When in 2011 Christoph Büchel inaugurated for the Hauser & Wirth gallery the Piccadilly Community Centre, it was not uncommon for, among the participants of the guided tours in the exclusive London exhibition space, someone to wonder about the nature of the alleged performers intent on eating in the bar of the community center set up by the artist. The directors who led the visits did not fail to point out that no one was acting but everyone had turned up spontaneously, looking for a meal. Visiting pawnshopthe immersive installation created by the Swiss artist for the Prada Foundation in Venice, you are reawakened by the hypnotic succession of objects piled up everywhere, in the same circumstances.
Some workers discuss how to arrange the goods still in the warehouse, others move those already on display. In the comings and goings that arise, it is natural to give way, wondering how long the exhibition will preserve the current composition. The absence of actors, in these circumstances, should always make us doubt the presence of a scenography and manifests the principles underlying Büchel’s artistic practice, who made truth a method and reality his medium.
A failing pawnshop fills Ca’ Corner della Regina
The five-dimensional installation, unraveling across the ground floor, mezzanine and first floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina, resembles, in the guise of a pawnshop about to go bankrupt, the Monte di Pietà of Venice. Büchel’s project expands its philosophical infrastructure starting from the architectural archeology of the palace, which, from 1834 to 1969, housed the ecclesiastical institution dedicated to providing loans to the less well-off, from which the exhibition takes its name.
From the start of this disorienting experience you are greeted by a multitude of incoherent objects. At the entrance, the door of a Guardia di Finanza car stands out and there is an opening onto a narrow corridor blocked by antiques, which in the next room will invite the visitor to be explored to verify that, having turned the corner, the illusion – if we can still talk about this – it does not go extinct. We continue towards the main room on the ground floor, where some camp beds and several display cases with the historical documentation of the building are arranged, contingent on two oxymoronic spaces.
The first is a chapel, set up with benches equipped with kneelers and a confessional, from whose ceiling and walls hang wheelchairs and crutches; enveloped by the soft light of candles, the delicacy and intimacy of the spirit is preserved in the dim light of poor lighting, in which the power and richness of the Church are consumed together with prayers. The second is the internal courtyard of Ca’ Corner, bright and everyday, flooded with dented bicycles and a mortar hidden by a bush. Here only the rags spread on several levels prevent a glimpse of the sky, contrasting with the religious claustrophobia of the place of worship.
In the mezzanine, another universe, which moves away from Venice towards the delocalized frontiers of digital non-places, is introduced passing through a casino, the room from which an alleged influencer communicates with her distant spectators and even rooms full of screens. Video surveillance sites that transmit images in real time from Ukraine to Palestine, where one of the most precious values we possessed, privacy, becomes a low-cost commodity, with an infinitesimal weight compared to the cryptocurrency mined by the wall of GPUs that can be meet along the way.
Finally, on the top floor, we reach the apotheosis of visual saturation mediated by these random objects. Weapons, jewelry, toys and works of art – all camouflaged so they are indistinguishable – are stacked in the “Queen of Pawn” pawnshop. It stands out among all The Diamond Maker: a briefcase full of artificial diamonds, produced by compression of organic matter obtained from the creations that Büchel never sold.
At the root of human society: debt
Pawnshop takes the form of a project that reflects on debt, the foundation of society and an instrument of domination, control and coercion, through an intricate relational plot, investigating the socio-cultural ties that underlie it. It does so by drawing on multiple realities, without ever intending that there is a single one, while presupposing that the mechanism underlying the desire for wealth and emerging power is endemic to our species. As such it unites the distant places that are mentioned in the work, without context other than current events.
One detail highlights the fact that the microcosm built by Büchel did not generate itself: the freshly printed posters attached to the windows to advertise the pawn shop on the top floor, vivid in contrast with the time-worn items for sale. The artist draws directly from reality and although the credibility of all the details cannot be criticized, in the spaces of the Prada Foundation the mammoth provocative device is disillusioned. Because art and its worlds, as taught by the lesson of Hans Haacke and the other exponents of Institutional Critique, despite their subversive aspect, are often exploited to preserve the status quo.
