Joseph Beuys,
Dieter Roth,
Sonja Alhäuser
at the
Busch-Reisinger Museum
Sonja Alhäuser, Exhibition Basics, 2001,
chocolate, popcorn, caramel, food dye
A concise history of the de-definition of art and its markets through abject materials is presented in this exhibition curated my newcomer Tanja Maka. Generational commentary comes into play: Beuys gives readymades new spiritual functions; through his Shit Hare, (1975) Roth debases Beuys's mythopoesis; and Alhäuser addresses both Beuys and Roth, showing that her predecessors' concepts are no longer visible through the institutional aura these works have acquired. The limits of Beuys and Roth's objects becomes apparent in this exhibition. Beuys may have extended his endeavors into the political, but his relics bespeak a certain impotence outside of academia; and Theodor Adorno's predictions about radical art's co-option remain true. By taking objects out of their historic markets, Beuys has managed in his Economic Values pieces (1977-82) only to make überware—super commodities. Otherwise, Beuys' pieces ostensibly demonstrating economic or spiritual values are cherished for a political potential accessible only through the esthetics of conceptual gymnastics.
Although curatorially juxtaposed with Germans of notable repute, newcomer Sonja Alhäuser steals this show. Alhäuser's Exhibition Basics (2001) is a subversive and effective institutional critique, functioning especially well in the venerable Harvard Museums. Her work's premise, like the exhibition's theme, is deceptively simple; her art is to be eaten by museum visitors and ultimately destroyed. Her sculptures are not bite sized, however, but scaled to the gallery space. The exhibition basics Alhäuser creates in chocolate, marzipan, caramel and popcorn are those parergonal museum objects: vitrines, bases, title cards and exhibition pamphlets intrinsic to museum presentation strategies.
Her work points to the desire evidenced by so many aspects of the museum going experience—art object consumption through admission, experience and the purchase of reproductions or tchochkes. Her literal museum pieces are especially germane in our time when museum structures, like those designed by Gehry and Leibskind, have become artworks in their own right. Eating the Basics is eating the museum itself in this transubstantial Eucharistic ritual—the religion of esthetics. The work's destruction leads to id fulfillment—we can view, smell, break, handle, and ingest the Exhibition. Of course, Alhäuser's work, like Roth's and Beuys', is about undermining the art object's preciousness and permanence. Alhäuser is most radical in this regard; especially juxtaposed with Roth's Chocolate Lion (1971), and sausage Small Sunsets (1972) and Beuys' Friday Object (1970) fishbones that have their institutional rot neutralized by curatorial care.
Alhäuser leaves documents of her process—her only capitulation to commodification. These documentary works are not evidential photographs à la Christo or Andy Goldsworthy, but compelling Rube Goldbergian watercolors deemed "recipe paintings," implying that the work can be made again according to her visual instructions. Her installation's intrinsic value, however, lay in its destruction which Alhäuser does not make into substitutional documentary works. In this facet, Alhäuser transcends her Eat Art predecessors, achieving immediate embodiment rather than deferred consumption.
William V. Ganis
Eat Art: Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Sonja Alhäuser is at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Boston, October 4 - December 15, 2001.