Vanishing Acts

The cowboy threw a saddle over his shoulder and climbed up a roof. Not a horse. He put the saddle over the roof’s apex, sat down in full regalia – boots, ten-gallon hat, long overcoat – and gazed forlornly off into the distance. Andreas Slominski sent him up there for his exhibition Riding a Saddle Roof (2012) at the Dhondt Dhaenens Museum in the Belgian city of Deurle. The work plays on the term for this particular roof style, so common across continental Europe – ‘Satteldach’ (saddle roof) – while turning the metaphorical name into a literal function. Slominski added the roof – slanted, unfinished – over the clean, minimalist box-like museum. This gesture recognizes how rooftops used to be the tallest and the most decorative part of a building because they were closest to the heavens. According to European tradition, a tree adorned with ribbons is still placed on the roof as part of the festivities for christening a building. Slominski used a cowboy, perhaps to suggest that museums can be ‘broken in’ just like horses. Or perhaps to take us all for a ride.

Yet Riding a Saddle Roof is quite harmless – at least compared to the works which Slominski made right before this exhibition and which continually hit below the belt with poor taste and vulgar infantile jokes about sex and faeces. For his show Sperm this past fall at his New York gallery Metro Pictures, Slominski allegedly organized ejaculations by humans and various animals, including a black panther. For Sperm of Two Pilots (2012), as the title would suggest, he invited two pilots to masturbate standing on bales of hay and aiming as high as possible on the white walls. All that remained were shimmering patches as visible traces of their presence.1 For another autumn show at his Berlin Galerie Neu, Slominski meticulously broke down a portable toilet into its component parts (Ecce Homo, 2012) and turned what would usually be hidden inside the plastic booth outward: the outlet pipe hung in a corner; the urinal on one wall; the chemical tank on another, mounted upside down with the toilet seat hanging down like a trapdoor.

In part, the humour in these works is a throwback to the kind of post-war West German vulgarity found in countless works by artists, from Martin Kippenberger to Hans-Peter Feldmann. The only way to deal with the stuffy narrow-mindedness of those years of economic recovery was to make nasty jokes denigrating one’s own country. In this logic, only jokes that hurt are funny. They don’t produce loud, liberating laughter, nor to an ironic grin, but work at the expense of the other – be it an animal, an exhibition visitor or, slightly more abstractly, an art institution. In this light, Massimiliano Gioni is right when he describes Slominski’s work as permeated by ‘a sense of heartless precision’.2

Slominski is still best known for the innumerable trap pieces with which he came to prominence in the 1990s: traps for mice, butterflies, earthworms, cows or nutrias (ugly little water rats from South America). Beyond treachery and cruel absurdity, the traps are about clandestinity remaining in plain sight. The trapper sets up the snare in the open yet leaves it and the quarry to their fate. An object, usually quite an ordinary one, is sprung by hidden mechanisms, creating an extraordinary tension. The artist as trapper, Slominski makes his exit before his prey – the viewer – appears on the scene. Many of his works depend on this kind of covert activity, on the presence of an absence. Someone has been here and done something. Someone put a new roof on the museum. Someone jerked off on the wall. Now they’re all gone. The viewer can only look at the traces left by this action, falling rather helplessly into another kind of trap: it feels like Slominski is watching from the wings.

Already in 1986, the artist fused trapping and covert observation with SlominSki in Frankfurt. He set up a small viewing platform at a fence surrounding an industrial building site. Anyone trying to pick out something special from the unspectacular view beyond the fence had already overlooked the core of the work: the artist, equipped with skis and ski poles, hiding beside the platform, in the shadow of the trees. This work, a self-portrait by virtue of its title, sums up Slominski’s definition of the artist’s position with regard to both his works and his viewers: Standing to one side, still visible yet out of the line of fire. Collaborators are often called in to take the artist’s place – even for works involving skis, which have become a signature running gag, like Kerze (Candle, 2005). In 2005 in London’s Hyde Park, Slominski had a ski slope built which led directly from the park into the Serpentine Gallery. Once the skier had wooshed inside, the wax was scraped from the skis and formed into an unspectacular candle which was shown in the exhibition. It goes without saying that the skier, slope and artificial snow were long gone when the show opened.

Slominski’s vanishing acts tend to involve the greatest possible (invisible) effort outside the exhibition space, only to achieve the smallest possible (visible) result inside. For 2. April (2004), he invited the carnival prince and princess of a big Berlin carnival club to pull up in front of Galerie Neu, in full regalia with their revellers on the float. In the traditional carnival spirit, they threw sweets from the float, and a few fell through the open door into the gallery space. By the time the show opened that evening, the carnival was long over, only the candy remained on the floor.

With this elaborate activity before the opening and outside the exhibition space, Slominski seems to approach the concept of performance through negation and in a way that recalls Bruce Nauman’s approach to sculpture in his 1960s works such as A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965). In Nauman’s work, the empty space under an object is turned into the presence of a sculpture; Slominski turns performance’s consti­tutive principle – the physical presence of a performer – into its opposite in time and space. Instead of encountering ‘real’ bodies in action, the viewer finds only traces of their activities. Physical presence is detectable only in terms of its absence – by the tension it creates in a space (not unlike a casting mould that has been removed). This almost classical interest in ‘giving shape’ binds Slominski’s performances to sculpture. Isn’t the portable toilet – turned inside-out – a similar attempt to render visible a space that is not normally seen?

The mould – and the related question of the solidification of a liquid material – can also be traced to Slominski’s paintings which he has been making since 2005. In series like xABCy000z (2006), he carves decorative elements and figurative scenes into Polystyrene, which is derived from a liquid petrochemical and normally used for insulation and packaging. The Polystyrene carvings – nick-knacks, toy skis, cogs, bananas, door handles, roast chickens – are each stuck on a similar ‘canvas’, spray painted in bright colours and sealed with a Perspex cover. However painterly, these works appear as yet another formal variation on the ‘trap’ theme. They may look like paintings, but strictly speaking they are more like reliefs and sculptures.

As this series suggest Slominski derives works from the transformation of liquids which take on the shape of their container and can change states more easily than other sculptural materials. Sperm dries and coagulates, snow freezes and melts, wax softens and hardens. Water changed its nature from the profane to the sacred in Benedictio, a 2008 performance at Cologne’s Kunststation Sankt Peter, a collaborative project run by the Catholic Church. Slominski asked the fire brigade to park on one side of the church (secretly, of course) and spray a jet of water in a high arc over the roof. On the other side, a crowd of children had gathered for a novel service: to catch the water in their hands, carry it inside the church and put it into the baptismal font. Pastor Friedhelm Mennekes, the initiator of the project, blessed the water and conducted his final children’s service before retiring. Slominski must have been delighted with the beauty of the action and with how it could be misunderstood as a joke at the expense of belief. And perhaps with the way the Catholic principle of transubstantiation – bread and wine into the body and the blood of Christ – was overlaid with his own principle of invisible trickery whereby fire hydrant water became holy water. In any case, one thing’s for sure: No one saw him do it.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell