ART-PRESENTATION: Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger-Too Early To Panic

Since 1997, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger have been co-creating in situ installations, often immersive ones, in the form of lush worlds where natural elements mix with just as many manufactured objects. Transformation, proliferation and crystallization function as fully fledged components of the work, which metamorphoses according to the chemical reactions that develop within it.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Tinguely Archive

Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger in “Too early to panic”, their solo exhibition at Museum Tinguely in Basel, have chosen to shape the exhibition space as a three-part, labyrinthine cabinet of curiosities between nature and artificiality. Visitors are invited to explore more than 25 years of their artistic universe, to partake of their evolving, proliferating and chaotic poetic transformations and to get active themselves. As soon as visitors enter, they are invited to choose one of three doors, those of the “Past”, “Present” or “Future”. Each door leads to a different chapter of the artists’ universe, which in turn leads to a multitude of potential journeys, divided into different stations. Visitors are able to cross a forest of branches, stop in a massage parlour, take a turn on a seesaw, shed a tear for aesthetic-scientific purposes, converse with beauty professionals, exercise their physical faculties on fitness machines, or lie down under a suspended meteorite. In the “Past”, visitors are journeying into the heart of the duo’s oldest creations. This very ordered universe looks like an exhibition of the most traditional kind; its arrangement of objects, videos, and two-dimensional works conforms to the established rules of museum presentation. After passing through a gardener’s shed filled with a wide variety of tools, the viewer reaches the various collections that the artists have accumulated over the years, including their seed collections “Schlafende Samen” (2002) and “Samensammlung aus Mali” (2003). The seed, embryo of all things, represents both fertility, that primary energy from which every life form springs, and roots, those linking us to our own past and to the history of humanity. “Lift-up”, is a series with 60 photographs, on a long journey the pleasure of meeting new people is shown by lifting them up by surprise. Further along, the video “The Logic of Beauty” (2010) leads into a flood of hypnotic images whose colors and patterns radiate a magnetic seduction, as if the artists had captured the essence of beauty. Beauty is again to be found in the following rooms, those behind the door of the “Present”. Each space is presented as a mini three-dimensional work of fiction, with its own set, actors, props and atmosphere. The viewer is given the leading role, that of activating the whole, bringing it to life. Each room offers an interactive experiment relating to the notion of beauty, one that combines science, humor and philosophy. Here, all shyness must be left in the cloakroom, so that one is free to be guided by the various protagonists (a secretary, a tear-collector or a personal trainer). In succession, one observes ocular secretions under a microscope and marvel at their tiny circumvolutions, do an experience that helps to see all the beauty of the world, sing into a shell and relax in the peace and quiet. Further along, it is the “Future”, with its uncertainties, its chaos, its incompleteness. The final rooms are presided over by a majestic, lush, scrubby forest. An aerial network of blossoming branches intermix the vegetable with the artificial to evoke the swarming of life. Aerial, multi-colored labyrinths, shapes dancing in space act as catalysts of dreams and imagination. This suspended forest gives onto a fitness room where the machines have been mischievously adapted by the two artists, so that exercise for the body can also gladden the mind.

Info: Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, Basel, Duration: 6/6-23/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00 (11-17/7/18 9:00-19:00& 9/9/18 11:30-17:30), www.tinguely.ch