Sweet nothing

In the work presented at the show, Angela Bulloch’s interest lies in the spectator’s point of view. By bringing in the authority of the object.

As she herself says, “I’ve become bored by the conventions in museums and the erect authority of the object. By lying down and looking horizontally it relativises the object’s authority... I first used them for an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunstverein, because I needed a position for people to really sit and spend time. After that the use became more a structure within the work — a vehicle to engage with physically...”

Markus Schwander has returned to his chewing gum sculptures time and again since 2000. Placed in various texts and settings, this type of sculpture has acquired a life of its own and keeps reappearing on models of meadows,of glacier crevasses or on park benches as an independent, fictitious element. This or usually found sticking to the underside of furniture is transformed through sheer scale into something so unreal that it is a breach in reality. Schwander’s sculpture in Kunsthaus Baselland is perched on a worn out park bench on a gravel bed. The three elements do not let any inhibitions toward the museum piece even emerge. The recipient who comes close to the sculpture immediately enters into a communicative relationship with it, to the extent that he/she even shares with the object its very base. Similar to Angela Bulloch’s , Schwander, too, refers to the recipient’s point of view and even puts him on the same pedestal as the object

Like Bulloch, Douglas Gordon also decided for bags as seats in his installation of 1998 and has added simple tables made of beer boxes and wooden boards. The book and film lists he has put together for his Room give an insight into the sources of inspiration for this work. One of them is by James Hogg (1824), which Gordon’s video (1995/96), borrows from. Here, the artist uses the soundtrack of a film based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1886), and slows the increases the frame rate. Several film classics such as Alfred Hitchcock’s or Bela Lugosi’s , Philip Kaufman’s as well as several historical film highlights, a selection of books from the fields of literature, art and film can also be found in the room.

Milosz Luczynski created an uncomplicated lounge for the screening of his video on very short notice. A couple of sacks for sitting, spare mattresses and two floor fans underscore the mood of the video. A mix made with two other musicians (Johann Bourquenez and Artificiel aka DJ Cisco) is the soundtrack for a visual mix of found textual, graphic and photographic, analog and digital images. Luczynski works as disc and video jockey and is also a qualified graphic designer. He uses the recordings of two live performances (in Toulouse and Perpignan), audio and visual material as well as his own creations. As Luczynski’s work shows, political attitudes seem to take recourse in a new vocabulary that is a mixture of music, dance, image and text. The artist’s main intention is to draw the recipient into his videos by means of the synaesthetic effect of multi-disciplinary media.

Flames dancing in a fireplace, a carpet and a cat — these are the three elements that are linked by RADI Designers in order to create a metaphor for the feeling of hearth and home. Woven into the red, round woollen carpet is a grey cat, and a red fireplace burgeons at another spot. Even though the latter works on electricity with artificial silk flames, each of the three basic elements in the work opens a mental sluice and brings in the memories of cosy hours spent before the warmth of a fireplace.

The recipient’s world of fantasy is also the material for Ursula Pallas’ video installation in Kunsthaus Baselland: When one enters the room one is steeped in an atmosphere of a cloudy night. Slowly the clouds begin to lift and a fog builds up, and the visitor is lifted off the ground, over the clouds. Floating in the clouds, surrounded by birds and paper planes or real ones, brings with it memories of flying — real or imaginary. The installation plays strongly on our primeval desire of exploring the materiality of clouds and feeling their softness despite the warnings from our causal thought processes — an actual attempt at it, however, would mean certain death.

Julie Hayward identiffies parallel worlds of emotion in her sculptures. In her most recent work she looks minutely at the lives of various people for whom being at home amounts to being lulled into oblivion by the TV. This passive withdrawal to a mostly fictitious world presented on the TV screen corresponds with the sculpture on the carpet comprised of a heart, a box and parts of a TV screen. “Reality, the ostensible experience of reality, is so strong that they (the people) seem to imagine that they are actually living it. But in reality they just stare on totally mesmerised, without ever coming to themselves”, writes Hayward describing what television really is. Hayward plays on these emotions and joins the individual expressions into a coherent visual sentence.

