Sausage as an art engine

A traditional summer festival of contemporary art collections, which has been held since 2007, has opened in the GTC. The main project of this season is a small but important exhibition “ Kulturprozent . Modern Swiss art. From the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Migros . "

The Zurich Museum of Modern Art is Migros - the exact micromodel of Switzerland: in order for it to develop and collect not the largest, but, of course, significant and successful collection (in its fund only about 500 works of world artists of the second half of the 20th and 21st centuries), the whole country had to work hard. The museum was created only 18 years ago - this is one of the youngest artistic institutions in Europe. It was based on a small private meeting of Gotlib Duttvayler, the owner of the largest Migros supermarket chain in Switzerland, for whom the support of young artists was the same mission of goodwill as, for example, to sell alcohol and cigarettes in their stores. Today, each buyer Migros gives money for the maintenance and replenishment of the collection: part of the network revenue is sent to the museum’s budget. Hence its special status - not state, not private, but public. This explains the nature of the collection - experimental and extremely eclectic.

The current exhibition is the first show of the meeting Migros in Russia. The word Kulturprozent repeats the name of the large educational program of the museum, but in fact it means different - the percentage of the known Russian viewer about the modern art of Switzerland. As it is easy to guess, this percentage is extremely small. That is why the curators Irina Gorlova and Judit Velter tried to accommodate even more into the exhibition space than it was possible.

After dismantling, the dollars do not go to the museum storage, but to the wallets, returning to the cash circulation.

It seems that all generations of modern Swiss artists gathered in the tiny exhibition hall-from the veterans of the European art scenes Roman Siegner, David Weiss and Pamela Rosencrantz to 37-year-old Valentin Carron (he was last year at the Venice Biennale). Among the most impressive work is the installation of MoneyBox , Gianni Motti, created in the midst of the 2009 world financial crisis. Hundreds of banknotes with a dignity of $ 1 are hung on the ceiling in the hall. It is curious that the installation is going again each time: after dismantling, the dollars are not sent to the museum storage, but to wallets, thus returning to the cash circulation, and new banknotes are used for the next exhibition. Each time, not only the size of the installation changes, but also its cost - depending on the fluctuations in the foreign exchange market. The curators joke that this is the most inconsistent exhibit of the permanent collection of the museum.

The protagonist, or rather, the heroine of a series of photographs of Peter Foshley and David Weis - food. A beaten postmodern joke, oddly enough, manages a closed half-dead space in its own way-against the backdrop of George Bush Jr., who broadcasts from the screen (Christophe Buhel, “Excursion of the Oval Cabinet with President George Bush Ml.”), Silent Klowns (Hugo Rondinone, “ Dog Days Are O ver " ) and constantly singing naked sculpture (Lutz & Guuggisberg, " I Will REST in Pieces ” ) Slices of sausages endowed with the will of the artists with the eyes, hands, facial expressions and motion, seem almost the most animated at this exhibition.

And the most touching work here is the six -minute roller of 1995 “Mom's apartment” of the Swiss video artist Costa Veche. The imposition on fragments of popular television shows of the large frames of the apartment of their mother, rented on an amateur camera, creates the impression of a patchwork blanket of a visual chronicle of life, where everything is mixed up and everything is as if inappropriately, as in the clumsy advertisement of the early 90s.