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22/10/2010

Mike Bouchet

Cobra Museum, Amstelveen

This autumn, the Cobra Museum has given free rein to the American artist, Mike Bouchet (b. 1970, Castro Valley, California) to present his vision of New Living. The result is a stimulating exhibition that Bouchet has fine-tuned to the museum's monumental upstairs gallery. An operating office for Bouchet's custom made swimming pools, an indoor golf installation, an American, prefabricated model home, and a lawn of artificial grass that has to be watered regularly. Throughout the exhibition, Bouchet's experimental interventions, notions of interior and exterior, high and low, desire and dysfunction are inverted and manifested in both humorous and deadly serious effect.

The internationally renown artist, Mike Bouchet has lived and worked in Frankfurt since 2004. New Living is his first one-man exhibition in the Netherlands and is being presented in the context of the Cobra Contemporary programme.*

The central sculpture of New Living is Sir Walter Scott (2010), a newly reworked edition of Bouchet's striking presentation, Watershed, which was initially presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In addition to this work, the artist is also presenting other recent and new work.

Since the early 1990s, Mike Bouchet has built on a consistent body of action based work. Bouchet focuses on social processes and structures and on such political subjects as the accumulation of property, consumer behaviour, capitalism and sex. In this context, he is especially interested in theoretical concepts for new, visionary approaches to domestic and residential environments and utopian forms of communal living.

Bouchet uses differing forms of expression, including painting, installation and video. The work is produced through an active, investigational working method whereby Bouchet also investigates his own role as artist and makes use of existing economical processes for production and distribution.

New Living

Sir Walter Scott (2010) is a reworked version of Bouchet's Watershed (2009) project, created for the 53rd Venice Biennale. The name refers to a type of single-family home frequently found in American suburbs and produced with inexpensive materials. Homes similar to these are a dominant form of architecture in the United States and are becoming increasingly popular around the world. For Bouchet, these prefabricated model homes in suburban neighbourhoods are a commercialized architectural fantasy: a dream house for mass consumption. Mike Bouchet used one of these kits to build a model home in one of the Venetian canals for last year's Venice Biennale. Floated on a canal, however, Watershed sank. Although the event was not planned, it was entirely in keeping with Bouchet's action-based approach. He later reworked the segments of the house with a chainsaw, reducing the construction materials to standardized measurements which he subsequently transformed into his new sculpture, Sir Walter Scott. With this new work, Bouchet continues his artistic investigation into the transformation of objects.

Sir Walter Scott is comprised of 15 separate elements, each a palette with building materials stacked on it and in turn placed on a carpet. The viewer no longer realizes he is confronting a complete house. In this sculpture many things are at work- the artists sculptural process, the (roughly) original dimensions of the raw material of a house, the creation of an interior architecture of the exhibition space, the characterizing of refuse and inversion of circumstance (via carpets), as well as the allegorical reflection back on the original significance (a house) and the temporality of architecture in general.

Bouchet's objects are the result of actions, are created by actions, or are the result of an action being contemplated. For Bouchet, a performance is not simply an action presented live by an artist. For him, the activity of his object is the essence of both his artistic considerations and possible new starting points. Bouchet does not distinguish between individual works made by the artist and industrially manufactured products. Saleability guarantees their completion and industrial manufacturing enables their distribution. He implements strategies used by entrepreneurs. With presentations of the artistic products, Bouchet undermines the myth of artistic reality. For example, in Warsaw Travel/Travel Warsaw, 2001, he arranged for real tickets to be sold from a travel agency. In other installations, he uses the products of the food, drink and clothing industries.

In a separate space in the exhibition Bouchet Pool Office (2010) serves as a sales room for swimming pools. Jacuzzis, custom made swimming pools, have become something of a trademark for this artist. The uncomfortable pools undermine in a subversive way the values of luxury and perfection. The room excudes the air of an exclusive showroom while being decorated with remnants of more destructive actions, hosts designs and models for custom pools that reflect vogues in random form architecture, and many other concepts for swimming pools.

In the Rotunda, Bouchet has installed the Colony Garden. A 16sqm plateau appears like an island floating in space - on top is a lush green lawn and Greco-Roman column that has to be watered regularly.

The rear exhibition space contains the installation Bright and White Amateur Golf. Comprised of a large reclining wood figure, reminiscent of mid-century figurative sculpture, and the remains of an action where the artist hit golf balls against the wall and worked towards completing the oak figure.

Mike Bouchet's models are at once both realistic and fictional. His interests lie in the effects of fundamental images and the social needs or desires that they generate: he achieves his goal with minimal contextual intervention.

* Cobra Contemporary is the new framework for presenting contemporary art that intentionally or otherwise continues the experimental philosophy of the Cobra movement.

Preview: Friday, 22 October, 4:00 pm
Opening: Friday, 22 October, 5:30 pm

Press contact:
Lieke Fijen, l.fijen@cobra-museum.nl, tel. +31-(0)20 5475038.

Cobra Museum of Modern Art
Sandbergplein 1 1181 ZX Amstelveen
Hours: Tues-Sun, 11:00am - 5:00pm, Closed Monday. Open other public holidays
Entrance Adult - 9,50 Cjp / students - 27 y - 5,00

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