READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE, curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen | The New Yorker

Jul 20 2018


Readymades Belong to Everyone Swiss Institute

The Swiss Institute inaugurates its elegant new digs—three floors and a roof garden, in a former bank on St. Mark’s Pl.—with a foray in what might be termed radical gemütlichkeit. This peculiarly tidy clutter of off-kilter works by more than fifty international artists, architects, and collectives includes a big, freestanding cutout photograph of a fire engine, a Kewpie doll paired with a cheese grater, a video of lunch at a Subway sandwich shop, a sinister besuited mannequin with a Pinocchio nose, a huge supine heart shape composed of wooden blocks painted purple, and many other mildly roguish divertissements. It’s like a crowded party of inanimate sophisticates. The mannerly effect is enhanced, amusingly, by the Institute’s location on a street of youth-misspending bars, tattoo parlors, and smoke shops. Think of Margaret Dumont hazarding her dignity amidst the Marx Brothers.

— Peter Schjeldahl

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