Andreas Slominski
For its inaugural show of contemporary German art, the new Deutsche Guggenheim selected a small body of works by Andreas Slominski, which introduced some of the artist's key strategies to the general public.
As an example of Slominski's recent series of absurdist performances, the gallery chose Gestohlene Luftpumpe (Stolen Air Pump, 1998), a work that involved the theft of a bicycle pump. Instead of merely removing the pump from its holder for this action, Slominski chose to cut through the bike's frame with an iron saw, expropriating not only the pump but also the part of the tube containing its holder. As an act of straightforward silliness this might have been quite funny. But Slominski was anxious to turn the gesture into Serious Art, presenting the pump and the piece of tubing in a showcase on a pedestal, accompanied by a video of the theft and a text on the wall that desperately begged us to interpret the work as visual absurdist poetry. Why should art intended as an act of light-hearted subversion be in need of such stern didacticism? The best way to ruin a joke is to explain it.
For some time, Slominski has been exhibiting animal traps as quasi ready-mades. In Berlin, he presented a set of bird traps Vogelfangstation(Bird Trap Station 1998-99), consisting of a row of branches with berries as bait. With the pull of a string, two nets resting on the ground tip up and snap together over the branches. The strings are operated from behind the hidden doors of a tarpaper covered wooden hut set in the middle of the space. Extra bait in the form of beer and Coca-Cola cans dangled from rods on its side.
These traps have generally been interpreted as a metaphor for art that functions as a form of seduction and entrapping of the audience by the absent artist. But the concept of art as dangerous or seductive is not new. Traditionally, the trap of art is the trap of the siren who lures you away from the safe ground of reality into the seedy resorts of fantasy and frivolity, a hobby for the bourgeoisie to test the limits of its own morality.
If Slominski's works make you feel uncomfortable, it might be because they reflect certain unfavourable elements of art production. It might also be because there is something smug about his humour: the central concern of his visual haiku seems to be to define his art in terms of eccentricity, frivolity and absurdity. Yet he never meets the standards set by absurdist poets such as Gérard de Nerval, notorious for parading around in public with a lobster on a leash, or Jean Cocteau who reportedly annoyed even his most bohemian friends by prancing through Paris dressed as Harlequin. In other words, Slominski's work flirts with frivolity without ever being truly light-hearted, avoiding the risk of embarrassment, never really exposing anything or provoking anyone. And f there's one thing to be said for poetry in the age of tastefulness, it's that it still has the potential to be truly, madly, deeply embarrassing.
