MAGNA CARTA SHELF
#2
Eva Vuillemin: WITH MOUTH AGAPE LAUGHING GUTS OUT
20.3.–.8.4.16
curated by Kate Brown
“He was an old man with eyes, nose, and
a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat.
And if He ate, He had intestines. […] Either/or: either man was created in
God's image– and God has intestines!– or God lacks intestines and man is not
like him. [...] Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.” –
Milan Kundera on God’s divine intestine
“The stomach and the bowel play puppet
games with their own walls…“ – Ferenczi, “Phenomena”
For
the second edition of MAGNA CARTA SHELF LIFE, Eva Vuillemin’s installation WITH
MOUTH AGAPE LAUGHING GUTS OUT explores the body as both subject and setting.
Working with bodies at the border of attraction and repulsion as an ongoing
current in her work, the exhibition brings the inner parts of the body to the
forefront – namely, the entirety of the digestive tract. Running the entire
length of the body beginning at the mouth, the exhibition characterizes the
digestion system as the threshold between inside and outside, a transformative
site of solid and liquid, expulsion, sensation, and expression. Termed in
psychoanalysis as the “biological unconscious”, Vuillemin investigates the
theatricality of the body’s so-called “underworld”, seen an unconscious chaos
in juxtaposition to the rational mind.
Disgust
is a recurrent phrase in Eva’s work – the artist uses it as a medium to cross
boundaries between attraction and repulsion. Examining the body as autonomous
fragments, what was once familiar becomes suddenly threatening and alien.
Vuillemin amputates the large intestine and tongues from their anatomical
resting places, enlarging both to a grotesque scale. Tracing the tight confines
of 3 1/2, the large intestine is suspended upside down and magically feeds into
other off-sites: toilets below, the exterior wall beyond, the attic or roof
above.
Mining
the prehistory of 3 ½ – a few short years ago it was a storage closet for
toilet paper – the filled-in waste pipes on the floor for two toilets in effect
become more present as negative spaces. In this instant, the suspension of
belief and the psychological fourth wall are broken–3 ½ transforms from a
neutral exhibition space and is realigned with the backstage elements of
Kunst-Werke. Playing with the pragmatic and clinical nature of both internal
biology and institutional management, Vuillemin orders an outside company to
document the piping systems running down from 3 ½. With this endoscopic view, Kunst-Werke
transitions into something more corporeal– the first and second floors
approximated with the head and mouth of the building, 3 ½ and the third floor
Chora as the bowels. Framing the video, the artist’s internal body is also
documented, a soft pink contouring corroded rust.
WITH
MOUTH AGAPE LAUGHING GUTS OUT questions what is proper and improper through
both humour and hyperbole, playing with their shaky definitions and
highlighting their contingency on the given norms of society and subculture. The
West’s overall distancing of both desire and criticality and guttural, bodily
processes returns into proximity, as invisible processes stand in the light for
short while.