Cyprian Gaillard the recovery of discovery March 27 – May 22 2011, KW August Straße 69 Berlin 10117, DE by craniv boyd.

Cyprian Gaillard the recovery of discovery March 27 – May 22 2011, KW August Straße 69 Berlin 10117, DE by craniv boyd.

 

Robert Deniero's Character in Meet the Parents informs Ben Stiller's character that he: "is entering his circle of trust." Trust, personal accountability and the law all come to mind at the reception desk at Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, responsibility and acceptance are the first steps all visitors who want to see Cyprian Gaillard's unmonumental monument in the institutionalized bohemian run and initiated space. Each individual of the public is required to tolerate the pain of the legal release form, in assent to enter or climb at your own risk. This is an exhibition that obliges you to sing a simple type of contract in order to see it, the law is flat and transportable like the A4 the document that permits your entrance and acknowledges your confidence in KW. Just as small and portable is the rather shoddy wrinkled color computer print out sheathed in a plastic sleeve of the pyramid of "Effes" pilsner, before the opening of the exhibition that the effective receptionists will show you, just so you know what it looked like before.

 

Let them drink Pilsner

 

"Equal to a collective amnesia in an active neglect of the sculptural form -lost in hopeless interaction with the monument – the successive destruction becomes an æsthetic of resistance." The press release predicts the future when it states this, by telling the public as it does what the result is of Cyprian Gaillard's contribution to the form of big trans medium biennial destined art discourse, with this, Recovery of Discovery, an instance of heavy handed, big-budget installed artwork sardonicism. What happens when the sentiments of Marie Antoinette "let them eat cake" cater to the fictive specter of Ideal Berlin Art Public Cyprian Gaillard has created in his own mind as a vehicle for this work with ambitions of being provocative site specific installation that is concurrently wry societal commentary and site specific local portrait or inside joke of Global transnational capital in his choice of beer, low cost Turkish migrant pilsner in Berlin. How can we have a monument in a western culture that is ambivalent to monuments to power, at times stating that monuments like that are categorically wrong, are we to believe that our democratic participation exists in our relation inside the slow destruction of the "Effes" tower? That we are good Samaritans when we participate and support what the press release claims is a "æsthetic of resistance"?  More over "the physical hangover is also an architectural one, from which one has to recover" the press release hints of the ideal public one that climbs to the top of Gaillard's Ziggurat of baby blue beer cases drinks the beer in the installation and destroys the work and forgets the geographic origins, destroys their own body as well has a hang over together with the building. How is it that reading and understanding of a work of art depends on how much of that work of art you drink?

 

 

I think not, Ziggurat of beer sounds more complicated moniker to remember than pyramid of beer, this unmonumental work has strong attributes of a site specific political campaign, where the creation of a truly crazy opening evening with all the beer you can drink vies for memorable-ness, Gaillard nominated for the 2011 edition of a young Berlin based artist prize earlier in 2010, has something at stake, is most likely a competitive international biennial track artist who wants to be remembered and talked of in Berlin in general, even if it is a kind low quality half recollected moment prior to a black out.  The stunt of "resistance" is not cultivated dumping tea into Boston harbor, or dumping green dye into a river in Stockholm in the middle of the night, it enshrining beer in Contemporary art Institute, an institution with an effective press organ and connexion to MoMA in New York City, the primary fetish object is not the beer itself, it is less of fetish object and enthrallment with the contained atmosphere of the hangover, chaos or destruction. by craniv boyd