Art Review - April Issue - (Page 79)

FE AT U RE ANDREAS SLOMINSKI IN SLOMINSKI’S DARK ALLEGORY, EACH ANIMAL IS LURED BY AN APPEAL TO ITS PECULIAR VICE Once every ten years the city of Münster plays host to a sculpture festival in which works are distributed throughout the medieval town. The difficult-to-locate pieces induce a phenomenon among curators and art critics known as trufflepig syndrome, whereby frustrated connoisseurs search among the architecture for the bestconcealed works. Slominski’s Streetlight with Tyre (1996) set a snare for them. The work consisted of a bicycle-tyre tube laid around the base of an ordinary street lamp. But instead of merely tossing the tire over the top of the lamp, he had a team of workmen come in and uproot the light and disconnect all its associated cables. He then ceremonially placed the tyre tube around the lamppost from below, before the electrical wiring was reconnected and the lamp reset in the pavement. Once the work was complete, all there was to be seen was a deflated inner tube on the ground. Within two days it was stolen by a passerby. It’s the same principle that is at play in Slominski’s inducement of a giraffe – with the aid and abettment of its keeper – to lick a postage stamp at the Frankfurt Zoo. The stamp was then affixed to an envelope and posted. We are not told to whom, but we can presume that the envelope was empty. An empty envelope and also an artwork. But where is the art? The innocent recipient turns it over, holds it up to the light: nothing betrays it. In Frey’s phrase, Slominski’s artworks are traps for the ‘metaphysically infected eye’. The aesthetic is the lure, but a work of art’s success is marked by its ability to interrupt and detain the viewer. The work of art’s hold over us stems from its prestige, itself the result of the artwork’s ‘difficulty’, or the amount of intellectual and technical labour crystallised in its production. These observations are truisms, but Slominski manages to turn them into themes. The principle of ‘maximum effort for minimum effect’ effectively throws our normal model of efficiency on its head. The works are almost an illustration of Georges Bataille’s principle of non-productive expenditure, and of his subsidiary doctrine that art is prestigious in proportion to how gloriously useless and resplendently wasteful it is. Bataille, hard-core pornographer and editor of the surrealist journal Documents, was also the author of the only extant textbook of surrealist macroeconomics, The Accursed Share (1949). According to Bataille, far too much attention has been paid to the relatively banal question of how wealth is accumulated. The most interesting question in economics is this: how is wealth destroyed? To escape the eventually catastrophic cycle of reinvestment, profit must be consumed, either through luxuries, war or sexual reproduction. Art, as the fetishism of fetishism, is the ultimate luxury. The best working definition we have of it is ‘stuff that is useless’. And taken to its logical conclusion, the best artwork is the one that produces the smallest possible return in proportion to the resources invested. One of the most remarked-upon pieces in the 2005 show at the Serpentine captures both the eroticism of waste and the mordant humour with which Slominski fascinates us. All that was to be seen on one wall of the gallery was a large salmon-pink rectangle marked by a concavity at its centre – reminiscent, perhaps, of Lucio Fontana or any number of abstract contemporary sculptures. The title gives away more: Imprint of the Nose Cone of a Glider (2005). What existed only as a rumour on opening night was that, in the course of installing the exhibition, Slominski had brought a 40-foot-wingspan glider up to the gallery and had the French windows unhinged and the plane brought inside until its nose-cone collided with a prepared rectangle of expanded polyurethane. He had, so to speak, crashed his glider, 9/11 style, into the Serpentine. And it is there, caught by the lure of an enigma that transforms into a reference to terrorism and an unholy joke, that the trap snaps shut around the visitor. And it is here, exerting a sickly fascination, that the assorted animal traps reveal themselves as what they were all along: microcosms of the gallery itself, in which we are stranded in what, for a moment, is a lurching confrontation with mortality. above: Imprint of the Nose Cone of a Glider, 2005, foam block in chipboard, 102 x 102 x 26 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London facing page, above: Rabbit Trap, 1999, wood, metal, paint, 24 x 26 x 78 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London facing page, below: Rat Trap, 1999, metal, plastic, electricity, 12 x 104 x 14 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York ARTREVIEW p 74-79 Slominski AR Apr07.indd 79 5/3/07 12:00:06

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Art Review - April Issue

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