual exhibition: transgression and amazement are the buzzwords when it comes to McCarthy and Bouchet. Suffice it to recall that years ago the two artists transformed with their works the Guggenheim in New York in a toilet. And at the time they did not even know each other yet. After all, as master Duchamp used to say, art should not be taken too seriously. A little like life.!

80 !! The Museum as Marketing Temple Mike Bouchet & Paul McCarthy at the Portikus, Frankfurt Consumerist behavior, cultural imperialism, and everything a globalized market promises these are the issues that connect the works of Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy. Bouchet, who lives in Frankfurt, has an entire floor in the Deutsche Bank Towers dedicated to his work. Ever since he studied with the bad boy of the West Coast art scene, he and McCarthy have worked closely together. Now, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, the two artists have created a collaborative project at the Portikus transforming the exhibition hall into a bizarre cross between department store, kitchen laboratory, and propaganda machine. Sandra Danicke met the artists as they were installing the show. A thick slime oozes out of the windows. Long, inflatable tubes in red, white, and blue bob up and down in the wind. The main entrance to the Portikus in Frankfurt is barricaded, forcing visitors to descend a spiral staircase to reach the exhibition hall through the basementlevel office spaces. Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthyhave taken on the Portikus and seized every opportunity they could find to confuse visitors. Instead of just hanging something, placing it somewhere or plugging it in, they ve occupied the entire building and crammed it full of material to the point that it feels like it s about to burst. The title of the show already makes the lack of moderation abundantly clear: Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model. A week before the opening, the mere sight of the insanity inside the Portikus is overwhelming. Astonished, one stands in the hall that usually serves as the central exhibition space one squeezes around a gigantic architectural model that is easily identified as a reference to Frank Gehry s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. One is blown over by a flurry of impressions. The overall shape of the model resembles a damaged ship, sitting there on a row of stacked sawhorses bearing donkey head emblems, which in turn appear on huge portrait photos of Michael Douglas. Propped up against the wall are canvases with colorful suntan lotion ads of the Bilboa brand. And then there s this sickeningly sweet smell lingering in the room, as though someone had sprayed several cans of air freshener. Is this supposed to stay that way? Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy return from lunch in the best of moods. We still don t know what s it s going to look like next week, McCarthy admits, amused. Maybe we should keep some of that stuff. The coffee cup? The folding rule? Since the 1970s, Paul McCarthy (born 1945), who lives in Los Angeles, has been widely considered the enfant terrible of performance and video art. His abyssal films and installations address sexuality, aggression, and the perfidious mechanisms of a culture rooted in entertainment. Again and again, grotesquely costumed protagonists usually accompanied by a liberal application of smeared foodstuffs go wild, and it s often McCarthy himself who has smeared himself with ketchup in the name of art, or inserted a Barbie doll. Even while they explore similar themes consumerist behavior, cultural imperialism, and everything the globalized market promises the sculptures of his former student Mike Bouchet, who was born in California in 1970 and lives with his family in Frankfurt am Main, come across as somewhat less excessive. One day Mike and I realized that we both autonomously made a sculpture that converted the New York Guggenheim Museum into a toilet. And that was when they decided to collaborate. McCarthy, a polite bearded gentleman wearing a woolen hat sporting an orange-colored dollar sign, explains: Just because the building looks like a toilet. In the end, they realized that the Guggenheim in Bilbao to the artists minds a kind of imperial cultural franchise also has a grotesque form reminiscent of a battleship. McCarthy and Bouchet began working together on a sculpture that addressed the subject. The shape of a building has an enormous impact on the way in which you look at the things inside, Bouchet explains. But nobody seems to reflect on that. When the artists were invited to put up a show together, it seemed logical to investigate the building s odd form in this case, too. In the Internet, entirely by chance, they found a formal analogy to the Spanish Donkey, a wooden sawhorse tapering upwards like a sharp wedge that served as a torture device in the Middle Ages: the bound victim was forced to straddle the horse without his or her feet touching the ground, causing the entire weight of the body to rest on the genitals. In exhibition spaces humiliation and power is a major topic, Bouchet observes. The fact that a donkey adorns the sawhorses sold in the US is just as much due to chance as the matter with the suntan lotion. I mistyped the word Bilbao in Google and wrote Bilboa instead, McCarthy explains with a grin.

81 We climb to the upper floor, where the intensity of the gummi bear smell becomes almost unbearable. We re cooking syrup from energy drinks, explains Bouchet, visibly enjoying the astonished look on the face of his conversation partner. We add gelatin, and when it s thickened, we dump it out of the window, the artist says as he picks a glob of light-brown goo off a windowsill where they ve tested the flowing consistency. Try it. It tastes good. The largest portion of the mass, however, winds up elsewhere. To put it more precisely: in a toilet bowl, from which a pipe leads right through the floor and onto the architectural model on the ground floor. Evidently, in the end the Bilbao model will look a bit as though feces had been dumped over it. In odd contrast to this, the Portikus employees will be dressed in red Valentino garb. Nearby the gummi bear kitchen, the A-Hole Sport Drink is produced a blue-hued beverage with a beef and banana aroma that s served in glass jars of the kind hot dogs are sold in. A product could hardly be more artificial, or more American. Using an aggressive product placement strategy, the sport drink appears as a fictive exhibition sponsor. It also serves as the basis for the The Bigga Picka Uppa: You put a Snickers bar inside, chew and swallow it, and afterwards you re ready to kick ass, explains Bouchet in marketing expert slang. It s isotonic, it contains caffeine and proteins it s able to push you to another level. To prove that he s dead serious, the artist shows me a photo series on his cell phone that has him eating it a rather dubious pleasure. It totally transforms your consciousness. That s what art is about, cried Bouchet in a tone of voice that s so tastefully exaggerated you can almost take him for a salesman. Meanwhile, we re sitting at a freshly mounted table in the attic, in a film set. While Bouchet plays salesman, McCarthy stares at a small pile of sawdust left behind on the tabletop: The woodchips are not uninteresting. Maybe we should keep them. A black curtain closes off a storage room, while next to us mattresses are screwed into the walls. We re going to have a dinner party, says McCarthy. His son Damon is planning on filming the action. We still don t know what s going to happen. I think we ll serve spaghetti with a sauce. That s all we know right now. When it s time to say goodbye, he suddenly grows serious. It s very important to McCarthy that the work isn t merely taken for slapstick. It s an entity with lots of layers. An assemblage with coincidences. It s so much about what it means to us being artists, dealing with the institutions. As for the realization he hopes for in viewers: At least that it allows them to see the building in another way.!

82 FREEDOM OF SPEECH Is the Guggenheim Bilbao Censoring Artists? The Guggenheim Bilbao has ordered a mural that caricatures the museum to be taken down, but the artists are arguing the artwork's removal would violate their freedom of speech. ANN BINLOT :50 PM ET Could a respected museum be violating artists freedom of speech in Spain? The Guggenheim Bilbao ordered a mural created by artists Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy that depicts the museum with hand-drawn sketches reinterpreting it as a battleship to be taken down. The mural coincides with an exhibition by the artists, titled

