MGK Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Neither Here Nor There, Neither Fish Nor Fowl

23 Apr - 14 Jun 2015

Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, 1959 (one of 26 photographs)
© Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Bernd und Hilla Becher, Simone Forti, Hans Haacke, Hans Hartung, Candida Höfer, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Jochen Lempert, Bruce Nauman, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Charlotte Posenenske, Yvonne Rainer, Fritz Winter, Olivia Dunbar, Karin Hasselberg, Kitty Kraus, Christoph Westermeier

Curated by Angela Jerardi and Antonia Lotz

It’s too early for her taste and she is in the shower. She glances down at a bottle of upmarket shower gel - organic rice milk & cherry blossom - and reads: “Celebrate each day as a new beginning.”

The object is speaking perhaps. But its attempt at pithy wisdom cum marketing ploy seems to her only sad. Instead of celebrating, she daydreams of sleep. She pauses on something she had just read: a call for a new paradigm of exhaustion within social life. She finds herself staring at the bottle again. It seems to her that objects aren’t speaking with a language of information or manufactured wisdom. Or at least not the objects that interested her. Instead they seemed to express a sensibility that couldn’t be captured via explanation or information.

 

Tags: Bernd und Hilla Becher, Olivia Dunbar, Simone Forti, Hans Haacke, Hans Hartung, Karin Hasselberg, Candida Höfer, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Kitty Kraus, Jochen Lempert, Bruce Nauman, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Charlotte Posenenske, Yvonne Rainer, Christoph Westermeier, Fritz Winter