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Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne: R�my Markowitsch - The Onion Option - 1 Sept 2007 to 13 Oct 2007 Current Exhibition |
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R�my Markowitsch, "The Onion Option I (Made in China)" 2007
polyester, acrylic paint, light, 403 x 215 x 170 cm. Courtesy: Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne |
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R�my Markowitsch � "The Onion Option" � A Game of Chance Money is not only an existential necessity, it is also a real thrill to have money and make it grow. And there are few things that set the pulse racing faster than dealing on the stock exchange, particularly in options that can generate enormous profits or losses. So many innate human traits combine and play into this - an instinct for hunting, a love of gambling, a passion for collecting, desire and the devil-may-care streak that is in all of us. It is a game of chance that can become highly addictive. In his most recent installation The Onion Option, R�my Markowitsch explores this trait, which is also the motor driving capitalism. As in all his projects, in The Onion Option he combines a huge diversity of references to create an imaginary chamber of associations; and the door to this chamber is opened by the sensuality and seductiveness of these objects and pictures. R�my Markowitsch's works arise from his engagement with the realms of literature and research, travel and discoveries, the appropriation of things alien, colonialism, a passion for collecting and addiction. At the same time they reflect on his chosen media of photography, books, video and language. Light - transluminating, illuminating, elucidating, enlightening - plays a central part in his work. For the series Nach der Natur/After Nature (1991-98) and On Travel (2004), for instance, Markowitsch made expeditions into pictorial worlds that he found in books. In the metaphorical and the literal sense, he shed light on and through these photographic interpretations of the world, photographing motifs on two sides of the same page so that they are superimposed. All his photographic works are guided by the same principle. When it came to Bibliotherapy (2001-03), with the huge, glowing sculpture Bonsai Potato at its centre, R�my Markowitsch was engaging with the book as a repository of knowledge, feelings and experiences. While Bibliotherapy and On Travel variously explore the archetypal human desire to accumulate knowledge and reflect on reading and looking at pictures as imaginary journeys, passions and addictions, You are not alone, vol. 1 & 2 (2004) also examines states of consciousness and human perceptions under the influence of alcohol, an entirely legal drug. In The Onion Option, realised in Beijing and Berlin, Markowitsch used onions as an analogy for the business of options trading, a game about the promise of raking it in. Markowitsch picks up on the attitudes of the players in this game and on the huge machinations it involves in this his most recent work, which will premi�re at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing. For all its simplicity, the onion not only features in almost all everyday meals; in places such as India, the cost of onions can affect even the most elevated political circles; no government can afford social unrest due to rising food prices. But onions are not just a potential source of nutrition, in the plant world - as tulip or lily bulbs - they also have the option of becoming flowers - a wonderful metaphor. And: the first stock exchange crash in history, in 1637, was brought on by the collapse of the tulip trade in Holland. The tulip bulbs that came to Europe from China via the Ottoman Empire and the onions that we can eat - as reified potential and a commodity - are used by Markowitsch as symbols of the way that human beings treat things and values; at the same time they also provide enough comedy to keep pathos at bay. The centrepiece of The Onion Option is a polyester sculpture some four meters in height, which is illuminated from within. It is an onion, which - gigantically enlarged - has been transformed into a sensual, strangely appealing object. It is not by chance that R�my Markowitsch takes an onion that is half raw and half cooked as his starting point for the sculpture. Thus the associations suggested by the work arise both from the notion of rawness (sheng in Chinese) as a symbol for things uncivilised, barbaric and alien (sheng ren = "raw" people, strangers) and the notion of food cooking (shu in Chinese) as a symbol for all things civilised and familiar (shu ren = "cooked" people, acquaintances, friends). In stock-market circles the term 'bullish' refers to an anticipated rise in prices, an increase in profits: in short, good luck. In the tulip series Bullish on Bulbs, R�my Markowitsch pursues his experiment with ambivalent beauty and sexiness - that's to say, market-worthiness - and relates it to the stock exchange by giving the title of a particular kind of option to each picture, as in an American, Asian or European option. We all know that chopping onions can make us cry but the failing onion option, which features as a motif in The Onion Option, can bring tears to one's eyes just as effectively, not to mention the sudden obsession for spider lilies that created a boom, followed by a mini-crash, in the Chinese stock exchange in the 1980s. However, boom and crash were triggered by the Chinese plant jun zi lan, in English the bush lily and in German the Klivie, so that R�my Markowitsch has based his work Spider Lily meets Jun-Zi-Lan on a fruitful misunderstanding: fruitful because of the erotic and pleasurable connotations of red spider lilies. The misunderstanding has led to a video image, framed in a cloth sculpture of red spider lilies and bush lilies and showing a gushing shower head wrapped in fabric, while the soundtrack plays audio clips from American, Asian and European films where people can be heard weeping. It makes one both shudder and laugh: the capitalist system is ambivalently and diversely bound up with feelings of desire, power and helplessness. Buyer and seller, good luck and bad luck need each other. And so it is that in the art market people seek not only profound insights and intellectual delights but also added value, in other words, an increase in their economic prowess. In The Onion Option R�my Markowitsch addresses this complex of emotions that is both vulgar and deeply complicated with analytical irony and focuses on the mechanisms and drives that sustain the momentum of these economic machinations. The Onion Option is a sensory and sensual analysis of the psychic processes that underpin our crazy dealings with anything and everything; as such it is a visual essay on the optional thinking that is also the motor of life. Nadine Olonetzky, June 2007 Translation: Fiona Elliott |
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