83 Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model, at the contemporary art space Portikus in Frankfurt that criticizes art institutions as, according to a press release, self-serving mechanisms for their board members. What s the purpose of these museums? pondered Bouchet in a recent phone conversation. The purpose of museums like this probably have more to do with city tourism than with art. Bouchet and McCarthy worked with a Spanish media company that sells billboard space throughout Bilbao in order to place the large-scale piece, which has hung since April 2, on 31 Gran Via, also home to a Massimo Dutti retail shop. The artists first conceptualized the piece in the early 2000s, when they likened the Guggenheim Bilbao s Frank Gehry-designed building to a battleship. We were amazed that we hadn t seen it come up before in popular media, Bouchet said. I think the fact that they reacted so strongly, that they were not interested in any sort of artistic interpretation of their museum It s hard for me to say what their motivation is, other than that image of the museum as a battleship, there must be some sensitivity to that particular image because it happens to look like it so much. Bouchet went on to explain that the Guggenheim Bilbao said that they own all the rights to any reproduction of the museum. The museum s request could be violating Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution, which allows the right to freely express and disseminate thoughts, ideas and opinions through words, in writing or by any other means of communication and the right to literary, artistic, scientific and technical production and creation. We have the right to make those kind of critiques, so them removing this image, and being really aggressive in taking this picture down, is problematic, in that it really gets into this thing with what s an artist s right? said Bouchet. The Guggenheim Bilbao contacted Bouchet s New York gallery, Marlborough Chelsea, asking them to have Bouchet take down the mural, and said they would take further action if it did not come down by April 11. What s the role of art? It s to critique, to be able to speak, said Bouchet. You can say yeah this is copyright infringement, but it s clearly a work of art. It s clearly a caricature. When asked for comment, the Guggenheim Bilbao issued this statement: "The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has not addressed any artist requesting the removal of an artwork. "The Museum wrote to a publicity agency, VSA Comunicación, as they had installed in a Gran Vía building a large commercial banner featuring an image of the Museum, which is trademarked, without the Museum's knowledge or permission. Said publicity banner does not contain any reference to any artist's name, so the removal of the billboard was requested.

84 "The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao absolutely respects the artists' rights and it likewise protects its own image rights and those of Frank Gehry's building." Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model, is on display at the Portikus Museum in Frankfurt through April 20. An extension of the exhibit will be traveling to Monaco in July for Marlborough Chelsea s debut at Marlborough Monaco. Editor's Note: This piece has been updated with comment from the Guggenheim Bilbao.

85 Portikus as an art Fortress Siege of the Main Island Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy have taken the Frankfurt portico in fitting. From the exhibition hall an art fortress has become. Visitors may puzzle. From MICHAEL HIERHOLZER PORTICO Who has been eating from the plate? In Frankfurt portico visitors roam an art mystery The main entrance to the Old Bridge is blocked. It is true that inconspicuous spiral staircase to descend, which leads to the main island, to approach from behind the portico. For this purpose, but you must be return back to go up a staircase that leads one to the back entrance. Strange colorful hoses hanging out of the windows. Still river Main flows to himself. The trees on the banks are bare in the air already vorfrühlingshaften. Dramatic clouds move across the sky. Then the visitor is in front of a closed door, to which he, as he is asked by a shield, violently knocking. After a while it will be opened. Quick recognizes the Inset: Here not ask about two artists exhibit their works, but they have this architecture, this small art gallery, this gabled ancient-looking and yet always acting strange building sequestrated, occupied, besieged.they work with medieval motifs as well as with those of the modern consumer world, with found objects and from Pappelementen Zusammengebasteltem.Who comes here finds a condition as it presents itself after a complex and long performance. Not only traces are left, but massive relics. Here artists have raged, celebrated handled with liquid rubber, strange objects, of which one does not know, are there foods or feces produced. The highest floor for the first time included with

86 No corner, no angle, nothing remained except everywhere Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy have hand created. On all floors. The first time, the top floor has been, involved directly under the roof, reminiscent already empty at a studio or loft in a total installation. Above all-as the remains of an apparently disjointed home-style food habits can be seen. The visitors increases over pasta remains on the ground. The Essensüberbleibsel already start to get moldy. Rear is a black doll, sunscreen bottles standing around, two ladies ankle boots perched on the dining table. One can easily imagine what has taken place here, a rollicking dinner party where a woman was dancing on the table, after they had taken off their shoes. Or is it all just staging, things have been carefully draped so? And what they have to mean the vast amounts of chocolate bars and the sausages, with whom they appear to be a connection? Were they about made from the Snickers bar? What is art, always determines the artist, you might say. But that is not self-evident. For art educators, curators, museum people have the final say when it comes to exhibitions. And the institutions transform into art, what they show in their halls. So much of what is not taken into the filthy reality as an art note refined in the relevant museums and exhibition halls, as it were lifted to another level of being ennobled the trivial to the aesthetic phenomenon. The two Americans, internationally renowned artist, drive it to a certain extent alchemical process to the extreme. You do not want just issue somewhere, but bring the institution into their power. You have made the portico into a fortress, occupied him and watch over the conditions of access. Between the art and the architectural envelope in which it is to be seen, they do not allow any more difference. You have collected everything. How else do the institutions of art. Guggenheim for example. "A-Hole Sports Drink" An expansive model of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao dominated the portico main hall. No pretty picture of the Frank Gehry building, but a battered, desolate cobbled together. It should resemble a warship after the artist's will.how do they ever bring war and art in combination. The museum in the Basque Country is the prerogative of interpretation in the art world, for the power of institutions, also. For the supremacy of the United States not only in world politics but also in the world of art On the floor above is about the production of "A-Hole Sports Drink" whose imaginary manufacturer we may be thought of as sponsor of the entire event.the portico of Bouchet and McCarthy is to be understood as a counter-image to the Guggenheim Bilbao, as a place of freedom for artists who claim the right to regulate access and use the space for their own purposes ruthless. With luxury and mass they go against the harmlessness of falls prey to any art that no longer defends itself against the conditions of operation.!

87 Berlin Independents Guide by Kate Brown 20 Feb 2014, 14.22h Images by Helena Schlichting, Courtesy Portikus It s this kind of subversiveness that McCarthy works with: the kind that leads you, sometimes blindly, to criticality. Albeit an awareness of consumerism, cultural industry, or abject idolatry, you arrive there, often by way of confusion. Confusion is the most prominent word that comes to mind to describe the mood at the opening night of "Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model" at Portikus, a collaboration with Germany-based artist Mike Bouchet. The exhibition took place alongside the Städelschule Rundgang this past weekend in Frankfurt, as the artists took over several locations in the city in addition to the gallery. Confusion, delay, and disorientation--perhaps not the most ideal words to describe an opening, but these could be expected: McCarthy s work has consistently catalyzed discomfort (Walt Disneythemed pscyhodramas or paintings with feces). Upon reaching the little island that is home to the unique architecture of Portikus, the main entry is swarmed with people. The usual drawbridge-like entrance to the building was closed, denying visitors the usual route of access. Instead, people filed down a spiral staircase, across a narrow walkway and up the steps to the small back entrance of the building. A small detour had a powerfully disarming effect on attendants as it denormalized the very act of entering an institution and stripped away the visitors sense of agency in following their regular routine. Line-ups continued inside, requiring people to wait to see each exhibition floor, and the cues snaked around the over-scaled installations: one of the Guggenheim Bilbao

88 (presented here as a menacing shipwreck) and the Portikus office, converted into a laboratory for the artists production of their energy drink gummi, which was pouring out of Portikus slitted windows. Such denial brought attention to the usual excesses supplied by the contemporary art world, a theme both McCarthy and Bouchet continually address, attacking the art industry s tendency to build up stardom and propagate consumers. As visitors lined up to get their free eerie blue energy drink that was being funneled from the third floor down to the bar into a huge vat, the whole act of being at an opening became apparently ridiculous, war-like, and dysfunctional. What can of art experience is this? Frenzy and unease pervaded the space, reminding us that art is not so peaceful, bound up in its own physicalized forms of power and oppression. Costumed Captain Americas stood in for gallery invigilators, surrounding the Guggenheiminspired installation and operating as bouncers between each floor. You could sense an undercurrent of indignation; people are not happy when denied their ease of access to the most satisfactory sensation of seeing. It s a religious experience the galleries, the museums, are religious temples, explained McCarthy in a recent interview. While religion is allotted criticism for its promotion of abject idoltry, of which McCarthy is a critic, McCarthy is ironically aware of his own God-like position as a hero and personal industry of contemporary art (having a huge production with employees, etc.). The Portikus opening brought an awareness to its function in creating war and social unrest. This dystopian opening was received with excitement. Both Bouchet and McCarthy utilized their frequent tools of extremism, exaggeration, parody, tension, and total psychosis to achieve art s monumental task: creating consciousness.!

