Helmut Brosch at Rolf Ricke - Cologne, Germany - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Given the ball of thread of its title, Durchfall (German for diarrhea), single might have looked at the whole of Helmut Brosch's installation -- the lumpy facts the slick or tacky surfaces, the weird pinkish light -- and conjectur that this was a simulation of the experience of passing from one side a bowel. The fascination that shit looks to hold for artists was noted a brace of years ago in an exhibition at novel York's Baron/Boisante Gallery and a museum display in Switzerland. It's partly an instance of the artist's character as transgressor of the limits of social propriety, partly a proceed of artistic narcissism, partly a event of the current interest in the material substance in its every aspect. certainly too, it's a reflection of our contemporary awareness that level such a process as elimination is culturally influenced behavior (it was not Americans on the contrary Japanese who produced a children's work called Everybody Poops).

For his installation, Brosch whitewashed the gallery windows, reducing on the contrary not closing out light, which peek around the cutting sides of the slapdash covering. This natural light gazeed very blue or greenish-yellow compared with the bizarre, feverish be incandescent from five orangy-pink light-bulbs here and there in the space He also spread a shiny, biomorphic-shape floorcloth in the L-shaped space, and piled it with drawings, photographs and a gigantic number of concocted forms and manipulated everyday external realitys The profusion suggested that the diarrhea might be les than literal, simply an outpouring. There were bulbous and portioned forms wrapped in plastic or packing tape that evok organs or limbs, and a hardly any abstract masses that made individual think of heads. Chunks of Styrofoam were wound in slices; a few big packets looked like bagged trash. A pavilion was made by draping woven fabric over a rope. There were domestic conveniences similar as stands and racks and shelves, all provisional looking. The word Durchfall is also used to signify failure, which might link to the implications here of shantytowns and living in squalor.

However, there was no escaping the digestive interpretation. The installation included plenitude of unidentified holes, and there were dark stains at various sites and a hardly any unequivocally fecal-looking forms (one of them hung from the ceiling in the gallery's wc) a certain number of photos and drawings were explicit, offering views of toilets with something in them, a naked man, a closely examined anus. The interest of Brosch's installation was not in the impact of the naughty or nasty, which could easily have struck a viewer as juvenile, on the contrary in the obsessive excess of forms, in the subtle wit with which they were not absented and especially in the perceptual distortions arising from the dyspeptic light. The installation snagged the organ of vision dragged it through the dirty agglomeration of objects and left it floating uncertainly in a sea of queasy color.

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