Lecture date: 2007-01-17
Skyscrapers have sex and are caught flagrant dèlit. Between a pink torso (or maybe a toaster?) and a buffed-up American GI, a nun is spitting fire. Synchronised swimmers, prize-winning vegetables, and the mythic ‘making of’ Manhattan are celebrated on countless postcards, alongside a home-diagnosis kit combining a veneer of Freudian insight with the depth of Trivial Pursuit.
Welcome to the world of Madelon Vriesendorp. This exhibition-related presentation explores Vriesendorp’s 40-year fascination with bad taste, Pop, ‘Playground Surrealism’ and the touching beauty of culture’s failed objects. Here, enlightenment emerges from distraction, and seriousness surrenders to the non-serious. The talk, for the first time ever, brings together Madelon Vriesendorp’s wildly diverse practices from the past 35 years, including painting, drawing, collecting, recycling, sculpture and psychological game-devising as well as the serious business of collecting what Walter Benjamin once called ‘the trash of history’. According to Hans Ulrich Obrist, Madelon Vriesendorp is an ‘almost unknown artist genius’.