89 Exhibition poster, Mike Bouchet & Paul McCarthy,Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model, Portikus, Mike Bouchet & Paul McCarthy Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model February 15 April 20, 2014 Opening: February 14, 8pm Film premiere: Adult Entertainment (Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy, 2013): February 13, 9:15pm, Orfeo s Erben Cinema Performance: February 16, from 2pm, Städelschule Städelschule Rundgang: February 14 16, 10am 8pm Portikus Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel Frankfurt am Main Portikus is proud to realize a unique exhibition project by Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy. Over the course of several years, the two artists have established an intensive dialogue that is now taking form in Frankfurt. A few years ago, independently from one another, McCarthy and Bouchet both had made a work that transformed the Guggenheim New York into a toilet. This coincidence sparked an ongoing conversation about shared interests in the politics of art institutions and their architecture. It has led them to develop a site-specific project for Portikus that takes up these concerns in a multilayered exhibition structure involving not only the main exhibition space, but the office, the monumental attic space, the exterior of the building, the island that the institution is housed on as well as external locations within the city. The project will culminate in an extensive publication, documenting the process and the final outcome of Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model. Denying visitors the usual right of passage into the exhibition space, Bouchet and McCarthy have diverted access via a spiral staircase down to the island and through the back entrance of the building. Not only does this raise questions about the accessibility of art institutions in general, but and this is specifically addressed through the architecture of Portikus an aspect of fortification within today s cultural industry. The gesture of rerouting the flow of people turns the simple act of visiting an exhibition into a performative storming of a medieval fortress. Analogies of war, military defense structures, and armed forces continue to appear throughout the exhibition, hinting at the U.S. domination of the visual arts industry since World War II: oil paintings of the Guggenheim Bilbao as a military battleship are sprawled around numerous public sites in the city; superhero Captain America and his arch-enemy, the Red Skull (portrayed as an Italian fascist following the iconography of the 1940s comic), act as live protagonists in the show; hot tar in the form of gummi energy drink is being poured out of Portikus s arrow slit windows, and its drawbridge-like entrance is blocked off by sandbags and barb wire.

90 During their research for the exhibition, Bouchet and McCarthy came across a medieval torture device of the cruelest kind, the Spanish Donkey, used in medieval times to split people in half alive. This, too, in an adapted form, takes a significant place in the show as well as on the exhibition poster designed by the artists. The main gallery presents the center piece of the exhibition, a sculpture of the Guggenheim Bilbao, originally designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry. An over-scaled architectural model, this version of Bilbao is reminiscent of a battered, ragged warship that has washed up to the shores of the island after defeat. A long pipe extends upwards from the sculpture, through to the ceiling of the upper gallery. Here, hundreds of liters of liquid gummi are disposed of into the very core of the museum. This is also where the production of the A-Hole Sport Drink happens, a Beef & Banana flavored sports drink acting as a pseudo-exhibition sponsor through aggressive product placement. The drink is needed to create the adrenalin-boosting concoction The Bigga Picka Uppa one liter of A-Hole with a Snickers bar dropped into it. Playing further on the Bilbao Effect, the artists also include over 60 paintings and a gigantic inflatable displaying Bilboa sunscreen lotion from Italy, Hollywood actors, star architects, as well as portraits of themselves. For the first time since the completion of the new Portikus building in 2006, visitors have access to the colossal attic space, designed by the architect Christoph Mäckler as a citation of an artist s studio. The space has been transformed by Bouchet and McCarthy into what is commonly referred to as a live/work artist loft, and will serve as the set for a performance, developed, produced and filmed by the two artists in collaboration with Damon McCarthy. The loft will host a dinner party typical of the art world, presenting a collection of personal and fictional anecdotes, some of which recall the brutality of the torture devices and warfare stratagems referenced in other parts of the exhibition. The project for Portikus exemplifies both artists use of excess, exaggeration, parody, mis-appropriation, dysfunctionality, and immoderation. There is a synthesis of shared beliefs and interests as well as a common aesthetics that facilitates a playful and highly proliferous gathering, drafting, and framing of ideas. Powered A-Hole Spanish Donkey Sport Dick Drink Donkey Dong Dongs Sunscreen Model also extends an homage to the late Jason Rhoades, a close friend of both McCarthy and Bouchet, whose Costner Complex (Perfect Process) counts amongst the most legendary exhibitions in Portikus s history. This collaborative tour de force turns Portikus into a rampant Gesamtkunstwerk. By employing a language of exorbitance, and extending this beyond the exhibition space into various locations in the city, Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy create a sprawling exhibition that points at the multifaceted excesses of contemporary art production and commodification. Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy are creating a unique artist edition for Portikus. For more information, please contact Portikus at info@portikus.de. Portikus Curator: Sophie von Olfers Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel Frankfurt am Main T info@portikus.de

91 NEW YORK MIKE BOUCHET: FLOOD AT THE MARLBOROUGH GALLERY CHELSEA UNTIL NOVEMBER 9TH, 2013 Mike Bouchet explores the adage, You are what you eat, if what is ingested contains zero-calories, in his new exhibition Flood at the newly renovated Marlborough Chelsea Gallery. The exhibition casts a mirror on to how our society digests all that it can from the media, regardless of nutritional content or health benefits. Through Bouchet s critical stance, everything ingested is about as substantial as Bouchet s own blend of diet soda. Bodybuilders in a pool of Diet Cola, by Mike Bouchet at Hotel Americano, via Ben Richards for Art Observed Throughout Flood, repetition plays a reoccurring role, as if to prime the viewer for the experiences and themes contained within. The first visible piece upon entering the gallery is Nothing is Everything 3 Times (Postive). On a square cotton canvas, Bouchet has written the triple declaration that nothing is everything in zero-calorie cola. Glaring in spite of its simplicity, Bouchet draws attention to the phrase through the staccato spacing and triple repetition of the three words.

92 Mike Bouchet, ASK FOR MORE (2013), via the Marlborough Chelsea Nearby, Bouchet s Ask For More drowns the viewer with that titular Pepsi slogan eighteen times. Similar to J.D. Salinger s Jesus Prayer in his classic work Franny and Zooey, the multiplied motto Ask For More fills the entire canvas, and forms its backdrop until the words become subconscious and imperceptible. In equal measure, the discoloration caused by the golden caramel come to the fore. Bouchet s Zero Gravity also provokes the unconscious, a Zen koan asking the almost incomprehensible question, Why not shopping bags with zero gravity? Mike Bouchet, Picnic (2013), via the Marlborough Chelsea

93 For referencing a deluge with the title Flood, Bouchet s exhibition resounds most with ideas of emptiness, particularly in his sculptural work Olsen Twins Jacuzzi. The name implies the lollipop-purple sculpture is made for two, but the sculpture is unfortunately not wide enough for even a single person to taste that pleasure. Other works, like Double Cowman Country and Picnic, use the white, negative space of the canvas to reference lines and outlines, similar to some images perceived in a Rorschach test. In the upstairs gallery lies Bouchet s untitled video piece, showing a multitude of small swatch-sized clips of pornorgraphy. Like a modern-day Ode on a Grecian Urn, the infinite loop keeps the clips within an eternity of action with no end in sight. When viewed from afar, the video appears to be an undulating mass of flesh set to a grid. Upon close inspection, the pixelated projection becomes too grainy to discern anything. As a result, the video conveys a shell of information as it is obvious what is going on, but picking apart any one porn swatch is impossible, particularly resonant given the title of the show. Installation View, Flood (2013), via the Marlborough Chelsea It its totality, Flood alludes to a variety of ideas about matter without substance. With the paintings in the main gallery, the shadow of the soda dye on the canvas is the only evidence of artistic presence. The Jacuzzis look as if they could be operational, if they did not also look like they were made of cardboard. Upstairs, the video clips are obviously pornographic, but analyzing them is almost visually impossible. Even Bouchet s event at the Hôtel Americano, where he filled the pool with flat diet soda and two female bodybuilders embodied an insipid response. Flood is on view until November 9th at the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery.

