COSIMA VON BONIN. HIPPIES USE SIDE DOOR. THE YEAR 2014 HAS LOST THE PLOT. 4. 10. 2014 – 18. 1. 2015 English museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien Introduction Imprint Exhibition Publication mumok COSIMA VON BONIN. COSIMA VON BONIN. HIPPIES USE SIDE DOOR. HIPPIES USE SIDE DOOR. MuseumsQuartier THE YEAR 2014 HAS LOST THE PLOT. THE YEAR 2014 HAS LOST THE PLOT. Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Wien Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung T +43 1 52500 4.10.2014 – 18.1.2015 Walther König, Cologne [email protected], www.mumok.at ISBN 978-3-86335-633-0 (engl.) Curator: Edited by Karola Kraus Director: Karola Kraus Karola Kraus with Cosima von Bonin Produced by Manuel Millautz Curatorial Assistant: Kristina Schrei Exhibition Management: Sibylle Kulterer, Dagmar Steyrer Exhibition Booklet Outside Project: Claudia Dohr Conservation: Christina Hierl Edited by Jörg Wolfert, Kunstvermittlung The injunction “Hippies Use Side Door” stands at the entrance to Cosima von Bonin’s Exhibition Installation: Olli Aigner, Gregor mumok studio in Cologne; it is also the title of her exhibition at mumok. This opening salvo is Neuwirth, Wolfang Moser, Andreas Petz, Text: Jörg Wolfert obviously not meant literally: there is no side door and besides, the time of the hippies is must. museum standards Translations: Alexander Scrimgeour Press: Karin Bellmann, Barbara Wagner Graphic Design: Olaf Osten over. But this phrase, which American store owners originally used to deter an alternative Marketing: Leonhard Oberzaucher Cover: Cosima von Bonin with PURPLE youth culture in the 1960s, communicates key themes of Cosima von Bonin’s work: Events: Maria Fillafer, SLOTH RABBIT in wheelchair Katharina Radmacher Photo: Rudolf Sagmeister insecurity, provocation, ambiguity, and a sly sense of humor. Fundraising and Membership: Since the early 1990s, von Bonin (born in 1962 in Mombasa, Kenya) has been one of the Eva Engelberger © mumok 2014 Sponsoring and Cooperations: most important contemporary Conceptual artists. mumok’s retrospective is the most Christina Hardegg comprehensive exhibition of her work in Austria to date. Alongside early works—among Art Education: Claudia Ehgartner, Maria Huber, Stefan Müller, them a reconstruction, specially made for mumok, of her first show, which took place Jörg Wolfert und Team in Hamburg in 1990—the exhibition includes her more recent stage-like installations as well as several works conceived for this occasion. It includes parts of her two last Lenders to the Exhibition: Collection de Bruin-Heijn; Sammlung Daniel Buchholz major exhibitions, ZWEI POSITIONEN AUF EINMAL [Two Positions at Once] at Kölnischer und Christopher Müller, Cologne; Galerie Kunstverein (2004) and THE FATIGUE EMPIRE at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2010). For the Buchholz, Cologne /Berlin; EMI Private Collection; Paul van Esch & Partners mumok show, the artist has also restaged the last installment of her traveling exhibition Collection, The Netherlands; Estate of THE LAZY SUSAN SERIES (2010–2012) at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Olivier Foulon, Berlin; Since she started working as an artist at the end of the 1980s, von Bonin has made Sammlung Dr. G., Köln; HMT, Berlin; Olivia many different kinds of work: she uses an enormous range of media, including sculpture, Koep; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Collection installation, fabric images, murals, photography, and film. She not only presents her work Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall; Sammlung Peter Martin, Munich; in solo exhibitions but also collaborates with other artists, organizes group projects, Sammlung Michael Neff, Frankfurt/Main; produces videos and performances, throws parties, and performs as a DJ. From the Galerie NEU, Berlin; Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Gabriele Senn Galerie, beginning, her work countered the celebration of individual mastery in the flourishing art Vienna; Sammlung Schröder, Berlin; market of the 1980s with a strategy of collective production that leaves room for all kinds Sammlung Kathi Senn; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kollektion Stolitzka, Graz; of influences and ideas. Sammlung Wiese; and lenders that wish to remain anonymous. Von Bonin works within a network of personal relationships, friends, and artists, in which she is also a curator and a producer. In reference to her collaborations, she says “I am many,” sometimes “We are many.” Over the years she has become an expert at disguising her own contributions in collaborations with other artists and in works with delegated authorship. Her own contribution often lies in the selection of a work’s basic elements and in picking the people who participate: everything else can develop without knowing what form it is expected to take in the end. This mixture of ideas and other people making work helps to generate a complex labyrinth of cross-references within the