Otterlo
Kröller-Möller
01/05/04 -
26/09/04
At the edge of the stately sculpture park of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, lies a large field of grass. This summer, settled in this recently assimilated ‘events field’, was LAB, a temporary outdoor exhibition organised by guest curator, Nathalie Zonnenberg. The theme of the exhibition was today’s metropolis. ‘The contemporary big city, in which communications structures run alongside and through one another, has become an elastic arena that can be shaped to the ideas of its own residents’, according to Zonnenberg. She selected seven artists and an architecture collective and asked them to collaborate on a project to serve as a laboratory, with the emphasis on exchange between the artists and the public. All the invited artists live and work in big cities, such as Berlin, Rotterdam, Milan or London, and their practice ‘has in common that communications structures of urban culture are employed as artistic media’.
Gruppo A12, a collective of architects from Milan, designed a construction to accommodate the works of the artists. The construction has only one entrance, to the left or right of which, along a narrow corridor, the different and widely spaced rooms of the construction can be accessed. Each room offers a temporary home for the work of one of the artists. This building, the so-called ‘labyrinth’, refers to an urban structure. But in this grassy meadow surrounded by tall trees it sooner recalled an old-fashioned fortress than a modern city. The picture postcards in Heman Chong’s ‘kiosk’ do literally represent fragments of ‘the city’, a collection of details easily recognizable as urban: traffic signs, graffiti, department store mannequins, bags of trash, people sleeping in the street, decorative shrubs and so on. Though in this green museum environment they evoke the same feeling as worn pebbles from an alpine stream or dulled shells from a Mediterranean beach, now collecting dust at home. Deprived of their original context, they offer only a vague reminder. With the smell of freshly mown grass in your nostrils, the images of a big city on postcards remain but innocent fragments.
Other artists embraced a direct relationship with the immediate environment of the park and the museum. Lara Almarcegui went in search of abandoned and dilapidated buildings nearby – farms, war bunkers and factories – and took slides of them. Minerva Cuevas, from Mexico, built an assault course at the back of the labyrinth, a military obstacle course framed in camouflage netting, which visitors were welcome to try out. Simon Starling’s camping set, made from a dismantled and reconstructed bicycle and a circular saw, was shown in the midst of branches and logs. But a truly urban experience or new insight into the city is still not in reach. Within their wooden home set on its grassy knoll, these works evoke associations of Boy Scout camps rather than life on concrete.
Entitled This Is Exchange, Tino Sehgal’s performative contribution is one of the few positive exceptions. Sehgal confronts visitors with an attendant who asks them to make a statement about market economy. If and when the reply is deemed convincing, the visitor receive a 25% reduction on the admission price for the Kröller-Müller museum. With his ‘talking concierge’, Sehgal is able to bring the city to the park in a surprising fashion and with minimal means. Confronted with a complicated question on market-economy the visitor, as it were, mentally lands in the urban.
All in all, the exhibition leaves much unanswered. Why choose such a theme for an arcadian sculpture park set amid Holland’s largest nature reserve? Why this mediocre solution in a setting so very far from urban? The city as a place of crowding and anonymity, where widely divergent experiences occur parallel to or converge with each other, where people can look the other way but cannot always escape the chafing realities of others, it is this city that LAB failed to capture. But what did you expect in the middle of the woods.
LAB
Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo
1 May through 26 September, 2004