94 Mike Bouchet on Byzantine Porn and Colachrome in His NYC Show "Flood" Courtesy of Marlborough Chelsea Tongue Pole Ice Fisherman, 2013 by Mike Bouchet by Lori Fredrickson Published: October 31, 2013 Two days before the opening of Mike Bouchet's Flood at Marlborough Chelsea, the 25th-street space was unusually chaotic, even by the standards of a gallery in the midst of installation. Having closed in June for a major design overhaul, the space still needed ceiling and fixture work on the first floor before art could be moved in, while upstairs a few of Bouchet's familiar, celebrity-inspired Jacuzzi sculptures seemed lost among rolling carts of construction materials. But Bouchet, directing a few assistants on the installation of his massive four-channel Untitled Video, seemed unfazed, if not even at home with the surrounding state of flux. That is, after all, one of his main areas of interest, particularly evident in the video work, a grid-like assemblage of 10,000 displays of revolving 10-minute clips of Internet porn, projected in hi-def on four channels across one of the gallery walls. I'm very happy to be showing it in this room at this scale, Bouchet explained on a visit from ARTINFO. From a distance, the display looks almost three-dimensional, with its array of close-up shots of repetitive acts seeming to ripple across the wall; the various fetishized sex scenes, in brightly colored miniature, look a bit like a moving swarm of butterflies. It's like an op-art work, he added.

95 The works in Bouchet's Flood which opened earlier this month and is on view through November 9 all approach the idea of deluge in some form. His Jacuzzi sculpture series, started in 1998, consists of cardboard-and-fiberglass hot tubs, each with a notably distorted shape and each inspired by the idea of a specific celebrity. In the past, these have ranged from Carmen Electra to Karl Lagerfeld to Robert Mugabe; on view here, more recently exploring the concept of dynasties, are the lipstick-red Lauren Bush Lauren, the jet-black David Kissinger (son of Henry), and the more whimsical, bright purple Olsen Twins. On the walls are works from Bouchet's ongoing Colachrome series: paintings made using the artist's custombrewed, capitalism-critical cola, which was initially developed and bottled for an installation idea for an exhibition in China, and which Bouchet has since found works well as a watercolor. Bouchet walked ARTINFO through the gallery to discuss the different works, his general theories on cultural overflow, and the Byzantine nature of porn. What triggered the idea for Untitled Video? I was thinking about the scope of it, initially 60 or 70 percent of web traffic is pornography, which is huge. Even 5 percent of all the traffic on the Internet would be a huge amount. Once I had an idea for presentation for this, I started drawing out sketches for it, and then set out to find the clips. For two months, I had a team of six people working literally 24 hours a day, grabbing everything we could find, downloading and compositing. The IT technician I had supervising the process hosted some pornography sites, and when he contacted them they were all happy to contribute. After that was the postproduction process, which involved cleaning it up, going through it and looking for doubles [of clips]. The videos don t have any kind of commercial title like Mad Max 3, or something. It s more like, Blonde, with big tits, and two guys, or a description of the activity taking place. So that process took two years I had to keep passing it off to a different company because people couldn t distinguish between them anymore. Did looking at that many clips change the way you looked at porn in general? Actually, it was really interesting to see the postproduction guys doing this work, who were these really macho guys, super enthusiastic about working on it. I realized that there s a generation gap in the interpretation of pornography the younger generation has less of a stigma about watching it or even participating in it. So they were enthusiastic about it the way that some people are really into tennis. But [after the project was completed], they all said that they were completely turned off by the whole thing, and they all got some notion of exploitation. Which wasn t necessarily my interest in making the work, but I did find that interesting. It was like having someone who is really into Formula 1 racing see too much Formula 1 footage and think, Wow, Formula 1 is actually really weird and problematic. I've also noticed that there's a different reaction to the work by men and women: Women immediately respond with, This is beautiful, men generally say, That s a lot of pornography.

96 I left the work untitled because every name I came up with triggered different associations I didn t want to steer the work towards. There are so many double entendres for everything in pornography the work is about sexuality, but I also wanted it to also be an abstracted experience. I like the original definition of abstract. It s taking something. You abstract money from a wallet, you abstract information. This is where the use of abstraction art comes from. It s about reducing or taking the essence out of something. Having seen the whole gamut of pornography, now, I do have a feeling that a large percentage of sexual activity takes place between a single person alone and a laptop, or a computer screen of some sort. At least in industrialized countries. This kind of opens it up as a quick snapshot of the activity going on. There s about 13,000 commercially produced pornos a year. It jumped from 10,000 in 2008, when the economy crashed. All of a sudden the porno industry had this big jump. Which makes sense, you have all these people at home with their laptops all day Exactly. No one s at work. Hollywood also had an across-the-board 28 percent increase in ticket sales. People had more time and wanted to escape more. I do think it has also become entertainment now: I imagine a lot of people just keeping it on all day. People also produce a lot of amateur pornography at home, the way someone might see a skateboard video and then go and make one with friends. But all of the videos [in Untitled] are commercially produced. Commercial producers are also not too aggressive about pursuing piracy I think they kind of instigate it. There seems to be a lot of available material that no one is too concerned whether or not anyone downloads it. It s like a free first joint. Watching porn is a huge addiction right now, clinically. I wasn t so aware of this until I started working on this. This is always part of my work to try to tackle an idea. Did that play into your later process of compositing? I was mainly focused on technical aspects, like the color, but I would still find the videos strangely hypnotic. For me, it s textbook Byzantine: it reminds me of mosaic patterns and the colors on stained glass. And like Byzantine art has parables within images, which put information together, each of these has its own narrative. But instead of St. John talking to someone or stations of the cross, you have schoolroom sex scenarios. There are big running themes, which aren t necessarily archetypes, but they re strong stories in our contemporary society that are somehow re-represented through pornography. [Producers] are also desperate for narratives and storylines. It s secondary, but they need them. For example, there are a lot of Simpsons porn videos there s a whole series where people will dress up like the characters from Matt Groening s show. And this also speaks volumes about our times and all the types of fetishes that, now, in our society, can be highly cultivated. We really have the time, access, and leisure to home in our own particular thing. It s like developing a taste for wine that s fed by a local wine shop that is always introducing a new type or bottle. One side is about money, and on the other side, there s a consumption of sexual desire, which is also the ultimate realization of Wilhelm Reich his early

