Kai Althoff
Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland
The Zürich Kunsthalle is carpeted in pale yellow velour, while the walls are pinkish-brown or else covered with gold-sprayed sacking. Partitions covered with yellow and salmon-pink carpet act both as exhibits and structuring elements. The entrance is adorned with an ornate, lightweight construction of painted wrought-iron, a perfect composition that draws us into Kai Althoff’s work, into an exhibition that is fairly bursting with inner life symbolism. The retrospective includes wall-mounted pieces and installations from the 1990s to the present, most of them relics of his three major recent exhibitions in Los Angeles, Berlin, and New York.
In view of the artistic fascination that the show unfurls, its title, ‘Ich meine es auf jeden Fall schlecht mit Ihnen’ (In any case, I wish you ill), should not be understood as misanthropic. Instead it appears as a radically egocentric appropriation of German poet Gottfried Benn’s dictum, ‘Art is the opposite of well-meaning.’ Both Althoff’s films and the music made with his band, the areas of his practice based on collective forms of work, are absent here. The exhibition’s theme is instead that of the individual artist in search of total communication with someone of his own kind – merely an extended form of solitude. The work at the centre of the show, an installation from 2007 encased in bulging red plastic walls, feels like some solipsistic dream. Inside stand a metal structure that recalls a 1970s boutique shelving unit – from which hangs a mannequin, a few scraps of fabric and a suit – and a sculpture in the form of a table made of cast plastic in bright yellow and red. The top is divided by a wide groove containing a fragrant, milky liquid concocted out of cough syrup, body lotion and similar ingredients. It is constantly mixed by a wedge moving noisily back and forth. The smell and the noise permeate the whole gallery.
Solo für eine befallene Trompete (Solo for a stricken trumpet, 2005) comprises thousands of items from girls’’ and women’s bedrooms dating from the 19th century through to the 1970s. The work is inspired by Fassbinder’s Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972), a melodrama of unfulfilled lesbian love caught in the net of social power constellations. Despite the apparent superabundance of material, however, Althoff’s installation reflects a fetishization not of objects meant to compensate for a lack of love, but of the desired union itself. As a meta-symbol, the whole installation is sprayed with blood, a mixture of the artist’s own and that of his artist friend Lutz Braun with whom he later made a piece for the Berlin Biennale. Fragments from this later work, mainly drawings and objects from Althoff’s childhood, have been recombined into a new ensemble for the Zurich show.
The very last wall on the way round is hung with advertising posters for an Italian furniture company, printed on glossy golden paper in brown, gold and yellow, that might have inspired the exhibition’s layout. In this cosmos, everything is linked to everything and nothing is not art.
Saskia Draxler
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