As a marker of the first anniversary of the museum, an international interdisciplinary mega-exhibition with biennial-like aspirations (with suitably cosmopolitan curators Yuko Hasegawa, Octavio Zaya and MUSAC’s own Agustín Pérez Rubio) and an accompanying pop festival, ‘Trial Balloons’ was nothing if not ambitious. The balloons of the title suggested an institution in party mode: Lara Favaretto’s parade of papier mâché giants (Treat or Trick, 2002–6) or cross-dressing compère Topacio Fresh’s TV show (Fresh Balloons, 2006) – best described as a disorientation video – signalled that the show was intended to be a gregarious celebration. Yet ‘balloons’ in this context also implied probes sent up into the artistic atmosphere to gauge climatic–curatorial changes. And from a museum with brochure-friendly looks and highly caffeinated branding, ‘trial balloons’ is above all marketing-speak for a strategy wherein ideas for non-existent products are floated out to test press and market-place enthusiasm.
Correspondingly, the exhibition’s guide was replete with the rhetoric of buzzy ‘open-ended’ non-liability, couched in words such as ‘transitory’, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘polyphony’, and including fluff such as ‘a richly transformed expression will be generated through the exposition of its naked sensibility to the reality while taking nourishment from it’. Like the logic of the floor-based circular video installation by the artist group Kyupi Kyupi (Kyupi Kyupi Circlamotion, 2006) – a rotating tour de force of pounding rhythms, flashing lights and gyrating dancers – the curators of ‘Trial Balloons’ seem to have bravely adopted an exaggerated, gratuitous framework for the event’s 50 or so participants, throwing the art to the lions of León’s public to see whom they had a taste for. (As it happens, Funky Projects’ ‘I "heart" LEÓN’ T-shirts, for sale at a stall in the museum’s foyer, had been literally lionized by big cats – the ultimate in ‘distressed’ clothing.)
Many of MUSAC’s galleries felt like vast chill-out zones of a mega-club (with Trance music leaking throughout) or sophisticated ‘edutainment’ experiences. Truly to appreciate the abstract computer-generated videos by Katarina Löfström and Chris Rehberger, for example, seemed to require the zoned-out faculties of a chemical comedown. Then there were bright lights: Lang/Baumann’s Pocket Stadium (2005) and Gunda Förster’s 13-metre-long Tunnel (2002) throbbed with megawatt intensity. And participation: Shu-Min Lin’s digital pond of ‘holographic’ water-lilies and fish responded to the brainwaves of wired-up visitors, and AVPD’s Possession (2005) was an impressive construction of moving rooms and doors inspired by paranormal research. The inclusion of such immersive installations and over 25 projection- or monitor-dedicated works could have left plenty of scope for wall-based or sculptural practices requiring a different speed of looking. Yet the artists included often had recourse to ‘dream-like’ clichés, such as Ellen Kooi’s facile Gregory-Crewdson-without-the-celebrities photographs or Jen Liu’s benign ‘floating world’ watercolours. Mona Marzouk’s vast two-tone wall painting, Black Gold Odyssey (2006), with silhouette-anagrams of helicopters and mechanical creatures, prospected for – presumably – a discussion of hybridity, but with an embarrassingly flat delivery.
In this low-stakes context two intense, prickly contributions, however, really stood out. Josephine Meckseper showed %, first presented in 2005. This ravishing installation of shelves, wallpaper, broken mirrors, vitrines and shop fittings, arranged with evocations of revolution, protest and product – a chromed hammer and sickle, ostrich feathers, a shrink-wrapped toilet brush, etc. – crackled with ideological friction. Tobias Buche presented three white wooden booths, as if from some no-budget municipal museum, on which he stuck black and white photos: bad photocopies, blurry faxes and downloads (Untitled, 2006). If ‘Trial Balloons’ boldly suggested that a large-scale exhibition could be selected with no tacit rules or explicit reasoning, Buche’s archive was an example of the more extreme social implications of such knowing recklessness: vandal photos, torture photos, photos of murderers, a snapshot of a hedgehog’s pelt, an adolescent Macaulay Culkin. Given that the exhibition’s ethos was to test undeveloped product, however, Meckseper and Buche – and these bodies of work – were already proven successes. To its credit ‘Trial Balloons’ strove to be even-handedly global and local, and was undoubtedly energetic – although this often came with the suspicion of its works being too cherry-picked from other biennials and mega-exhibitions (Whitney, Lyon, Istanbul or ‘Greater New York’, for example). Although the potent art – Alexandra Navratil’s architectural wall collage Accumulations Part II (Desire is Based on Loss) (2006) deserves a mention here as well – was diluted by lesser contributions, polemics sounded above MUSAC’s marketing muzak as the most viable commodity.