97 theories that teens shouldn t be repressed by sexuality at an age of heightened sexuality, and society should celebrate that. I ve had a long running interest in the industrial farming of human pathologies soft sciences, behavior studies, economics. They lay out an abstract on how to capitalize on people's tendencies. How can we capitalize on how horny teenagers are? Is the Jacuzzi series also related to that idea of cultivation? I am interested in how celebrity names function as a kind of invisible cover. If I say purple, you have an idea of purple, and if I say Tom Cruise, or Jude Law, you have an idea of what their faces look like. But it s not necessarily portraiture, it has more to do with my sensibilities about an object, and it's less an interest in the people themselves and more in the idea of the person. These started out from thinking about El Greco, actually, who was a very eccentric painter for that period in time, but since he was living in Toledo, where the church was located, and because he was such a devout, religious person, the church viewed those works as their own kind of genius. If he was living in a different city, we wouldn t even know about those. And I thought, how many failures were there? How many works did artists create that weren t commissioned, and politely declined. This made me think of vanity architecture projects, and celebrities hiring starchitects. Jacuzzis play a different role in that they are small forms of architecture, but you also think about how comfortable they are. So these are noncommissioned commissioned works, which aren t made for the celebrity but by interpreting the celebrity. [The celebrities] are a bit about the idea of dynasties, which is, for me, a bit about New York, since dynasties are very tangible here. I like to be able to politicize that, in a sense. I do think the idea of an artist as a provocateur is important, as to understanding the time that we re in. Understanding something through multiplying it is something I ve always been attracted to overproducing, and understanding through multiplication. Which is also a theme with the video, and then there s your Colachrome paintings Those initially started when I got really into the idea of making my own cola and shipping it to China. I was interested in the idea of how bad it is it s this black water that we really shouldn t be drinking, with all this sugary acid in it, and it also has as much of a global presence as oil, and is a similar thing, in a way. So I started researching how to make my own cola, which, it turns out, isn t that hard, there are all of these recipes available, even the original Coke recipe is available. I worked with a pharmacist on measuring the ratios, and then I got in touch with an essence company and mixed a batch, and produced the first 2,000 bottles of that. But I had problems after that getting the bottles to China, because the Chinese government wouldn t allow foodstuffs as art. Once I had it recategorized as foodstuffs, the museum wasn t a qualified recipient of foodstuffs, so that got complicated. When I was originally bottling the cola and working with a laboratory, I d wanted them to make the cola as dark as I could, so that it would look more like oil. And then I realized that it s almost like a pigment, so I

98 started doing some drawings with it it stains almost like a watercolor, like aquarelle. Which, in these, works both for creating the lines and as a wash. Later, I was thinking about how we have these massive oil spills, and I was wondering what it would be like to have a massive cola spill, rivers of cola that you can jump into. So I started filling up swimming pools with it, and people would jump in and swim around in it. We filled up a swimming pool here [at the Hotel Americano, for the Friday night opening], and we re going to have female bodybuilders swimming around, and anyone else who wants to jump in. After four or five minutes you have to jump out and get hosed off, because it starts to burn. But it s also strangely refreshing.!

99 On ie here iet Cola Is the Ne Paint By JULIE BAUMGARDNER October 17, 2013, 5:16 pm We re living in a time when I can have 50,000 liters of my own diet cola made pretty easily, Mike Bouchet said last Friday evening on the rooftop of the Hotel Americano in Chelsea, where he d filled the pool with his dark, viscous concoction. I just spoke with a laboratory. The 44-year-old artist had also hired two female bodybuilders, Roxanne Edwards and Michelle Falsetto, to cavort in the sticky stuff while the crowd of artgoers gawked. Eventually one attendee ripped off his shirt and jumped in, too.

100 Mike Bouchet, courtesy of Marlborough Chelsea Zero Gravity, 2012, one of Bouchet s colachrome works. The event celebrated the opening of Bouchet s new exhibition, Flood, at nearby Marlborough Chelsea. But the cola was more than a party gimmick. He uses it as a material, like paint (he calls it colachrome ), creating white canvases with faded brown imagery that often plays on ad slogans. Flood is his first show with the gallery, and his first solo outing in New York in more than eight years. The California native, who currently resides in Frankfurt, lived in New York for a stretch, so the show felt a bit like a homecoming, he said. Bouchet also spent his adolescence in the Spanish port city of Cádiz. His nomadic life is reflected in the apparent randomness of his work, which takes on a sweeping array of forms and subjects. In addition to the colachrome paintings, Flood includes his Jacuzzi sculptures (asymmetrical jewel-toned cardboard-and-fiberglass tubs) and a colossal video comprised of 10, minute porn clips. I don t like the word appropriation, Bouchet said, watching the party guests from across the pool, but I feel strong about the artist as a cultural producer, just like 20th Century Fox or Twix. Mike Bouchet: Flood is on view through Nov. 9 at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street; marlboroughchelsea.com/chelsea.

101 Diving off the deep end Female bodybuilders take a dip in diet cola. Photo: Elliot Black Courtesy Mike Bouchet and Marlborough Chelsea The California-born artist Mike Bouchet wanted his first exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea to make a splash literally. Visitors to Mike Bouchet: Flood (11 October-9 November) are greeted by cardboard and fiberglass sculptures of distorted Jacuzzis. Named after figures such as Lauren Bush and David Kissinger, the works send up Minimalism and luxury, according to the gallery. Best known for his failed attempt to float a suburban home in the canals of Venice during last year s Biennale, Bouchet may find luck with more modest vessels. The spirit of revelry continued after the opening last Friday at a nearby rooftop, where Bouchet hosted a private performance featuring female bodybuilders swimming in a pool filled with the artist s homemade diet cola formula. From In The Frame Published online: 14 October 2013 http: in-the-frame

102 PRINT MIKE BOUCHET'S CONSUMER FANTASIES LAUNCH GALLERY»

103 The finer details of global consumerism can be mind-boggling, not to mention bleak, but Mike Bouchet has learned to embrace them. The Frankfurt-based artist has spent his career examining consumer culture and its limitless output. Drawn to images that viscerally tug at him, Bouchet explores his own emotional response to the quotidian marketing blitz. What results is a whimsical mixed bag: cola, porn, and celebrity-inspired Jacuzzis are the subjects he deals with in "Flood" at Marlborough Chelsea, opening today. The show is Bouchet's first New York solo exhibition in eight years, and his first with the gallery. Fittingly, it's all strategically branded to Bouchet's liking. The cola is his own concoction, Cola Lite, which is essentially Coca-Cola with no sweetener, artificial or real. Bouchet invented the formula in 2004, envisioning the dark substance as the equivalent of America's oil export, a counter to foreign oil. Discovering it worked surprisinly well as paint, he began using it to create watery, caramel-colored compositions. Later, in 2010, he filled up a California pool with the liquid at a compound owned by Paul McCarthy a feat he will repeat at Hôtel Americano for the opening's after-party. In the exhibition, the eight cola paintings included deal mostly with advertisement themes. Sheer cotton canvases, roughly the size of billboards and bus stop posters, emulate ads in the real world. Ask For More (2013), which displays the Pepsi slogan 18 times, is unsettlingly plausible (more is always better, right?). Also on view is a series of misshapen cardboard Jacuzzi sculptures named after celebrities. Their strange, uncomfortable-looking contours, Bouchet explains, are inspired by his mental imaginings of the public figures. Featured are the Olsen Twins (2010), bulky, jagged and purple; Lauren Bush Lauren (2013), red with a narrow recess; and David Kissinger (2012), exposed, black and house-like. On the gallery's second floor plays Untitled Video (2011), a mosaic of 10, minute porn videos downloaded from the Internet. "It was a labor of love," describes Bouchet. "Well, perhaps that's not the right term." Born in California in 1970, Bouchet moved with his family to rural Spain, near Cadiz, when he was nine. It was after Franco died, and the country's modernization was stunted. Returning to the states as a teenager, he was shocked at the object-driven, consumer lifestyle. "It was like how you can't take your eyes off the train wreck," he remembers. Bouchet never shook his fascination, which he says is still a mix of attraction and repulsion. This has manifested in everything from a 3000 square-foot floating factory-made house for the 2009 Venice Biennale, to Carpe Diem (2004), in which a cascade of customized jeans, manufactured in a Colombian sweatshop, rained from an airplane onto the city of their origin. We met with Bouchet at Marlborough Chelsea and decided to walk to a nearby café. We started talking about shopping, and then malls, and transitioned to suburbia. MIKE BOUCHET: I grew up in suburbia, in California. When I was nine, my family moved to a very rural spot of southern Spain for four years. RACHEL SMALL: That must have been beautiful. BOUCHET: It's less beautiful now. It's really gotten trashed, turned into a wasteland. When I moved to Spain, it was not long after Franco died. My stepfather was working for the Spanish-U.S. Navy as a technician. There was kind of a lag period for Spain. There was no television. There was one really crappy Spanish national television program. We didn't have a television set. There were very few cars. And it was a real big switch at a very impressionable age for me. When I went back to the U.S., it was really kind of a shock this blend of fascination and repulsion that I think still influences all my work. I had a strong reaction to suburbia. This immediate realization that: "Wow, this is weird. I think America's the weirdest place in the world." In particular, the dream of a suburb is still one of the big dreams of the world. Having your own house, your own patch of land. No neighbors crowding in on you. But the reality of it you see in larger cities like Los Angeles, Sacramento. You see the whole cycle where something starts out nice and then social entropy happens. People keep spreading out, kind of, letting other things decay. I still drive through suburbs and new suburbs. I think of them as almost psychedelic. SMALL: You've been living in Frankfurt since How is the experience of consumerism there? BOUCHET: I still find bus stops with crazy images and magazines and television. Every commercial project, every marketing campaign, it's geared for international. They want billions of consumers.

