2010–2013: BAWAG CONTEMPORARY
Mike Bouchet
Retreat
6/5/2010—30/6/2010
Using a variety of media, Mike Bouchet, who was born in California in 1970 and lives in Frankfurt am Main, investigates social phenomena and processes of our time. Whether he develops his own diet coke and ships it to China or paints coke pictures with it, has jeans sewn for Carpe Denim in Colombia and lets them rain down from the sky on the very place they were made as an American promise of happiness, or mirrors the foam of luxury and success in the design of his Jacuzzis: he always finds apposite pictures for complex contexts in his performances, installations, and sculptures.
Redefining concepts of authorship, ownership, and aura, Bouchet has developed an unmistakable style. His works, which may strike us as mere ironical appropriations at first sight, register the prevailing themes of our time: the predominance of entertainment, sex, and consumerism, as well as the obsession with celebrities. Whatever his approach, Mike Bouchet is concerned with a political issue: the question which value is attached to an object, an artist’s work, or the artist himself. A question he raises in playing with what is a commodity or might be one at least.
The BAWAG Contemporary exhibition Retreat will be presenting a number of recent works by the artist. The title of the show plays with the various meanings of the word which revolve around security and temporary withdrawal – whether of an individual or a group, whether for spiritual, health or life-style reasons, whether motivated by sociological, ecological or – not least – strategic reasons in corporate business.
The presentation assembles different facets of this context of retreat such as hamburgers, Jacuzzis, and a golf facility: facets with which various social phenomena and fantasies are linked. Fantasies about gold, for example, in the case of Canburger, a project for which Bouchet had 10,000 hamburgers in golden tins produced in East Germany in 2007. While Canburger only alludes to the objects’ use in the form of a quotation, as it were – the hamburgers having become inedible in the meantime – the Jacuzzis are basically usable. Bizarre feel-good sceneries for Silvio Berlusconi and the Olsen twins are the most recent products in this series in which Bouchet has been focusing on the whirlpool as an American status symbol and treating the role of the artist-entrepreneur with irony since 1998.
Being thrown back on free enterprise, the artist-entrepreneur finds himself forced to produce also lighter, more current commodities which can be repeated or varied if necessary. Both the Jacuzzis and the indoor golf facility play with the issue of participation. The golf setting extends the wellness promise satirized in the Jacuzzis to a real offer. Combining off-color and richly allusive aspects, the installation explores the manifold relationships between art, performance, and entertainment.
Curator: Christine Kintisch
Press: Christina Werner
Redefining concepts of authorship, ownership, and aura, Bouchet has developed an unmistakable style. His works, which may strike us as mere ironical appropriations at first sight, register the prevailing themes of our time: the predominance of entertainment, sex, and consumerism, as well as the obsession with celebrities. Whatever his approach, Mike Bouchet is concerned with a political issue: the question which value is attached to an object, an artist’s work, or the artist himself. A question he raises in playing with what is a commodity or might be one at least.
The BAWAG Contemporary exhibition Retreat will be presenting a number of recent works by the artist. The title of the show plays with the various meanings of the word which revolve around security and temporary withdrawal – whether of an individual or a group, whether for spiritual, health or life-style reasons, whether motivated by sociological, ecological or – not least – strategic reasons in corporate business.
The presentation assembles different facets of this context of retreat such as hamburgers, Jacuzzis, and a golf facility: facets with which various social phenomena and fantasies are linked. Fantasies about gold, for example, in the case of Canburger, a project for which Bouchet had 10,000 hamburgers in golden tins produced in East Germany in 2007. While Canburger only alludes to the objects’ use in the form of a quotation, as it were – the hamburgers having become inedible in the meantime – the Jacuzzis are basically usable. Bizarre feel-good sceneries for Silvio Berlusconi and the Olsen twins are the most recent products in this series in which Bouchet has been focusing on the whirlpool as an American status symbol and treating the role of the artist-entrepreneur with irony since 1998.
Being thrown back on free enterprise, the artist-entrepreneur finds himself forced to produce also lighter, more current commodities which can be repeated or varied if necessary. Both the Jacuzzis and the indoor golf facility play with the issue of participation. The golf setting extends the wellness promise satirized in the Jacuzzis to a real offer. Combining off-color and richly allusive aspects, the installation explores the manifold relationships between art, performance, and entertainment.
Curator: Christine Kintisch
Press: Christina Werner