Into Me / Out of Me
KW Institute
Berlin, Germany
137 international participating artists
26 November 2006 – 28 January 2007

As seen by Rea Cris

This massive exhibit spans across forty years of art practice and includes 137 artists. The exhibition, now showing at the KW Institute in Berlin first started at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre, MoMa affiliate in New York and has been curated by Klaus Biesenbach. The exhibit is a historical retrospective of the way in which artists have explored the different ways of passing into, through and out of the human body. Biesenbach has attempted to separate the huge amount of work into different categories; namely focusing on three primordial actions of the human body, metabolism, reproduction and violence. Within these categories you have works addressing specific issues such as eating, drinking, shitting, sex, birth, illness and mutilation.
Therefore how could we not expect an appearance from some usual suspects? Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit from the 1960s, Jeff Koons’ photographs with his ex-wife porn star Cicciolina, Judy Chicago removing a tampax, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi, a version of Mona Hatoum’s Foreign Body, Shigeko Kubota’s performance still from Vagina Painting, the 1970s feature Lynda Benglis’ dildo advert for Artforum, Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll and Chris Burden still from Transfixed where he nailed himself to a Volkswagen. Also not forgetting Nan Goldin, Gilbert & George and the Chapman brothers, some bloody Herman Nitsch and of course Orlan.
And these artists are just the tip of the iceberg; the exhibition is massive. Some other ‘household’ art names are present, but get lost, such as Matthew Barney, Andy Warhol, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Richard Hamilton. There are those pieces, which stand out, fighting to steal the attention. Marcel Dzama masked girls, joyfully slicing their wrist merged well with Kara Walker Victorian style black silhouette doing dirty tricks. Henry Darger’s scrolls are a pictorial history of an imagery battle between soldiers and children, the battlefield littered with hanged children, their intestines splayed around them. They reminded me of a more sinister and disturbed version of the outsider artist in the movie Junebug. Brazilian artist’s Vik Muniz’s chocolate rendition of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper was amusing as was Alex McQuilkin’s video Fucked (2000) where a girl attempts to put her makeup on while ‘being taken from behind’. Sigalit Lanau’s video Barbed Hulla (2001) is mesmerising as you realize that the lure of torture may not be dead as you watch waiting for blood to appear. Patty Chang’s two videos run in reverse as kissing her parents recreates an egg they both shared. Ulay’s (born Uwe Laysiepen) collaboration with Marina Abramovic in the video Rest Energy (1980) shows them, holding a bow and arrow taunt, between them, the arrow dangerous pointed at Abramovic. As the tension builds, they give away no indication about the conclusion.
With an exhibition this size and a cast this large, the exhibition runs the risk that the manner of curation will steal the attention away from the exhibited art. Focusing on the merits or disadvantages of how the exhibit was curated rather than the choice and range of content within it is an easy trap to fall into. The curator himself fuels the thought when his name is sandwich into the prestigious place beneath the title and before the artists, in pink on the exhibition poster. Yet this retrospective is relevant. Disturbing and taboo subjects can easily be swept under the rug and its good that someone has dusted them off and shown us “here is what we have done”…now what have we learned and what are we going to do? The exhibition seems to thrive on the extreme of every spectrum, which in turn demonstrates how not unnatural it is. Human are still functioning on their primordial instincts. There is no right or wrong, no better than thou. And what about basic art history lessons? What disturbs you is not bad art, on the contrary its probably great art. Art (and life) is not only Van Gogh’s vase of sunflowers.

http://www.kw-berlin.de/
http://www.ps1.org/