Christoph Büchel Gianni Motti
Capital Affair
August 23 – September 29, 2002
Helmhaus Zürich
www.helmhaus.org
Preview: August 22, 2002, 6 pm
Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti both cultivate an artistic praxis essentially concerned with the production of cultural values and mass communication. Invited by the Helmhaus Zürich, they have collaborated on a project, as they did earlier this year for the exhibition “Cadeaux diplomatiques” at the Kunstmuseum Thun.
For their project at the Helmhaus, the two artists decided to use the CHF 50,000 budgeted for their exhibition by hiding it in the galleries of the Helmhaus in the presence of a notary. The amount of the budget becomes the property of the person who finds it. Visitors do not find themselves confronted with a work of art, which has a use and exchange value, but rather with the actual production costs, that is, the budget of the exhibition: a work of art that is not there.
Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti thus create an encounter with emptiness, with a work whose existence is still potential. The exchange that takes place among the visitors in the exhibition galleries becomes the raw material of this artistic project.
The project not only poses the question of the value of art for society. It also poses, more generally, the question of the essence and value of art per se: what do we expect of an exhibition? Beauty, endorsement, social and political relevance? Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti’s project is a caesura in the conventional cycle of changing exhibitions. Both generous and confrontational at once, the artists delegate creativity to the public. Thus activated, visitors generate their own performance. The (supposed) absence of art is compensated by social contact, by the traces left behind by the public, by mental and physical activities such as the intense study of the empty galleries.
The question of money is a particularly explosive and political issue in Switzerland, the country of bank secrecy known for its discretion in dealing with finances. One week before the exhibition closes, on September 22, 2002, the people of Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on the use of the country’s surplus gold reserves.
Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti currently rank among Switzerland’s most highly wooed living artists. With their conceptual approach, they investigate the routine and ritualized workings of the “operating system of art”. To this end, they modify or abandon its customary territories. Inventive and efficient, subversive and provocative, they operate in the chinks between art and society in order to examine the premises and possibilities of art and, in particular, the medium of the exhibition.
Simon Maurer, Curator, Helmhaus Zürich
Further details: www.helmhaus.org
E-Mail: info@helmhaus.org
Exhibition offices: Tel. +41-(0)1-251 61 77
