whitehot | April 2009, Prepare for Pictopia @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Pictopia installation view, courtesy Pictoplasma
Prepare for Pictopia at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
March 19 through May 3, 2009
An installation of taming and repulsion - a lovely description for a giant golden phallus turned into a rodeo machine. While female visitors carefully stay behind the inflatable stall (“indecent!”), the golden teaser enjoys giving wannabe cowboys a bumpy ride on its back. How do we know it’s enjoying it? It’s grinning.
The interactive sculpture designed by Akinori Oishi opens this year’s Pictoplasma, a festival dedicated to reduced and abstracted character design. In its biggest edition so far, Pictoplasma returns to its hometown, Berlin. After the crossing the ocean last year with conferences in Argentina and New York, hundreds of bunnies, beasts and oddly shaped things now invade the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Central to the festival is a large exhibition titled “Prepare for Pictopia”, which features works from designers from around the world. The show aims to explore the diversity of those funny looking characters that increasingly populate our virtual world. Its most prominent characteristic, however, is its similarity to an indoor fun fair. Basically, “Pictopia” is like a Disneyland for the hip 20 to 40-year-olds. The entrance area welcomes you with multiple childhood attractions. To get into the show, you have to pass the terrifying golden rodeo and a big bouncing castle designed by FriendsWithYou. As if that weren’t enough, the entire exhibition is installed around a bumper car arena. Characters by various participating designers have been turned into fluffy, big eyed cars. Every hour, for fifteen minutes the exhibition space becomes dark and a loud hoot announces the start of the spectacle. Coloured lights flash over the graphically designed arena and the cars begin to move.
The gate-way to the exhibition is populated by thousands of little golden insects, another reduced character, this one designed by Japanese Akinori Oishi. These little creatures set the tone for what is to follow - most of the artworks in the show employ a similar visual vocabulary of archetypal forms. At best, animalistic creatures reference pop-cultural icons like Bambi; phallic or round shaped things sporting eyes and a mouth are the most common. Exhibited prints often show these very simple characters in various real-life situations. In Boris Hoppek’s pictures, for example, a brown ball-face replaces the artist in holiday photographs, and, in his slide show projections, Aaron Stewart adds funny little creatures to childhood photographs from the 1970s. These unexpected appearances evoke irritating and funny moments. However, the topic is repetitive and generally remains superficial.
There are only a few pieces in the show that delve deeper. One of them is Wayne Horse’s installation of giant stuffed, track suit-wearing puppets sitting in front of a TV. When you join them on their sofa, in their ugly dilapidated living room, the TV programme you face suddenly reveals the puppets’ violent past. Another thought-teasing work is a short film by Japanese artist Nagi Noda called “Mariko Takahashi's Fitness Video for being appraised as an ‘Ex-fat Girl’”. The half-poodle-half-something-else life-sized figures’ work out questions common concepts of beauty in an absurd yet hilarious way. However, pieces like these are rare and easily forgotten in the wake of car bumping, rodeo riding and other entertainment.
People undeniably love the spectacle, but the abundance of joyous games makes you wonder whether escapism disguised as art is all the show has to offer. There are political limits to the debauchery - the paintball shooting gallery event had to be cancelled after the latest gun rampage in Germany, which cost 16 lives. But the show itself predicts its own limits - those of the fun fair. The title, “Prepare for Pictopia”, combines the organisation’s name and the term utopia. Yet its logo is cracked in the middle, and instead of an exuberantly decorated play world, the exhibition’s black architecture contrasts starkly with the colourful, often humorous exhibition pieces. Only two installations fully live up to the name in creating an artificial utopia: The bumper car arena in the middle of the exhibition, and a giant, plush koala multiplied infinitely by the mirrors surrounding it.
At the presentation of the catalogue, initiators Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler explained why they choose the topic of utopia - and why its failure was necessarily implied in the design of the show. In the project’s very beginning, in 1999, they had envisioned the emerging virtual characters as a new international method of communication. Back then, graphically reduced pictograms spread like wildfire across digital media, advertising and fashion. These characters aimed to engage the viewer emotionally, thus bypassing language and cultural barriers. Ten years later, in 2009, Denicke and Thaler had to realise that even though these characters remain fascinating, they have failed to establish a visual language that is globally meaningful. The envisioned utopia had failed. This failure is mirrored in the exhibition’s architecture and in the cracked title of the exhibition. The idea that “Pictopia” is a place where people enjoy themselves, however, remains intact – hence the bumper cars and the rodeo.
Although it is questionable whether the exhibition adds anything valuable to our understanding of the world, it definitely affirms the notion that there is a child in each of us. Regardless of age, audiences simply love the entertainment. If you are not searching for art, Pictopian escapism can be great fun.
