Dylaby

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Poster for Dylaby
Piet van der Have / Martial Raysse , 1962
pressure
100 × 70 cm
The Gielijn Escher Poster Collection, Amsterdam

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Dylaby, a dynamic maze was an experimental exhibition of six artists Jean Tinguely , Daniel Spoerri , Robert Rauschenberg , Martial Raysse , Niki de Saint Phalle and Per Olof Ultvedt that from 30 August to 30 September 1962 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam took place .

prehistory

After Willem Sandberg , director at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in Zurich in 1960, interested Daniel Spoerri in an exhibition of kinetic art in his museum, Spoerri began planning the same. During the planning period, Pontus Hultén , director of the then two-year-old Moderna Museet in Stockholm, reported his interest in taking over the planned exhibition for his museum, bringing in all sorts of ideas for the selection of artists and objects. Hultén, who had been friends with Tinguely for years, compiled the catalog, and Spoerri was mainly concerned with the selection, organization and furnishing of the Bewogen Bewegungsing exhibition, which opened in the Stedelijk Museum on March 10, 1961 and which also featured the ZERO artist Heinz Mack , Otto Piene and Günther Uecker took part and which was called Rörelse i Konsten in Stockholm . Daniel Spoerri's proposal to have a special room designed by some artists led, among other things, to an environment by Jesús Rafael Soto , a wooden room sculpture by Ultvedt hanging on the wall and a large sculpture by Jean Tinguely attached to the facade of the museum and his designed fountain for the pond in the museum garden. Especially his hall full of moving machines completely upset both the exhibition visitor and the press.

In August 1960, Sandberg contacted Jean Tinguely to realize his plan for a labyrinthine construction to combine elements of amusement park and theater, exhibition and ghost train. For a world exhibition planned for the same year in Switzerland, Tinguely, together with Daniel Spoerri and Bernhard Luginbühl, had already designed an “idea sketch” and a model in which the visitor was walked through a hundred meter high “dynamic labyrinth” in which there was none would give more perceptible works of art and which should "receive the visitor like a fair and shake them up with an exciting mixture of extreme, visual, physical and psychological sensations".

exhibition

The Stedelijk Museum, the exhibition space

Initially, a “labyrinthe dynamique” was planned for May to June 1962. The participating artists were Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jasper Johns , Robert Rauschenberg , Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely , at times also Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers , Jim Dine , Bruce Conner , John Chamberlain , Zofia Stankiewicz , Edward Kienholz , Cy Twombly and Robert Watts as well as the artists Arman , Eva Aeppli , Raymond Hains , Yves Klein , Bernhard Luginbühl , Martial Raysse and Per Olof Ultvedt. However, the plans were changed several times, and Sandberg agreed with Tinguely during a conversation in New York on April 30, 1962 that next to him only Rauschenberg, Spoerri, de Saint Phalle and Ultvedt - the latter instead of Jasper Johns - should exhibit. On May 4, 1962 Tinguely appeared together with Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle and Öyvind Fahlström in New York in The Construction of Boston , a choreography by Merce Cunningham. Ten days later, on May 14th, Sandberg wrote a letter with a "list definitive" that also included Jim Dine and Martial Raysse and Sandberg as an " arbiter ". Dine later left.

Catalog and poster

Since the rooms and the works of art were finished at the very last minute, the catalog was only published after the exhibition opened. The Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken accompanied the artists during the construction of the seven rooms in order to take photographs at different times. Piet van der Have from the graphic cabinet of the Stedelijk Museum designed the layout with photos by van der Elsken and a text by Sandberg. Inside the catalog is a loose sheet of precise floor plan that Ultvedt drew, and Rauschenberg designed the cover with the double arrow. Martial Raysse dipped his feet in black latex paint for the cover and poster, and van der Have stenciled the text underneath.

Rooms and works

Dylaby, entrance
Robert Rauschenberg , 1962
Assemblage
John Kaldor Family Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Dylaby, room III
Daniel Spoerri , 1962
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

After two and a half weeks of construction, during which the artists were allowed complete freedom, there was a car tire by Robert Rauschenberg as a wall object at the beginning of the Dylaby , on which a board with a black double arrow was attached, the arrow pointing to the two entrances to the Dylaby . One entrance led into Daniel Spoerri's terrifying and pitch-dark labyrinth (room I), where the visitor's sense of touch was required, the other into a room designed by Ultvedt (room II), where a climbing party in a nested wooden structure awaited the visitor was squeezed into the not much larger space. The next room (room III), again designed by Spoerri, offered a museum hall tilted by 90 degrees, in which the pictures “hung” on the floor and the ceiling and bases with sculptures protruded from the wall.

Room IV, designed by Martial Raysse, offered a large bathing pool in which all sorts of plastic animals such as ducks and swans or balls floated. There was a jukebox in one corner of the room and a cane-woven beach chair in another corner , in which a "fashionably dressed up mannequin " sat. There were paintings on the walls, including a bathing suit and a swim ring. The floor was covered with artificial grass, on which also plastic balls and animals were scattered around, and a sign on a stand read the neon inscription "Raysse Beach".

