Selected by Israel Lund and Sam Korman
Ulrike Müller gathered expressions from a weeks worth of The New York Times for her audio installation, New York Times (February 16-22, 2003), 2003. In advance of the invasion of Iraq, the language veers between heated calls to war and ethical resignation, easily conjuring a litany of politicians behind the podium, deadlocked by popular opinion, political allegiances, and the momentum of recent history. Müller re-locates the pathos of this language in the personal, and as she monologues, the rhetoric of inevitability, both hawkish and entreating, implies an increasing and inherent violence. New York Times was originally installed at a high-up window in lower Manhattan, and viewers looked down on the city street, listening to the audio on headphones. At St. Louis’s Parapet/Real Humans, viewers look through a 4x5 inch opening on the gallery’s painted, street-level windows, that look upon a domestic neighborhood. The audio plays on a speaker in the window frame, and a 4x5 inch photograph of the original installation accompanies the audio on a nearby wall.
A shopping cart handlebar stolen from the German discount grocery chain, Lidl comprise Kitty Kraus’s Untitled, 2009. The work relates to similar works that use the same handlebars. They were placed on the floor, or near a window, and though inert, suggested ad hoc, threatening, and blunt implements. In St. Louis, the bar will be strung to a small motor on the ceiling, and spin menacingly near the body of a viewer. It was couriered by plane from Europe by a friend of the gallery, who, upon opening the package, realized the component pieces resembled an explosive device. Traditional sculpture, from Rodin to Minimalism, privileges an intimacy
