at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich
It’s hard to be an old institution and reinvent yourself enough to still keep your cool; just look at David Bowie. Bowie’s pulled this off with the utmost grace over the last 4 decades, but the legendary Cabaret Voltaire isn’t doing too poorly itself, and compared to their 10 decades, Bowie’s still a spring chicken.
Keeping that in mind, some people don’t see a challenge as a challenge unless it’s a REALLY BIG challenge, and to be clear, here keeping a 100-year-old avant-garde arts venue at the forefront might comparatively be called moderate on the challenging scale. What would tip it into the REALLY BIG range would be to use that venue to present contemporary interpretations of a concept that itself is another old institution, namely Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, which might be most simply described as the artist’s radical extension of his artistic vision on the interior structure of his family’s Hannover house in the 20s and 30s. Here’s where it gets really interesting, however, and also where we can be glad that time doesn’t just heal wounds, but also smoothes over differences. Where Schwitters’ application to join Dada was once rejected on the basis that he was too preoccupied with aesthetics, nearly 100 years later we can see that he really was working in the same direction as his officially Dada contemporaries.
In the first half of Merz World, or until June 19th, you will encounter Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale, and new interpretation of the “Merz Principle”, according to which a seemingly random agglomeration of things comes to form a whole, as a means of exploring the idea that the challenge of producing architecture in urban spaces lies in basing it on the behaviour of its users. Starting June 19th, Tomas Saraceno will intervene and alter Friedman’s structure into his own under the name Cloud Cities, in which the behaviour of clouds is taken as a model for the behaviour of houses. Can houses really change their shape and position like clouds do? Stop by Cabaret Voltaire to find out how!
The exhibition runs until August 21st and you can find Cabaret Voltaire at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zürich. Whether you make it to Zurich in time for this show or not, Cabaret Voltaire’s duDA-Bar is open every day (expect Mondays) to welcome you for a drink. Before you get totally duDA-ed, head over to Hotel Greulich for their fantastic restaurant. They have beds too, if you need one.
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