Frankfurt. Alaska-based artist Paola Pivi (born 1971 in Milan) divided the floor area of the Portikus into nine equal fields for her installation in polished stainless steel. Her object has turned the exhibition space into an expressionless showroom, generating an alienating sense that visitors are being kept at a distance. The division into nine squares is familiar from Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological approach to industrial photography. Liquids circulate around each field through tubes and pumps: ink, glycerine, pink face-tonic, espresso, red wine, green woodruff syrup, water, olive oil and the like. White liquids rise and fall in the installation too. These movements along the central vertical axis once again express the artist’s passion for subtle, monochrome gradations of the »non-colour white«, demonstrated in many of the animal photographs she has exhibited elsewhere.
The liquids fall as a broad jet from the mouth of each pipe, cascading from the extreme height of three meters into a basin which is constructed on principles analogous to those of »Minimal art« and serves as a catching tank allowing the upwards and downwards circulation to continue. Paola Pivi does not present narratives about resources and how they are distributed, threatened or unfairly pillaged. With a view to rendering this playground theatrical, she selects anachronistic material to highlight the sunny side of the aesthetically attractive life. Until recently her nine sculptures could still have been temporarily dubbed »self-referential«.
Currently the installation is struggling to attain marketable visibility with its large-scale dimensions. Its mechanical and liquid aspects are all set within the conspicuously »absurd« situation of a spectacle on a grand scale: we are accustomed to encountering substances that fall into the categories of food or personal hygiene in small quantities, spurting out of much smaller nozzles. The kinetic energy produced by the specific weight of these substances cascading down fills the Portikus with a loud din. The apparently purposeless post-industrial configuration of forms and materials, propelled by the guileless and joyful conquering zest of the industrial age, strives to create an experience of a thunderous spectacle: a sense of fascination is the goal.
The staging echoes the architectonic rigour of the existing space, in particular the defining structure of three lateral windows. However, the fully mature form of the artwork extends beyond this, particularly as the falling liquids leave slippery layers on the floor, resulting in a reluctant decision that visitors must keep a safe distance from the installation. The liquids – a good 320 litres propelled in each cycle – fly through the air as a spray of fine particles, which has meant that books and computers in the open-plan floor above had to be moved to a less exposed location. Odours float towards the visitor. One basin has sprung a leak.
Materials from the worlds of nature, energy, food, cosmetics and education fall »downwards«, substances which have often romped around in the White Cube in Arte Povera and process art since the period from 1970 to 2000. The title of the immersive minimalist installation with a pop twist, »It’s a Cocktail Party«, extends an amicable hand to collectors and art critics: »Friendliness is my religion« Paola Pivi asserts. The most important aspect remains the alterations in the liquids as they move »downwards«. Changes in the materials become visible. Projecting social narratives into these liquids would miss the mark. Is it possible to identify a naive physical metaphoric in Pivi’s spot of mild inebriation in the »abstract cloud-cuckoo-land« of mere look-alike visual manifestations?
At the lower levels the liquids seem to be fizzing, bubbling and frothing. The broad brown jet of Illy espresso tickles the palate visually. Foamy liquid is pumped upwards, soon falling energetically downwards again and generating an elegant design that can keep viewers transfixed for minute after minute. It seems fair to assume that the myths and lies, repeatedly voiced in the museum and social context, of the purported equality between »above« and »below« have left their mark on the installation’s cheerful rigour.
The artist formulates this more trenchantly, in a take emphatically devoid of societal references, on the three-colour invitation card, where she collages a salmon onto a plane parked on a runway, melding streamlined technology with a turbo-fish complete mouth, fins, gills and tail to form a single whole: Wild Alaska Seafood N792AS – the gourmet plane stranded so often within the daily 24-hour rhythm in the guzzlopolises of the world. Or is this rather a romantic black-and-white transfiguration of technology?
The aimless perpetual circulation of this elaborate installation, contentedly virtually meaningless (»the shock of nothing« in Geoff Lowe’s formulation) amounts to nothing more than nine loud downwards and invisible upwards movements of liquids in glorious colours. They all descend to the lower level in perfect serial beauty. That’s all. There’s nothing more to think about here. Just enjoy it to the full.1

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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