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The buzz started during the opening in October 2006 during the Frieze Art Fair. Some spoke about it as the exhibition of the year. This six-month show is coming soon to an end, which helps me reveal some of its secrets with ease to those who have not seen it yet...
The gallery Hauser and Wirth Coppermill is located in the East End of London, right between the Bengla City Supermarket, the fashion designers, the giantvintage clothes stocks, and the Old Truman Brewery, where the Scope Art Fair was held.
Outside this old industrial building, an entrance is lit by the sign "Hotel". Upon entering, one reaches a lobby, where they are politely asked to sign a discharge which implies that the visit is at their own risk. The visitors leave all their belongings and climb a staircase.
A hotel corridor, kitsch and moquetté, leads to many rooms, strewn with luggage and cots. Heavy metal music howls out of one of them. Here, an archaeologist’s room with a secret path toward another area through a wall cupboard. There, room 102, incontestably of a young woman, who likes dance music and is gone, leaving behind her a diary of paid lustful trysts, without putting away her leopard underwear, sex toys or rubbers…
Everywhere – in the kitchen, in the bathroom, etc – there are single beds, objects, books (even Bibles), glasses, dirty cups, ashtrays, cigarette butts, and sandwich leftovers, or half-eaten pizzas piled up in an apocalyptic and deserted environment. The linen hung up dampened in such ratty surroundings. Even the power button of the washing machine flickers; someone had turned it on a little while earlier. Lastly, one arrives at a large warehouse; one has landed on another planet... Ours.
The warehouse is filled with refrigerators, monoliths of modern times. There are also containers, heaps of cameras, electronic components and phantom objects. The resonance of the still sewing machines in this clandestine workshop bursts our ears, overlapping the TV yelling the victory of the Manchester football team. The space is overloaded, saturated, almost orgiaque; there isn’t a single living soul in this quasi dumping ground. The walls are splashed sporadically with graffiti and pornography. The artist may not be the creator of the images, but his touch can be seen through the talented layout. Christoph Büchel, one of the Swiss figureheads of a subversive and politicized art, reintroduces here his favorite topics: capitalism, globalization, geopolitics, overconsumerism, which turns here into a true bilious pain.
War is a major issue. One crawls, one squats, one climbs the ladders, it is cold, everything is dirty, one seeks the entrance to the secret niche which leads sometimes to a claustrophobic Muslim cave for prayer, or other times to an excavation site containing a mammoth. The saturated and grotesque rooms are connected like Russian dolls. The artist imagines the scenarios in which the visitor is obliged to take part physically. The complexity and contradictions of the world are expressed by these mazes and these meanders; each one is telling a different story.
An ordinary door takes you from the warehouse to a second-hand refrigerator store where the window displays show the outside world. Prayer mats decorated with images of September 11th and piles of “Mein Kampf” translated into Arabic... Make up the inside. The perfect Hollywood mise-en-scene impression that one feels is shattered. Büchel searches reality’s every nook and cranny to prove how our universe is made up of complete nonsense and chaos. Surreptitiously, he sheds light on how religious extremism, the sordid social conditions of immigrant workers (illegal or otherwise), and trade in human flesh all meet somewhere down the road.
This picture of a museum-like gallery blots out the gallery. There isn’t a single price label on any piece of art! Finally, the notion of gallery pops to the surface because every relic is sold for about 55, 000 Euros. Moreover, this colossal installation, brimming with details, is undoubtedly meant to be perceived as a metaphor for collectionnism and obsession with archiving. The work of art is us, our habits, our society, our laws and ethics, our multinational companies... The reference to paleontology and archaeology is probably the artist way to tell the visitor that he should dig far and beyond and search for his mammoth. The big-bang was the sparck that gave birth to a life tengled up in mayhem. Like an explorer, the visitor is this last survivor of a cataclysm resurected in a world which he believes foreign but is in fact his own.
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Christoph Büchel: “Simply Botiful”
October 13 2006 – March 18 2007
Gallery hours: Thursday to Sunday 12 – 7pm
Hauser & Wirth Coppermill
92-108 Cheshire Street
London
United Kingdom
london@hauserwirth.com
www.ghw.ch
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Christoph Büchel, “Simply Botiful”
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich-London
© Mike Bruce
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