In room V, the “Shooting Gallery”, there were works by Niki de Saint Phalle. Jean Tinguely, then Niki de Saint Phalle's partner, helped build her “Shooting Gallery”, which consisted of a three-dimensional group of prehistoric monsters as well as plaster mannequins, stuffed animals and plastic dolls. The whole thing was painted white by Tinguely and equipped with electric motors in the upper area, to which bags of paint were attached, at which the visitors had to shoot with an air rifle. If someone hit a bag, the paint splashed over the relief of the monsters, which in the long term resulted in an impressive picture. Adjacent in the same room, at a height of 2.5 meters, there was a floor resting on several metal tubes. Below the floor, Tinguely had built a complicated-looking machine between the tubes, which he named Hommage à Anton Müller after a well-known Swiss artist who had made large useless machines . The visitor came up stairs to the floor, in which there was a hole. If you looked through it, the viewer saw how the machine “set a tangle of iron wires, steel springs, rubber hoses, furs and rags in senseless dancing movements: 'Ordures animées'”. Per Olof Ultvedt, the third in Room V, contributed a raised catwalk that was lined with wooden tourniquets that, when a visitor turned them, turned horizontally mounted wheels on which large white shirts hung. From this catwalk you got through a door that Ultvedt had transformed into an assemblage into Robert Rauschenberg's room (room VI). Cage-like structures await the visitor here, with assemblages in them, some of which made noises or moved, such as the rapidly rotating hands of the horizontal station clocks . Between these cages ran a raised, asphalt-covered catwalk, in the middle of which a median was painted like a road.

Room VII, devised by Jean Tinguely, housed a small tunnel with a wooden floor rising to the side, from whose holes air escaped and dozens of balloons with the inscription "DYLABY" blew into the room. In one corner of the room sat an employee of the museum who, since many balloons burst, had to blow up new balloons with a vacuum cleaner over and over again. Out of this room, the visitor unexpectedly got into a completely normal museum hall.

The material for the exhibition, mainly from flea markets, from second-hand shops or from "found material" ( objet trouvé - a reminiscence of Marcel Duchamp ) was largely disposed of at the garbage dump after the exhibition was over.

reception

Within the history of the art exhibition, at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938, the rejection of the white gallery space of modernity and the staging character, the equal use of work of art and found item, was a decisive forerunner for the room staging and installations of the 1960s. In 1962, Dylaby took up the character of the 1938 exhibition . With the exhibition BEUYS by the sculptor Joseph Beuys in the Museum Abteiberg in September and October 1967 and the exhibitions 50 3 (1600 Cubic Feet) Level Dirt by Walter De Maria from September 28 to October 10, 1968 in the Heiner Friedrich gallery in Munich and Untitled (Dodici Cavalli Vivi) by Jannis Kounellis (Rome 1969) and others, the artist space and the artist exhibition, “based on surrealist practice, became a separate facility within the exhibition medium”, which in turn established the The artist rooms of the 1980s.

In 1966 Dylaby found a direct museum continuation in the exhibition Hon at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It showed, on the initiative of Pontus Hultén , a huge female figure lying on her back with a labyrinth in its body. The performing artists were, as with Dylaby, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and Per Olof Ultvedt. With Crocochrome , a joint work was shown again in 1977, when Hultén was working at the Center Pompidou . However, this exhibition was not as successful as Dylaby or Hon had, which was due to both the architecture of the Pompidous and the gradually changing times.

literature

  • Dylaby: Dynamic Labyrinth , Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1962
  • Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Hrsg.): The art of the exhibition. A documentation of thirty exemplary art exhibitions of this century . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. / Leipzig 1991, ISBN 3-458-16203-8
  • Hans Richard Brittnacher, Rolf-Peter Janz (Hrsg.): Labyrinth and game. Reinterpretations of a Myth . Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89244-933-1 ( partly online)

Web links

  • Dutch Photo Museum: Ed van der Elskens picture database from Dylaby

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Rauschenberg - Jean Tinguely. Collaborations , www.kultur-online.net, accessed on September 15, 2011
  2. ^ Ad Peterson: Dylaby, a dynamic labyrinth in the Stedelijk Museum, 1962 . In: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Hrsg.): The art of the exhibition. A documentation of thirty exemplary art exhibitions of this century , p. 158
  3. ^ Ad Peterson: Dylaby, a dynamic labyrinth in the Stedelijk Museum, 1962 . In: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 158 ff.
  4. a b Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (ed.), P. 160
  5. ^ Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 163 f
  6. a b Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 161 f.
  7. ^ Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 162
  8. Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 162 f.
  9. a b Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 163
  10. ^ Dylaby , www.worldofart.org, accessed September 19, 2011
  11. Uwe M. Schneede: The Art of Surrealism: Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Photography, Film , p. 212
  12. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Exposition internationale du Surréalisme, Paris 1938 . In: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 100
  13. Uwe M. Schneede, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 101
  14. ^ Ad Peterson, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 165