In the middle of a tire change with Allan Kaprow
Rahel Puffert

11.11.2007


Yesterday I was here another time to look at what would no longer be able to be seen today.
When outside the contrast of the two shop window looks is urged. Pure white, strikingly lovely wedding dresses next to heaps of black tires. Despite the strikingly cool neon lightning the room is well heated when one enters and has the intense smell of rubber that reminds of summer jobs in the tire factory and visits in the garage. In hilly chaos the tires are spread all over the floor. No escape - one has to face the game: step on it, buckle, look for balance,  declare instability to be the game. Since the opening obviously several visitors have taken part at the tire throwing, Michel Chevalier has supplied work gloves. With different verve, pressure and power again and again heavy tires flew through the room, hit the white art room walls. The circle like traces, profile tracks are witnessing this.
Old used tires here, passing cars double: outside and by video picture in realtime projected into the room. At a certain height the movements of the people present in the room or the tires bound against the wall produce disturbances in the video picture.
Realtime shots and pre-produced pictures intermingle. Then graphical lines appear in the video picture. The passing cars are analyzed according to frequency and speed by micro-processor.
Playfullness triggers computer-driven processes.The movements outside and inside are combined. Actual physical moving and moving pictures are interlocked. Then these strange sounds. Street sounds, recorded and synthesized with open source programs. Who interacts with whom?  Who directs?....
 Also inside one only seeminly has the control over things. At the opening one got by force surprisingly close to one another. The tires didn't really allow the  polite distance or ridiculed it.  Tightly crowded one stood at the bar within the small free area. Or one escaped to the basement. The here available 30 charge-free copies of BULLSHIT have all been taken in the last 10 days. Now being distributed in flats in Hamburg. New copies that can be taken are in the basement.

The issue, published in 1991 by Gino di Maggio and Allan Kaprow at the occasion of a two-part exhibition in Mailand and Napoli, does explicitly claim not to be an arts magazine neither an exhibition catalogue. BULLSHIT. The artist utilized the documentation to comment and reflect on his method of working by looking back, to develop once again a theory of the Environment. Here it becomes clear what one could sense in
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