pictures, objects, photographs, films, and installations that make up her exhibitions. Von Bonin questions not only her own status as an artist but also turns the notion of the artwork as commodity into a game with the forces of the art market, whose co-optation she tries—mischievously—to escape. The art world’s permanent insistence on creativity is combated by works that clearly communicate gestures of refusal, hesitation, exhaustion, and a fear of failure. Von Bonin defamiliarizes everyday objects by manipulating their proportions, altering their materiality and texture, or questioning our sense of their reality. Artistic creation is understood as something intermeshed with all kinds of cultural and social reflections. Personal experiences also make up part of this web, in a way that is often impossible for viewers to follow. Von Bonin’s exhibitions and room-filling installations deliberately can’t be understood in terms of the expressive single work. Attempts to explain every detail of her work are usually bound to fail and besides not something the artist wants. In spite of that, however, her repertoire of images, which always also has an ironic and playful note, is filled with allusions and cross-references to art and popular culture. These easily recognizable references make it straightforward to establish certain associations, but in the search for meaning you are usually left to your own devices. For the mumok exhibition, von Bonin has selected work from all periods of her artistic production. They have been complemented and extended by the inclusion of works from artists and filmmakers whom she sees as influential or important reference points. Among them are Martin Kippenberger, Cady Noland, André Cadere, Isa Genzken and Mike Kelley as well as the filmmakers Jacques Tati and George Romero. While some of her own works are present in their original form, others have been reconstructed in cardboard on a scale of 1:1, either because they don’t exist anymore or because the artist doesn’t want them to be measured against the works that inspired her. Ebene Appropriately, the artist has also included a work of Mike Kelley’s in the exhibition. Its title LUMPENPROLE (1980) (2) refers to Karl Marx’s idea of the LUMPENPROLETARIAT. 0 Stuffed toy animals are hidden under a huge knitted blanket that only suggests the shapes underneath. The act of concealing opens the doors to what is in a literal sense “swept 4 under the carpet” of the unconscious. Rather than the reception of art being an analytical mode of observation, it is here cast as a process of perception that is almost physically uncomfortable. Hard to fully decode, the work becomes an allusion to the corrupt and base 2 aspects of human nature, in which psychological entanglements, distress, compulsions, and fears develop an unpredictable life of their own. 3 9 Okka-Esther Hungerbühler‘s BLUME (2014) (3) can give rise not only to a sense of the uncanny like that in Kelley‘s works, but also to surprise and curiosity. This flower is a robot with an integrated camera; it opens slowly when a single person stands in front of it for a certain period of time. If it sees more than one person, it closes again very quickly and remains closed. If you walk toward it too quickly it also closes and judders with fear. The flower never stops 8 5 7 making gentle breathing movements with its petals. 1 In her first exhibition in 1990 at the Ausstellungsraum Münzstrasse 10 in Hamburg, von Bonin already made other artists the primary subject of her work (4). In a collaborative 6 project with Josef Strau, she filled the space with balloons bearing the names of well- known Conceptual artists, along with their dates of birth and those of their first solo exhibitions. Her own first exhibition was thus made into an exhibition about exhibitions. It made direct references to the Conceptual art of the 1960s, which resisted traditional market criteria and the interests of collectors by giving the artwork a new form. The short- lived balloons shared such an approach and responded to the booming art market of the 1980s with a renunciation of artistic authorship and the stability of value. In addition von Bonin demonstratively occupied the storefront window of the exhibition space, ironically thematizing the idea of herself as a product and the mixture of artistic and market value that comes from “selling one’s own skin.” In this way von Bonin made an emphatic gesture of self-assertion in the male-dominated art world of the 1980s. On pedestals at the entrance to the exhibition are oversized dogs and a donkey (1), seemingly keeping guard. They are sewn in fabric, but von Bonin has used expensive Leaning against a wall of the gallery is BARRE DE BOIS ROND (B16) (1974) by André Cadere. textiles from the world of fashion rather than the standard materials used for children’s toys. The artist left such bars, made of painted segments of wood, in museums and galleries The animals sit on pedestals that are called “boxes” in the work’s title, which suggests the unbidden.