Hooligans and workers

Exhibition of European Art "Manifesto" in Zurich

Five policemen were invited to dinner at the crime museum, the table sets the sorcerer, treat the guests with a plasticine chicken, and then immerses them in a narcotic sleep. Waking up, they try to squeeze water out of the icy walkie -talkie and chase an invisible attacker around a mysterious cube, on which a plastic leopard is drawn.

Marco Schmitt's film “Legal fighters” is inspired by the “fighter angel”, guests in the film Bunuel rushed about the same in a locked mansion. Schmitt shows his cinema at the headquarters of the cantonal police of Zurich, and in the exhibition hall you can watch at the heroes of the film: a plastic leopard and a shepherd with a club in the ass and handcuffs in the teeth.

The theme of the 11th nomad exhibition of European art "Manifesto"-"What people do for money"-is quite appropriate in Zurich, a city inhabited exclusively by Dadaists and bankers. Kristian Yankovsky curator slipped a “clock with an hour -long mechanism”: he suggested that artists (according to the layman, loafers) cooperate with people who are engaged in socially useful labor, create with them for three months, while “manifestos”, joint enterprises are going on. Marco Schmitt's film was born from cooperation with the police department. The writer Michelle Welbek sorecastly decided to cooperate with doctors and put the results of his tests, cardio and radiographs created in the best Zurich clinics.

John Kessler made a huge kinetic sculpture along with the sentries by the master: feathers are inserted in the gear, the eagle trembles on the monitors, everything is spinning and striking, the world turned into hours with a cuckoo, in other words, crazy.

Among the collaborations there are exotic ones: one art project was made at the Women's Orgasm school, the other in the hairdresser for dogs, and the most impressive was the cooperation of the artist and Assenizers. Mike Boucher gathered, compressed in briquettes and put 80 tons of human excrement in the huge hall. That is how much waste was made by residents of the city of Zurich in one day, March 24, 2016. Of course, it was not easy to get rid of the smell, but the artist almost coped with this task. Although the fecal sculpture became the most discussing the work of "manifestos" long before its opening, in the hall where it is exhibited, there are not many people. I hope there is a brave collector who will acquire it and save it from destruction.

At the "Manifesto" I finally saw the famous sculpture "Clean hands": a piece of soap, which, according to its author Gianny Motti, was made of fat Silvio Berlusconi. The artist says that he managed to penetrate the clinic, where the then Prime Minister Italy made liposuction, and abduct the precious material. The clinic denies the loss, but the soap is it:

The most difficult task went to the Russian artist Evgeny Antufev, who, together with the Protestant priest, made an installation in one of the largest churches of Zurich, Wasserkerhe. Antufiev decided to turn him into the sanctuary of Vladimir Nabokov, the writer and entomologist. The crucifixion over the altar was replaced by a huge blue butterfly, tin from the candies appeared in the windows in which Nabokov kept his collection, as well as roses from the garden for the blind and the documentation of one night conducted by Antufiev in the Nabokovsky hotel in Montreo, including a piece of hotel soap (this time is definitely not from human fat).

The Norwegian photographer Torbjern Rödland created a joint venture with one of the Zurich dental offices: the dentist ruthlessly tears his teeth in his very frightening pictures, and the prostheses are mixed on plates with the remains of food.

A rather nightmare picture hangs in the dentist’s reception, in the office - not so macaber, so as not to upset the patients.

In Zurich, I stopped in the quarter of red lanterns, in the Rothaus red -brick hotel, one of the rooms of which uses the "manifesto". The artist Teresa Margolles was going to put at the poker table of the Mexican prostitutes-transgender, but one of her heroines was killed in December last year, the other was in prison, and the empty hotel room is filled with voices telling about their sad fate.

In the same quarter, on Langstrasse, several fast food establishments, which the artist John Arnold used Imbissy for his project: modest snacks will offer visitors to food from luxurious menu of state techniques and banquets. I don’t know how Arnold managed to get Embassy and Imbiss: when I left Zurich, they did not start cooking yet, but I took a picture of one of these Gourmet kiosks called Palestine-Gril.

John Arnold reminds the public that politicians eat like ordinary mortals, his photo collage eloquently testifies to this eloquently:

Russian workers are also mentioned at the exhibition. In the first hall of the exhibition, you can look at the subway workers captured by Olga Chernysheva: the workers of the gloomy, like a bastion before the assault. Such an important part of the working day as a lunch break did not go unnoticed. Human -like sculptures Sharon Lockhart are resting, as it should be ordinary builders, but next to the monitor there is a story about a more intricate method of passing a break - to take a Hallucinogenic drug DMT, which is so shortly called a "lunch of a businessman."

The “Pavilion of Reflections” is specially built for “Manifesto” on Lake Zurich: they show films, and the most eminent member of the exhibition Maurizio Kattelan and the Paralympic champion Edith Hunker arrange a performance with a wheelchair .

In addition to the "Pavilion of Reflections", there are two more large sites, but dozens of small exhibitions "Manifesto" are scattered in different regions of Zurich, so a map is required to find them. For example, at the railway station, among brochures and albums in the tourism information office, landscapes of the drowned continent mu are as unrealistic as idealized tourist Switzerland.

The ideal Switzerland from the station brochures does not exist, but Zurich is a very perfect city for such a giant and hooligan exhibition as the Manifesto. I recall Fiasco 2014, when the Manifesto was held in St. Petersburg . As one could assume, everything went back at once. It’s not even a boycott because of the Crimea, political protests and scandals, but that the country itself, and so not very friendly, and in the lousy Crimean year, which was completely scorched and grown, rejected the frivolous exhibition. There was a lot of wonderful (Louise Bourgeois sculptures in the Hermitage, the red carpet, turning into a bow in the hall, where Lenin spoke in 1917, an old car into which two giant teeth stuck), but St. Petersburg was not needed, it was an event for foreigners, half of which did not come.

Is it possible to imagine that Russian police will act in a surreal film and show it right in the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs? Is it possible to place an installation dedicated to Nabokov prepared with the participation of a priest in an Orthodox church? Even soap from the fat of Berlusconi is unlikely to dare anyone to bring to Russia, so if you want to look at him, come to Zurich.