The installation created by the Japanese artist Shiro Masuyama offers a helpful sanctuary to those of us who attend exhibition openings only reluctantly, and who would prefer to escape to a secluded life when faced with their usual pugnacious atmosphere, generated by endless attempts to make a social impression and market one’s own work in the art business.
He offers visitors nine seats at a bar, without any compulsion to communicate. Isolated by wooden dividing walls like blinkers, hidden from the audience behind curtains, and separated from the barkeeper by smoked glass, the art consumer can order his drinks by filling in a form and even use headphones as acoustic protection from his surroundings.
In this way, Masuyama’s “Parky Party” installation reverses the entertainment factor which has become a firm component of the art business and its culture. Few large-scale exhibitions fail to provide an artists’ bar these days. But what was – only a few years ago – a counter strategy to the tidy, unworldly art system has now become a mirror image of the latter’s compulsion to entertain.
“Parky Party” analyses these conditions, and at the same time it offers an analysis of the semi-public situation “art exhibition”. A defence of the private amid the public is one of Masuyma’s general themes. In the Künstlerhaus, these reflections on self-protection in the city also develop into a service for the public.
The interactive installation “Parky Party” will be operating on the opening and closing (17th July) evenings from 2 – 7 pm.