104 SMALL: It's also something that appeals to everybody. Like, a picture of a woman drinking Coca-Cola. BOUCHET: There's a lot of basic human buttons. What are people's reactions to things? I do feel as if my buttons are being pressed. If I feel my buttons being pressed, I generally start making work about something. I take material from when I feel like: What do these things want from me? What is this pulling me? From that, it kind of widens to maybe a larger designation. I have my own hypotheses and theories, you know. They're not very scientific or academic. I have a gut feeling. I think that the commodity aesthetic has a huge affect on our culture, as human beings. I think it's almost like a monumental force for human beings all over the planet right now. SMALL: Your clothes, a lot of your food. It's all brands. BOUCHET: And there's layers. Like with some people you speak with [about products they buy], there's no irony in the discussion. I think Japan doesn't have much of a sense of irony about these things. And people in Germany wholeheartedly explain why they like this sort of coffee is better and why they like this brand or this type of voice recorder. SMALL: You can obviously gauge the quality of something. And that's supposedly consumer autonomy. BOUCHET: It's the world's favorite pastime, is window-shopping. Where it gets dark and kind of meaner where I think it becomes problematic is the tendency to instill a kind of anxiety or fear in people of, like, "Oh, that's last year's tie." Or knowingly making a tape recorder that will break in five years. These kind of things to keep people, kind of SMALL: On their toes. BOUCHET: or slightly nervous about things, I find it discomforting. But, other than that, there's lots of amazing things to share with what's available in the world right now. I try to use this in a positive way in my work, in that, I get to participate, you can participate, too. I got jeans made by a place in Colombia. I made my own cola. SMALL: Where did the idea to make your own brand of come from? BOUCHET: Well, I wanted to make my own Diet Coke. SMALL: Why diet? BOUCHET: I like the kind of thing about diet. It's like the guilty pleasure. It's somehow a restraint, but then you drink five. There's all these ladies, like, diet is somehow a futuristic concept and to say, "Yeah, we're going to make something that's not bad for you, but here's the experience of the bad thing." But, then maybe it's worse. It gets very complicated once you introduce diet. In mine, there's no sugar or artificial sweetener in it. But then it's still diet. SMALL: It must taste terrible. BOUCHET: It tastes interesting. You can taste it and really understand what cola is. It's a bit of a deconstruction. SMALL: So, what's in it? Or is it like a secret? BOUCHET: No, it's not a secret at all. The cola recipe was never really a secret. There are eight different kinds of oils. It's like lime, orange, lemon, cassia. There's a type of lavender. I forget everything that's in it. Then they mix it with gum arabic so the oils can dissolve into water. Caffeine, citric acid, phosphoric acid. I went to a pharmacy and we experimented until I got it. And then I called an essence laboratory. This is another thing: essence laboratories are a huge monopoly. There's three companies that make all the flavors and smells for the whole world. Of perfumes, foods. It's very secretive. SMALL: It's strange to think about how that determines our sensory experience of taste and smell. BOUCHET: What you think of as a strawberry color and taste has been manipulated a lot. It's like the idea of strawberry. It's probably related

105 to your childhood notions. SMALL: Why use soda in your art? BOUCHET: The largest advertising campaign and marketing budget in the world is for Coca-Cola. I think what's interesting is the notion of a stimulus, a relief, is somehow bottled in that. I'm interested in it for a number of reasons. One is, it's America's oil export. All that base oil leaves America in a very concentrated form. Every country has its own bottle. It goes to these places and it's mixed according to the taste of each country. Mexico has the most sugar with their Coke. All of this base oil is leaving America. Black gold. And it's leaving and then it's refined for every country. It's the opposite of how oil comes here. You know, it leaves like crude oil from, and we expand it here. They do the same thing over there. So I like the visual image of the planet with all this stuff going one way and also going the other. SMALL: It's also an interesting way to brand yourself as an artist just use this one type of paint. It's an interesting parallel to the branding of Coca-Cola. You're using this medium again and again. BOUCHET: I like that. For me, the definition of an artist is cultural producing. When I read about the idea, I realized I could produce like everyone else, you know? SMALL: There have, of course, been a lot of artists that explore consumer culture. How do you think your artwork treats it differently or departs from the past? BOUCHET: I think that with all those artists, there's an aspect of trying to understand the time they're living in. The same applies for me. An important notion for me is about exploring right now. It's not so much about nostalgia and looking back. I think that for sure those artists are working from that too. I think that I'm less interested in the straightforward aesthetic of the information. Appropriation is a given in our time. My work is more of a kind of subjective interpretation of information. When people say, sometimes, "Oh, is it appropriation art?" I say, "No. I'm a misappropriation artist." I like this idea of customizing and rendering something worthless or dysfunctional. I take a lot of pleasure out of this: conflating things until they don't work. The idea of making products that fail in a consumer situation, but are interesting in an artistic situation. I think that the art world in this respect is still an amazing place. That you can make these things that have no practical use. Or even aesthetic. But you still appreciate it. When I'm making Jacuzzis, I'm always thinking about how one's body would be positioned. Maybe there's points of comfort, maybe there's awkwardness. You conceptualize yourself in those weird spaces. Then the colors are subjective to the name of the Jacuzzi who I meant it for. They are noncommissioned commissions. I'll look at the shape and I'll think, "Hm," like, "Sylvester Stallone." It's not about the person. It's about the idea of the person. SMALL: What about the video? BOUCHET: It's titled The Untitled Video. It's the first untitled work I've made. It's composited from 10,000 porno videos that were downloaded off the Internet and 10,000 porno videos playing simultaneously in a big mosaic. I was thinking about the amount of pornography on the Internet and what that means for video art. There's been a lot of work that's dealt with video, and I've seen a lot of video art that's dealt with pornography. Somehow I kind of had this vision of the river passing me by. I have taken this big bucket and dipped it into this river of information all of this pornography. SMALL: Is it just chaos? BOUCHET: It's not chaotic. There's definitely a general skin tone. Formal qualities. The overall video becomes this, kind of, flicker-y, geometric grid. It has a weird push-pull optical effect. You get into a trance. There's no sound. It's ten minutes of a collective desire. A lot of people don't realize that's what it is when they see it. There's something about the activity, the motion people who realize they, kind of, grab onto. SMALL: "Flood" at Marlborough Chelsea is your first solo show in New York in eight years. Can I ask what the significance of that is for you, coming back? BOUCHET: I do think that New York is still the most important place in the world for the exhibition of art. And for me, it's important to make work in America. My work deals with what? Consumerism. International perspective. A lot of those ideas were coming from America,

106 originally. SMALL: What do you want people to take away from the show? BOUCHET: On a very simple level it sounds romantic but I would hope that they take away the notion of taking information in, their impressions of the world, and seeing that I've tried to turn them into something beautiful. It is about my own, individual methodology. And [at the same time] we can appreciate everybody's individual impressions of the world around them. I would also hope people feel inspired to go and make art. That's the most I can ask for as an artist. It makes me want to make work on a simple level. I think that's a tremendous thing that art can do. And bring some other type of understanding of the world. FLOOD OPENS TODA AT MARLBOROUG C ELSEA, AND LL BE ON V E T ROUG NOVEMBER. FIND THIS ARTICLE: PRINT

