Blasenheit Macht Frei

david brown ™ and martin heine

 

Blasenheit Macht Frei is a performance/installation work designed for the garage gallery. We will fill the gallery with the artist’s breath .We have chosen to contain the breath in inflated condoms. According to our calculations, it will take 375 fully inflated condoms to achieve this. We shall blow up the condoms over three days preparatory to the opening. A bright light, installed at the back of the gallery space, will produce a pattern of floating translucent latex cylinders, visible from the street. A banner over the door will announce that those who blow are free.

On the evening of Saturday 2 February 2001, the final condoms will be inflated and inserted into the space as partof a ritual involving live music and the offer of free samples of artists breath.

As with Cutting Out The Middleman, our previous work, the installation Blasenheit Macht Frei addresses the current banal homeostasis of the visual arts through an all inclusive event which combines - inspiration/exhalation, labour, manufacture consumerism and corporate terror of all kinds, in particular the kind widespread in the local artscene. It combines sex desire and death in a sharply defined but irreducible poetic gesture, during which the self interested viewer will always be on the wrong foot.

One of the more sinister ideological achievements of the forced imposition of an arts industry model on the visual arts has been to convert the artist into a self employed wage slave, who like C19th factory workers is expected to be grateful to curators and others for the right to starve in order to work. A radical division of rewards is emerging with the artist as serf, performing exclusively for his exterminators.

Viewers unable to enjoy the spectacle of Blasenheit Macht Frei for itself should consider the condom as industrial product and container, its relation to sex — safe and unsafe — to desire and to death — the associations are endless — but their point is elsewhere. Freedom comes, not through work, but blowing empty air - artists can breathe everywhere.

(for serious reviews of local art see www.behindthe-8-ball.com)