Columnist Alexander Gutzmer visited Museum1 in Switzerland and found himself in a location that questions the boundaries between body and space.
Corona left places of art deserted – museums and galleries were closed for a long time. They are now open to visitors again. Museum1 in Switzerland is no exception. Columnist Alexander Gutzmer visited the curatorially transformed open space and found himself in a location that questions the boundaries between body and space.
It hasn’t been easy for any of us in recent weeks. However, the corona challenge was certainly one of the toughest for the art world. Exhibitions have been canceled, museum venues (as classic Sloterdijkian collectors of people) have degenerated into potential virus catapults and consequently into shunned non-places. All of this is now gradually easing. However, the question raised by the lockdown remains: what is a museum, what is an art space anyway? What are its promises? What role do spatial boundaries and, by contrast, concepts such as indeterminacy, undeterminedness and uncertainty play in its “functioning” – whatever we understand by functioning?
It is therefore important to create spaces of thought that reflect the social role of museums. Yesterday I visited just such a thinking space: Namely, a curatorially reshaped open space on the outskirts of Lucerne in Switzerland. The “Museum1” in the small town of Adligenswil is, to put it soberly, initially an overgrown landscape where artists can creatively lose themselves. But it is precisely this “wild”, radically open character that makes this pre-museum improvisational space a highly contemporary approach. After all, in coronavirus times, outdoor is the new indoor, so to speak, the new avant-garde, the place of higher value to which anyone can aspire artistically.
Those who are outdoors are ready for art, because the cursed virus cannot develop dominance here. And so a place like this house-less “museum”, initiated by local artist and curator Stephan Wittmer, is an extremely contemporary location, the kind of place that art needs – and that it will certainly increasingly get. Perhaps all art will be outdoor in the future – or, following Heidegger, at least reflect our relationship to concepts of inside and outside.
The exhibition, which has now opened in Adligenswil, does precisely this reflection of indoors and outdoors. And it also has an indoor component. More precisely, a small hut wrapped in gold-colored foil. Inside, artists Barbara Hennig Marques and Olivia Lecomte have created an installation consisting of video-narrative and sculptural elements. At the center of their exhibition is the question of (primarily female) corporeality, which is illustrated in the shack not least by a humanoid-looking women’s stocking filled with sawdust.
The shock moment of quasi-human objects continues in the outdoor space, where many more of these objects reminiscent of limbs are seemingly casually hung in the landscape. They all draw a contrast between body and space, questioning the body in space.
This approach was extended by a performance by the two artists at the opening of the exhibition. Dressed in black full-body tights, they heroically stomped through the uneven grassland of the museum on high heels. It was painful just to watch. The voyeuristic disposition that viewers found themselves in was heightened by the end of the performance. Lecomte led Hennig Maqques around the meadow on a collar made of the aforementioned golden foil.
I was fascinated by the production – not least because it touched on questions of corporeal vulnerability and vulnerability. Questions like these are more topical today than ever. “Safe spaces” do not exist. And perhaps they don’t need to exist. What we need instead are spatial strategies that enable a kind of human resilience. We should all look for such places together. Architecture is also in demand here.
Photos: Alexander Gutzmer
The title of the exhibition also fits in with this: “Urban Search, Decadent Rescue”. Because in this context, of course, the question of what we understand by “urban” is raised in a new way. And what decadent rescue is taking place? Well, perhaps the rescue (for all of us) lies in allowing fragility, also in the ability not to lose a certain nonchalance, perhaps even grace, in the face of existential crises. This nonchalance, which could of course also be called decadent, was demonstrated by the two artists at the amusing end of the performance: they decapitated two bottles of champagne buried in the ground.