107 Top Exhibitions Opening this Week in New York (Oct. 7-12) By Olivia Swider October 10th, 2013 THURSDAY Arlene Shechet: Slip at Sikkema Jenkins Co. October 10 November 16 Opening: October 10, 6-8PM 530 West 22nd Street One of the artists at the forefront of the current wave of interest in clay-based sculpture, Arlene Shechet unveils her largest and most ambitious works to date in her inaugural solo presentation at the gallery. Schechet makes tough, muscular and aggressive pieces that nonetheless flaunt her sexuality, challenging notions of gender, form, sculpture and material. Terry Haggerty: The Nearness of Objects at Sikkema Jenkins Co. October 10 November 16 Opening: October 10, 6-8PM 530 West 22nd Street

108 Terry Haggerty s paintings and large-scale wall drawings are rooted in Minimalism s elimination of non-essential forms, and in the phenomenology of optical illusion and perception put forth by Op art. Suzanne McClelland: Every Inch of My Love at Team Gallery October 10 November 17 Opening: October 10, 6-8PM 83 Grand Street McClelland s pictures always find their genesis in textural elements: words and numbers. The artist considers writing as a form of drawing, especially as handwriting falls increasingly out of use, almost entirely replaced by typing. Conor Backman: Diorama at Mixed Greens October 10 November 9 Opening: October 10, 6-8PM 531 West 26th Street Diorama consists of new paintings and sculptures that continue Backman s engagement with representation, reproduction, origin, and translation. The exhibition s title references both the contemporary interpretation of the word diorama as a framed, re-created model landscape, and the word s origin as a picture viewing device developed by Louis Daguerre in the early 19th-century. FRIDAY Mike Bouchet: Flood at Marlborough Chelsea October 11 November 9 Opening: October 11, 6-8PM 545 West 25th Street Presented on tow floors of newly renovated galleries, the show brings together new colachrome paintings, Jacuzzi sculptures and a four-channel, high definition video. The artist has not had a solo exhibition in New York in 8 years, and this is his first with the gallery. Counter Forms at Andrea Rosen Gallery October 12 November 16 Opening: October 11, 6-8PM 525 West 24th Street Counter Forms brings together an extraordinary group of rarely seen works, predominantly from the 1960s and 70s, by four artists whose oeuvres remains as fresh and visceral today as they must have first appeared in their time. The exhibition gathers an unprecedented constellation of artists and exceptional relevance of each artist anew while also highlighting the unexpected resonance of their oeuvres. Artists are as follows Tetsumi Kudo, Alina Szapocznikow, Paul Thek, and Hannah Wilke. Llyn Foulkes at Andrea Rosen Gallery October 12 November 16

109 Opening: October 11, 6-8PM 544 West 24th Street With works ranging from 1963 to 1984, this exhibition focuses on the theme of the landscape and the language of post cards. It s fascinating to see the diversity in Foulkes s complex formal language from his signature rag technique using rags to apply and subtract paint to the canvas in a way that anthropomorphizes the rock paintings into denim jean paintings, to the use of drips on the canvases imitating stains of a photograph, or ever painting on top of collaged postcards. You Are Here at the Hole October 11 October 13 Opening: October 11, 6-9PM 312 Bowery Despite the exacting nature of its title, the exhibition s underlying theme is randomness. More sensibility than sense, more reblogged than curated, YOU ARE HERE is an exhibition informed by Likes and unpredictability distracted web-browsing histories of never-ending hyperlinked and meta tagged content. Artists include: Big Egypt 2020, Jacob Ciocci, Josh Reames, Kathy Grayson, Phillip Stearns, Rick Silva,, Ryder Ripps, Thomas Pregiato, Trudy Benson and #Bentrill#.

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113 Mi e Bouchet electe or s Texts by Lucas Ajemian and Colin Gardner Conversation with Daniel Birnbaum The work produced by Mike Bouchet in recent years seems to present a compulsion to alter one s place in the world by reproducing and re-contextualizing desirable things in and of the world. His projects and exploits are one-to-one models real transactions with their own autonomy and agency. You cannot alter your place in the world without first altering your image of the world. Bouchet s endeavor goes beyond representation or a kind of DIY prudence, into what can best be described as a reallife parody. This artist uses everything at his disposal to grow, package, and pitch his own products. In systems such as these, even real transactions are not completely convincing, the reification of one s product through extensive image production is needed to make it completely viable. Lucas Ajemian 2009, English 21.5 x 28 cm, 216 pages, 171 color ill., hardcover ISBN John Smith John Smith Nina M ntmann (Ed.) Scandalous A Reader on Art and Ethics Gavin Butt, Irit Rogoff Visual Cultures as Seriousness Astrid Schmetterling, Lynn Turner Visual Cultures as Recollection Jorella Andrews, Simon O Sullivan Visual Cultures as Objects and Affects Gelatin Loch Barry Schwabsky Words for Art Criticism, History, Theory, Practice e-flux journal Martha Rosler Culture Class Deborah Ligorio Survival Kits Karen van den Berg, Ursula Pasero (Eds.) Art Production beyond the Art Market? Douglas Coupland Shopping in Jail Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century Ekaterina Degot, David Riff (Eds.) Monday Begins on Saturday Ana l Lejeune, Olivier Mignon, Rapha l Pirenne (Eds.) French Theory and American Art Sven L tticken History in Motion Time in the Age of the Moving Image Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke (Eds.) The Whole Earth California and the Disappearance of the Outside Cerith Wyn Evans The What If?... Scenario (after LG) Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt (Eds.) Bulletins of The Serving Library 5 Kate Newby Let the other thing in Marie-Louise Ekman No Is Not an Answer On the Work of Marie-Louise Ekman Milena Hoegsberg, Cora Fisher (Eds.) Living Labor Marysia Lewandowska, Laurel Ptak (Eds.) Undoing Property? Ingo Niermann (Ed.) Solution Love Greg Lynn (Ed.) Archaeology of the Digital Hilke Wagner, Axel Wieder (Eds.) Susanne Kriemann Alex Coles, Catharine Rossi (Eds.) EP Vol. 1 The Italian Avant-Garde: Joanna Warsza (Ed.) Ministry of Highways A Guide to the Performative Architecture of Tbilisi Donatien Grau The Age of Creation Dénes Farkas Evident in Advance Joshua Simon

114 Joshua Simon Neomaterialism Gardar Eide Einarsson Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs Mara Ambro i, Angela Vettese (Eds.) Art as a Thinking Process Visual Forms of Knowledge Production Thomas Thiel (Ed.) Schaubilder Thomas Keenan, Tirdad olghadr (Eds.) The Human Snapshot Dorothee B hm, Petra Lange-Berndt, Dietmar R bel (Eds.) A World of Wild Doubt Charlotte Birnbaum On the Table Pies, P tés, and Pastries T. J. Demos Return to the Postcolony Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Optimundus M HKA Marcel Duchamp Ulf Linde De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde Mai Abu ElDahab (Ed.) Behave Like an Audience Apolonija u ter i Selected Projects, Clara Meister (Ed.) Compilation of Translations: One Year at Ludlow 38 Jorge Pardo Tecoh Beatrice Gibson The Tiger s Mind Sharon Lockhart Sharon Lockhart Noa Eshkol Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt (Eds.) Bulletins of the Serving Library 4 Futurefarmers A Variation on Powers of Ten Ruth Buchanan The weather, a building Markus Miessen, Chantal Mouffe Critical Spatial Practice 2 The Space of Agonism Lene Berg Lene Berg Katja Gretzinger (Ed.) In a Manner of Reading Design Maria Fusco, Ursula Mayer Gonda Jessica Warboys Vanelephant ak Kyes ak Kyes Working With... Steve Rushton Masters of Reality Omer Fast 5,000 Feet Is the Best Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch (Eds.) Thinking through Painting Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas Tirdad olghadr Plot Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al. The Mattering of Matter Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society Valérie Knoll, Hannes Loichinger, Magnus Sch fer (Eds.) Dealing with Some Texts, Images, and Thoughts Related to American Fine Arts, Co. Hito Steyerl

