ABSTRACT
If we start this chapter as we ended the last one, with an image of a group of people standing around in a public space (as we might say up to no good), this time the figures are more substantial, more fixed and three-dimensional than Monika Pormale's ambiguous photographs of ordinary-seeming citizens who may turn out not to be citizens of this world at all. This time we are dealing not with photographs but a sculptural installation, although given the lay-out of the place we see the figures before finding out who or what they are. They might strike us at a distance like a group of performers – actors, dancers – who have been gathered to do or to show something, or else an audience who are here to attend to something that other people are showing and doing. As it turns out, neither designation quite fits although, as we will see when we do get close, the group are identifiable members of a world where showing and attending is very much part of what goes on. Specifically, art world people. Art lovers and art workers. Transmitters and communicators. Gallery owners and curators. Collectors. Critics. Art historians. Art theorists and cultural philosophers. Some artists too. There are even some art world children – three of them – squatting together on the floor by a far wall. They are all here, most of them with drinks in hand, cigarettes poised, as if they were attending the opening of a show, which is appropriate enough given that where they are is an exhibition room in Berlin's Berlinische Gallerie. They have been here for quite a while, I imagine since the gallery itself re-opened in its present location in 2004. They are, after all, part of the permanent collection and in fact some of them have been striking these poses and holding onto their drinks – which appear to be made of dyed wax or something of the sort packed thick into the dusty cocktail glasses and tumblers in their painted, papier-maché hands – for even longer, since 1963, when American artists Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz started assembling their multi-figure installation The Art Show. The last figures were completed fourteen years later in 1977.
