Art that must be destroyed in a week’s time: ›Showroom 1‹ (Alise Tifentale)

Also, I’d like to take a look at one truly alternative art event taking place in Basel in parallel with Art Basel: the ›Showroom 1‹ initiative, by Latvian art historian Egija Inzule, studying in Leipzig, and Swiss artist Tobias Kaspar-Sessler, studying in Hamburg, who offer, for the attention of curators and critics, installations by young artists from Germany and Switzerland, displayed in the urban setting. The project was supported by three different cultural foundations (Christoph Merian Stiftung, Fondation Nestle pour l`Art and Gesellschaft für Gutes und Gemeinnütziges Basel), it was organised with the help of the K26 exhibition room of Leipzig and the art salon Amberg & Marti of Zürich, as well as the independent art space Marks Blond Project of Bern and Planet22 of Geneva. All the installations were created specially for this exhibition in the courtyard of a complex of artists’ workshops, and afterwards almost all the works are to be destroyed or taken apart. Accordingly, they are made of readily accessible materials, with low production costs.

The artists` studio building is located in an area purchased by the Novartis pharmaceutical company: they envisage demolishing all the existing houses and extending their production and administrative premises. In answer of this expansion, one of the installations has rearranged the letters of company’s name: a message in lights on a house slated for demolition announces Art is now (by Nino Baumgartner and Annina Matter). Two of the participants in the Planet22 independent art initiative, Peter Stoffel and Solvej D. Andersen, have created the message ›is is and not not‹ in plastic cups on a metal fence. The work itself and its verbal message is subject to the wiles of fate, to the inescapable formula of entropy, which strives to bring absolutely everything that IS to the state of IS NOT. Simplest in terms of the way it’s realised, but at the same time the most poetic, is the work ›Industrial Snow‹ (Christian Müller): sheets of snow-white A4 office paper have been laid out on the tarmac, inescapably to be ›melted‹ by the weather, pedestrians, cars and bicycles. At the centre of the yard is the work ›GDR Musical‹, by German artists Alexander Hempel and Hans-Christian Lotz. Created on the tarmac is a kind of dream (or nightmare) garden plot, with earth deposited in an irregular form, together with shiny glass balls, garden elements and the materials for a potentially possible greenhouse or half-demolished shed – the artists make use of all the illicit techniques developed by artistically oriented owners of garden plots. Even if it appears at first sight that we’re seeing something ravaged and destroyed, nothing here is accidental: water in a bucket is intended to show a reflection of another work; the glass ball reflects the sky, and so forth. ›The work is like painting in space an using objects,‹ explains Egija Inzule, the author of the idea behind ›Showroom 1‹. The other works, too, are just as frugal in terms of materials, just as bare in visual terms, and reveal their true nature only on closer acquaintance.

How successful was ›Showroom 1‹? Its creators reported that several of the right people had come to see it.