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The secret sex life of appliances
A witty sculpture show offers an acerbic look at consumerism
 | | Common objects become charged with sexual and social connotations in this amusing and provocative show. |
By Mimi Fronczak Rogers
For The Prague Post
March 10, 2005
Absurdist humor, social critique and mischievous semantics are some of the hallmarks of the half-dozen new sculptures by Kristof Kintera. The 31-year-old artist has recently returned to Prague from a two-year stipendium at the prestigious Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where he created this ensemble of electric-kinetic objects that expand upon themes of consumerism and communication seen in his previous works, this time bringing a measure of gender politics into the mix.
Consumer goods and the buzzwords of advertising have long been part of Kintera's creative vocabulary, as is the case with many other Czech artists from the 1990s generation. In this show he also utilizes his theatrical experience (he is a founder of Hidden Creative Unit), assembling a cast of characters — a vacuum cleaner, drill, electric meat slicer, computer mouse and others — to present a darkly funny and imaginative fantasy scenario of what goes on at a hypermarket or DIY emporium once the doors close for the night.
The show starts by immediately instilling a sense of raw energy and danger. As viewers are reading the signs warning them to keep their hands off the sculptures and an eye on their kids, they hear a cacophonous chorus of whirs, whines, banging noises and the crackling buzz of It's Beginning, a plugged-in electrical cord attached to nothing, that surges perilously with power every few seconds.
This is a prelude to the main act in the next room — an orgy of copulating consumer appliances. In Natura (Coitus bizzarus) involves an electric knife fitted with a plastic phallus that rhythmically plunges in and out of a replica of a watermelon, sometimes revving its motor belligerently while poised over the fruit, and sometimes purring as if in post-coital satisfaction. Its object of desire, the melon, is neither "natural" nor "real" but a mimetic device, rather like artificial silicone "melons."
Conflict of Interests consists of a yellow vacuum cleaner that cycles on and off in a high-pitched whine while its hose lies inertly on the floor, sucking up nothing. Periodically, an electric drill energetically humps the vacuum with a lower-pitched whir until it winds down with a comic wiggle. This odd coupling of appliances from the "feminine" and "masculine" domestic spheres (Kintera ironically uses a Progress brand vacuum cleaner for the piece) is at once intimate and completely out of sync.
Kristof Kintera: Super, Natural, Special, Real
at Galerie Jiri Svestka. Ends April 5. Biskupsky dvur 6, Prague 1-New Town. Open Tues.-Fri. noon-6 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. |
In the next room is Something Electric, a coconut with a motor inside that creates quite a ruckus as it bounces around on the gallery's concrete floor. It vibrates in place, seemingly wanting to break free from the electric cord that keeps it tethered to its confined space.
In the final room is Unhappy Coincidence, a computer mouse impaled by a ski pole. The lack of action (the mouse's cable writhes without much energy) of these two weirdly paired objects provides an anticlimactic conclusion to the high drama at the beginning of the show, turning even conventional dramatic presentation a bit on its head.
While some of Kintera's best-known works — Talkmen and I'm Sick of It All, for example — make language (in the form of sometimes-nonsensical monologues) an integral part of the piece, these new works speak in an international visual language — about sex, power, aggression, gender politics and consumerism. The title of the exhibition uses advertising buzzwords that are readily understood across cultures. Visual puns — from milder anatomical terms such as "melon" and "pole" to brutish synonyms for sexual intercourse such as "drill" and "impale" — add a further layer of semantic reiteration.
Kintera brings the curtain down with I Can't Sleep, a figure huddled in a sleeping bag as far away as possible from the aural assault coming from the other rooms. Vapor rising from its head, it seems to have short-circuited from the onslaught of stimuli — which may be the real danger those signs are warning us about.
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