Usually we’re the ones falling into tables. At the opening of Zurich-based artist Jan Vorisek’s first Swiss solo show at Galerie Bernhard on that dark December eve, it was tables that were falling into us. Ouch! And there we were, right in the middle of his ideas, in Rented Bodies (2015), the exhibition’s eponymous installation. Or rather, the tables were right in the middle of us, who loiter around at gallery openings, fetching beer from the fridge to the tables. Yet these tables aren’t tables. They’re Art: dysfunctional mostly, too little, too pretty, too fragile. Or do they seem so just in contrast us being too awkward, tall, dysfunctional all the time, all over the place? It’s this ambiguity that unites us and the tables, in a system of rent, time, and labor on loan from each other, to perform our respective functionalities at the gallery opening, or failing by falling. And so we see much more than tables: Rented Bodies is a whole set of fragile sculptures, 100 percent design products, sampled from gift shops, collected from thrift shops, shop windows, and workshops, meticulously arranged and re-arranged into an environmental assemblage that explores every nook and cranny of the …

A long, long time ago—in 1976—an artistic collective called COUM Transmissions, of which the active members at the time were Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter Christopherson, held a short exhibition at the ICA in London entitled “Prostitution.” Pornographic photographs of Cosey Fanni Tutti were the main element: these had previously appeared in porn magazines and were re-appropriated for the exhibition. There were sculptures with used tampons, performances of stripping, and inexpert but enthusiastically experimental music too, so it was little wonder the British press were able to find an offended Right Honourable Member of Parliament. The Daily Mail quoted Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn calling the artists “the wreckers of civilization. They want to advance decadence.” Nearly 40 years later Genesis Breyer P-Orridge continues to take aim at so-called civilization. This can be found within her/his exhibition at Galerie Bernhard, and it is an inescapable part of her/his identity. Breyer P-Orridge was born Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, changing his name to Genesis P-Orridge in 1971; the name Breyer came with marriage to the now deceased performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. Her/his artistic outlets before and after COUM Transmissions include the collective The Exploding Galaxy, the band Throbbing …