- Venue
- Hauser and Wirth Coppermill
- Location
Once in a while I feel so in awe of an artist or an exhibition.
Using a series of rooms which you walk through to tell you a narrative about an eastern European import/export business, Christoph Büchel did this for me recently.
Upon arriving, a hotel assistant takes your bags and signs you in and you walk upstairs, past the generic wallpaper and paintings to the first room, filled with a person's life – contacts, photos, a bible with pages marked out. Strangely there is a whole in the cupboard leading to another room with an open cage, suggesting something has escaped. Leaving this room we move through the rest of the ‘hotel', with beds in every conceivable location. You walk through some rooms which suggest a possible sex-trade business. All the rooms look lived in up until a day or two ago, with open drinks, sausages and hundreds of eggs lying around, TVs and stereos blasting at full volume.
You walk through a door leading to the giant warehouse filled with an eternity of broken fridges, computers, TVs, and other electronics. I was amazed at the scale of it all and wondered how Büchel accumulated such a vast array of objects and unneeded junk. But there was something missing. The scale was all very impressive but there was nothing to make me believe in what he was showing me.
All this changed however, ‘finding' a secret passage which involved crawling into a hole inside a crate to find a small passageway filled with prayer mats leading to a lightless room, the walls filled with page 3 girls and a chairs each with a bible on it. What I believe changed here was that it was a place in which it felt you weren't meant to discover, and in its dankness I felt like I was intruding into somebody else space.
Leaving this, we found a hole inside a fridge which had a crooked ladder leading down into a small pathway carved out of the earth. Crawling through here you find the biggest discovery in the exhibition, a piece which seems so exciting you can't help but smile. This piece alone gives justification to the exhibitions title. You feel like an explorer who has been found something he's been searching for his whole life, the feeling is incredible. If you'd have gone into a gallery and seen this, it wouldn't have made much of an impression but because of the huge effort you go to to get to this point, you feel a sense of admiration and affection for everything around you.
This isn't the end of the work but it's the climax, what follows is still quite lovely and explains everything you've seen.
Simply Botiful feels very much like interactive theatre or walking into a film set after all the action has taken place and everybody has gone home. In this way, it works similarly to the Lala Land Paradise exhibition by Paul McCarthy that appeared in the same warehouse a year earlier, only the gore and performance element has been left far more to the imagination.
This work, for all its depth and complexity is a beautifully simple work when stripped down to its bare bones and those that dare to immerse themselves in it will be thoroughly rewarded.
Samuel Mercer is an artist and film-maker based in the U.K.