115 Look at This! Eagles at Marlborough Madrid By Dan Duray 10/17 6:15pm Michael Stipe, Ryan Trecartin and RoseLee Goldberg Take Part in GIFS Festival We all know Marlborough s been making a splash with its Chelsea branch, but it looks like the Madrid branch is sure heating up. From Oct. 25 to Nov. 24, that branch will host an impressive group show of 27 artists. Patriotically titled Eagles, the show will feature Ahmed Alsoudani, Frank Benson, Mike Bouchet, Matthew Chambers, Dan Colen, Ara Dymond, Jeff Alrod, Sam Falls, Mark Flood, Freeman/Lowe, Drew Heitzler, Jacquline Humphries, Xylor Jane, Matt Johnson, Robert Lazzarini, Andrew Kuo, Wes Lang, Ari Marcopoulos, Chris Martin, Eddie Martinez, Rashaad Newsome, Amanda Ross-Ho, Davina Semo, Colin Snapp, Daniel Turner, Sara Vanderbeek and Marianne Vitale. If you re in Spain you really must stop by. See for yourself!

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118 Mike Bouchet SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE, FRANKFURT, GERMANY There is something very peculiar about the American way of building houses. An entire suburban home might be casually transported on the back of a truck. Or perhaps it arrives on flat-packed pallets, to be screwed together like IKEA furniture. While natural catastrophes have a calamitous effect on these lightweight structures, the consequences of their human demolition could be seen in the recent solo exhibition of American-born, Frankfurt-based artist Mike Bouchet. The show s central motif was Sir Walter Scott (2010), a sculpture in 15 parts. It was made from an Internet-ordered, singlefamily home, which Bouchet ferociously chopped up and carefully re-layered into a parody of the house in its pre-built state. The stacks of materials were placed on brand-new rugs, which, along with the pediment atop the first pile, hint at the materials original functions. The 15 carpets, which would more usually lie beneath a television or a coffee table, act as the most minimal of pedestals, their bright colours and distinctive new smell contrasting with the discolouration and mouldering destruction undergone by the once-dignified Sir Walter Scott (the structure s actual designation in the vendor s American Values series). The home s visible water damage alludes to its history: before hacking it to pieces with an axe and chainsaw, Bouchet floated the assembled house on pontoons as part of the 53rd Venice Biennale, for a piece entitled Watershed Venice (2009). Consistent with the artist s self-described signature of bad luck, it promptly sank. The work was salvaged but the evidence of

119 its life underwater remains: tiny molluscs obtrude alongside bent nails, while scraps of seaweed happily co-exist with shards of aluminium. A spider s web and dangling tree leaf were perhaps gathered during transport, a sense of accident even serendipity that is also a signature. Not only was the real Sir Walter Scott in deep debt for his housing investments, his name adorns the shipwrecked boat in Huckleberry Finn (1884). Bouchet has maintained a consistent practice of action-based work since the early 1990s, when he was still living and working in his native Los Angeles. His aim is to reveal the dark and farcical side of America s cultural and societal obsessions and possessions, to evaluate the very national issues of image, manufacturing and distribution of wealth that pertain to the consumer world as much as the art world. The house, in fact, could have been dismantled carefully, screw-by-screw, but the deeply physical and purposeful act of demolition allows us to disengage from the finished product and question the concepts of what we might consider home. It also underscores how intensely fascinated we can be by destruction and catastrophe. This latter theme was picked up in the show s next section, an ersatz estate agent s office whose major art work was Upside Down Pacific (2010), a large-scale oil painting depicting a massive fireball with flying shards a replica of a film poster with the text removed. Close by, Interior Crush (2010) was a set of USM Haller shelves the decorating accessory of choice for any realtor or art collector s office crushed at a scrap metal yard, along with designer objects, art books, golf clubs and DVDs. Bouchet also displayed Rob Roy (2010), eight framed coloured-pencil drawings of the orderly packed housing material, stacked neatly on a transport dolly (another act of serendipity: Bouchet was unsure how to show them and simply left the works as they were delivered). Front and Back (2010), a stainless-steel replica of one of Watershed Venice s anchors with its front door key cast in bronze, asks whether the purchase of a home is an act of freedom, the ultimate American dream, or a form of imprisonment. Two additional works alluded to the desperate desire for refined living: the tragic ensemble Ivanhoe (2010) a collection of framed sections of ruined interior wall, where seawater diluted wall paint over the differing grains of the cheap chipboard and the outdoor sculpture Colony Garden (2010) an eight-metre-high scaffold supporting a patch of Astroturf, a working sprinkler and a rather slim faux-doric column from the house s portico. Much of Bouchet s work has focused on the issue of house and home and what Americans have become fixated on achieving through material accumulation. In 1993, for a gallery show in LA s ritzy Design District, which heaves with costly knickknacks for Beverly Hills homes, he cast household items from his body parts (an ass sink, a testicle ice-tray). The final process piece from his California studio was Eagle Rock Shit Rock ( ), in which he produced his own sheetrock from cow manure. The work ultimately led to his eviction and can be seen as a forerunner of Sir Walter Scott in questioning the faith put in cheap materials to access our heart s desire. Large-scale photographic images of his destroyed studio were turned into wallpaper, which he used to create murals in private homes or museums. The disparity between these glimpses of Bouchet s disordered studio and the exhibition s pristine spaces underscored the American consumer s general disengagement from any production process, while living comfortably within the fruits of its industry. Here, too, Sir Walter Scott s degradation and ragged edges stood out against the Schirn Kunsthalle s minimal halls. This work and its attendant pieces in the adjacent office were presented under the title New Living, which might seem a snarky form of mockery to the casual visitor, or the sliced-up house a flippant stunt; for the art initiate, it could be hard to look at the debris and not think that history has seen similar incisions, that the piece is derivative. Bouchet is, however, deadly serious in his humour, playing with degrees of value, as well as the difficult distinction between objects as consumer goods or works of art, and asking us to relocate our frame of reference and reconsider what we deem important. Predominantly self-referential, his work is a continuous process, an organic outgrowth that follows his own accidents and experiments that allow for his fundamental ideas to evolve, always metamorphosing into astonishing surprises. Amanda Coulson

120 Frieze Projects 2009: Mike Bouchet California-born and Frankfurt-based artist Mike Bouchet invited the motivational speaker, Alex MacPhail, to address the gallerists of Frieze Art Fair. MacPhail, like speakers found in the programmes of business conventions, tailored his positive reinforcement skills to make a presentation on topics important to the business of selling art. Through positive reenforcement the seminar, entitled Sell and Destroy: Redrawing the Bottom Line, dealt with issues such as business ethics, cultivating honest relationships with artists and collector, positive visualization towards increased sales and how to sell more challenging works of art. MacPhail also performed his talk for members of the public as part of the Frieze Talks programme at 5pm, Sunday 18 October.Close description Mike Bouchet (b.1970) is an American artist based in Frankfurt am Main. Recent solo shows include CANBURGER, Galerie Georges-Phillipe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris; New New Age Film Festival, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main (both 2008) and 16x9 Action Film, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2008) and MOCA, Los Angeles (2007). Group shows include Making Worlds, 53rd Venice Biennale; Quand la première ivresse des succès bruyants. CAPC Musée d Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (both 2009) and Meet Me Around The Corner, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2008).