Coney Island

New York’s Coney Island is where the Luna Park opened in 1903. It became the blueprint for many amusement parks, with their crystal palaces, haunted houses, and oversaturated, multicolored worlds. The scenographer Adrien Rovero has imagined a candy-colored environment with oversized striped walls. Just as in an amusement park, things might be too big or too small, creating a circus-like welcome to the show.


There are numerous examples of this in the main hall of the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. The first to catch the eye is the large-scale work by Jim Shaw, Labyrinth: I Dreamt I was Taller than Jonathan Borofsky (2009). Shaw studied under Borofsky, who became a highly successful sculptor in the 1980s and 1990s, especially for gigantic outdoor sculptures, to which the title ironically alludes, while also hinting at the fact that Shaw repeatedly realizes motifs from his own dreams, captured in sketchbooks, as works of art. Various stands, several meters long and high, with mounted canvases reminiscent of stage backdrops, create a very busy impression in the exhibition space. We see an oversized vacuum cleaner that operates itself and sucks up a group of people as if they were ants, a head portrait of Richard Nixon, a vaudeville dancer with the mask of a man with a red nose that oscillates somewhere between a drunk and a clown (a quotation from a Borofsky sculpture), a sack with an attached dollar sign, and a figure with holes that also resembles the style of Jonathan Borofsky’s monumental sculptures, along with ancient columns and medieval ruins. A lot is happening here simultaneously, much like in the fairground to which the chapter owes its title. In contrast to Shaw’s work, John Miller’s Thirsty Duck seems rather miniature.


Situated between the two is Family on the Beach (2015) by Isa Genzken. (The family trip to the beach, by the way, often takes New Yorkers to Coney Island). In the 2010s, sculptor Genzken worked on the group of works called Actors, created in her Berlin studio from fashion mannequins and from clothing and accessories that she added to them. These materials are draped, hung, lashed together, completed, broken, made fun of, embellished, and brought to flickering life. The constellations that ensue are a thorn in the side of any rather rigid aesthetes for whom the shrill and exuberant is a betrayal of form. In Family on the Beach, a total of seven mannequins (two adults and five children) are grouped together with scanty clothing, paint that sometimes resembles stains from sunscreen, and various toys such as balls or frisbees. Genzken turns these dolls into parodic avatars of dramatic and symbolically charged (family) constellations, between pompous appropriations and scurrilous sideswipes. This is an absurd exaggeration of the Freudian primal scene, and at the same time a family setting with the competing feelings of shame, defense, and rebellion.


In her installation Grotta Profunda Approfundita (2017), screened in a separate side gallery that visitors enter by walking through a four-meter-high sculpture of a hand, Pauline Curnier Jardin presents a film that tells the story of Bernadette, a fortuneteller from the Pyrenees. Driven by a deep religious experience, she descends into a cave and sets out in search of the truth about the origins of humanity. The story is based on that of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, who heard the Virgin Mary whisper to her in a prehistoric cave on the French-Spanish border and had a religious experience that has been passed down in tradition to this day. In the film, the Virgin Mary is voiced by the artist and represented by a chicken. After the beginning of the descent to the ​“core of everything,” the film shifts from black and white to color, and then evermore strange encounters occur. With a mixture of blood, the grotesque, and strong contrasts, the artist transfers references from B‑movies, pornography, religious customs and tales, and trash into her own visual worlds. Beyond this mythology, the artist often plays with the demi-mondes of the circus, carnival and theater, and these appear both in her large-scale film projects and also as elements in her installations, such as abstract circus tents, stage situations and the like.


Martin Kippenberger’s work consists of various components. Painted on a green door and the wall behind it is the larger-than-life likeness of silent movie star Charlie Chaplin. Also on the door and wall is a series of black-and-white photographs depicting another of the artist’s projects, taken by photographer Ursula Böckler on a trip to Brazil with Kippenberger. ​“TMB – Martin Bormann Gas Station” plays on the notion that the high-ranking Nazi Bormann absconded to South America after the war and built a second existence there as a gas station owner under a new name. In Kippenberger’s work this is all combined with a borrowing from Russ Meyer’s absurdly frivolous sexploitation film Supervixens (1976), which also features a gas station called ​“Martin Bormann’s Super Service,” Mel Brooks-style; Nazis have always deserved to be mercilessly ridiculed. Chaplin, who in his role as dictator Hynkel already made similar jokes about the Nazi régime during the war, is perhaps also a kind of artistic model for Kippenberger’s approach here, or at least a reference that can be used as a key to the work in the photo documentation. The heyday of silent film and the emergence of amusement parks like Coney Island came around the same time, which is why the work is a very fitting addition to the Graz version of the exhibition. Slapstick is also a figure of thought that played a major role in the discourse around the readymade and Dada. This is why the work is also a good transition into the next exhibition space that contains the DADA section.