Like Hayward, Bendicht Walthert also produces psychological atmosphere in his photo scan 1.25 Meters above the sea. This image of three interlocked people lying in a meadow with various philosophical thoughts crossing their minds, thematises the act of just hanging around in the summer doing nothing. The texts in the bubbles let us participate in their thoughts: What thinks the woman in the foreground, thinks the man in the middle and thinks the second woman? “It is about lying about, being lost in dreams, about the sleep that Hölderlin calls the younger brother of death in one of his poem”, writes the artist in an e-mail.

The designer group flushlab presents two prototypes. is a multi-functional piece of furniture, that can either turn from a backrest, preferably placed on a carpet, into a stool — or into a table. The size and the lines of a chaise longue, invite one to remain in it longer. Clear lines, functionality and the precise use of forms and material characterise flushlab’s principles of design.

In pursuit of everyday design, the designer Jeremy Edwards captured with his camera in various cities of the world. These simple, anonymous objects usually made with a few movements of the hand bear witness to the functional creativity of people reacting to their immediate environment. The photographs present ephemeral traces of interactivity that even contain certain aesthetic criteria. Two square protrusions in a wall, for instance, can turn into two chairs when painted white — as the photographs taken in Barcelona prove, it suffices to mark just the backrest and connect it with the seat. This intellectual and conceptional design is contrasted with the idea of the as for instance in the Roman tyre-stool. The photographs visualise the atavistic and primeval desire to sit, rest and relax.

Is not only about furniture and design but also includes the fields of graphic, Internet, music or fashion. Concepts of colour are inseparable from each of the areas. When the artists group L/B designs. The stained glass windows conceived specifically for the exhibition by the artists group L/B show how important concepts of form, material and colour combinations are to their entire production.

Dorothee Golz’ set of furniture for the Kunsthaus Baselland addresses several senses at the same time. I like your smell too is the title of her bonbon-like objects that are reminiscent of stools, side-tables and benches. Their colourful surfaces are coupled with drawings of portraits that add a touch of narrative to the haptic experience. Golz not only addresses the desires and longings of the recipient in her drawings, for instance, of a couple fondling each other, but the resemblance to sweets also awakens memories of sucking on them. Glasses filled with Calvados are a bridge to the title that implies a dialog through use of the word . “I am interested in exposing those aspects that are concealed within the objects and are expressed by human actions; aspects that are present in the very obviousness of the objects — often identical with its function.”

“Four fifths of humanity reads a book in the reclining posture”, says Julius Deutschbauer in an introduction to his installation at Kunsthaus Baselland. This project that began in 1997 has now been shown at various exhibitions and has in the meantime also built up a biography of its own. In interviews with people selected according to personal criteria, Deutschbauer asks the interviewee about his/her unread book and, like the librarian in Elias Canetti’s , records the weather during the time of interview as a kind of reference to the outside world. Innumerable books that were bought after the interviews are arranged according to the name of the interviewed persons who did not get round to reading it at least once before the interview. Julius Deutschbauer sees himself somewhere between the chief librarian in Musil’s and the Quaker librarian in James Joyce’s . In other words, between superficial knowledge about the book based on title and index of content and the total fulfilment of duty by the one who reads. The precision with which he executes his project informs about the phenomenlogy of reading, something not written about till today. Deutschbauer has been working with Gerhard Spring on various library-associated projects for several years. One of them that has been shown at the Kunsthaus Baselland two times. Videos without sound with a text bar, a microphone and loudspeaker are available to the visitors so that they can test their own elocution talents. The texts stemming from various sources are simultaneously entertainment, decoration and message. To borrow from Aphex Twin: “I love voices but only in moderation, and preferably if they are incomprehensible.”