The doubling gesture of this architectural performance, in which the museum\u2019s ground is at once physically and symbolically uprooted and supplanted, is the first of Laure Prouvost\u2019s many playful contestations in her immersive installation We would be floating away from the dirty past<\/em>, on view at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Through a genre-defying assemblage of architecture, sculpture, and video, Prouvost challenges the sedimentation of history within art institutions. Floating away from the dirty past\u200a\u2014\u200aProvoust\u2019s eponymous task for us viewers\u200a\u2014\u200acalls for reimagining the future of the museum, paradoxically, through an immersion into its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe have been waiting for you to arrive for so long\u201d flashes on a small screen that forms the head of a figurative sculpture at the front of the installation. \u201cWaiting for so long\u201d extends present anticipation into the realm of the past, thus foregrounding the centrality of history, specifically Haus der Kunst\u2019s institutional history, in Prouvost\u2019s project. Walking counterclockwise to the back of the installation provides the opportunity for a detour into Haus der Kunst\u2019s adjacent Archive Gallery, which functions as an additional mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em> that stages the historical force of the artist\u2019s intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Archive Gallery narrates the history of Haus der Kunst, originally \u201cHaus der Deutschen Kunst\u201d (House of German Art), built between 1933\u20131937 as the first representational monument to the Third Reich. The museum demonstrated Nazi art policy as the party\u2019s chief art institution. A mythologized \u201cGerman-ness\u201d of art reified the values of the Nazi regime while the contemporary art of the now-historical avant-garde was defamed, particularly in the notorious Entartete Kunst <\/em>(\u201cDegenerate Art\u201d) exhibition of 1937. Archival photographs reveal the Middle Hall, the site of Prouvost\u2019s installation, in its original iteration as the Ehrenhalle<\/em>, or the \u201cHall of Honor,\u201d wherein \u201chonor\u201d was iconized by the swastikas that once donned its walls. Prouvost\u2019s work is the fourth annual commission of \u201cDer \u00d6ffentlichkeit\u200a\u2014\u200aVon der Fruenden Haus der Kunst\u201d (To the Public\u200a\u2014\u200aFrom the Friends of Haus der Kunst), in which a contemporary artist is invited to transform the Middle Hall. Thus amidst the various genres and forms that comprise Prouvost\u2019s installation, it is integral to view Haus der Kunst as its primary source material. In dramatizing a transformation of the museum, Prouvost underscores that the subjective envisioning away from its \u201cdirty past\u201d is contingent on lifting up its floor to continually question the history on which it lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walking around to the back of the installation reveals the projection of Prouvost\u2019s video If It Was<\/em>. The large screen frames the opening to the tent-like space, constructing a cinematic environment. The upright screen emphasizes the orthogonal severity of the room and alludes to the ideological violence for which such geometric purity once stood. Two more figurative sculptures guide the viewer into the makeshift cinema, one enticing the viewer with a plate of fresh raspberries. A custom-designed carpet patterned with images of bicycles, tools, previous \u201cDer \u00d6ffentlichkeit\u201d commissions, breasts, and phrases like \u201cnothing is lost\u201d lies on the ground of the interior space, metaphorically under the museum\u2019s lifted floor. The carpet\u2019s appearance, which evokes an archeological site, foregrounds the video\u2019s humorous speculation on what Haus der Kunst\u2019s past could become if Prouvost determined the course of its future. This atmospheric use of film to reimagine the future from embedded histories and myths remains a compelling feature of her practice, following from prior works such as Wantee<\/em>, winner of the 2013 Turner Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If It Was<\/em> forms the structural and narrative core of Prouvost\u2019s installation. Filmed in Haus der Kunst, the video begins with the artist narrating the phrase \u201cIf it was my museum\u2026\u201d This subjunctive clause, which becomes a repeated refrain throughout the video, is followed by visual and verbal descriptions of the humorous (and grammatically subversive) conditions that Prouvost imagines if Haus der Kunst and its history were hers. Kaleidoscopic images and a panoply of sensory pleasures dominate Prouvost\u2019s virtualized museum. Architectural transformation and embodied ecstasy become an oasis: the fa\u00e7ade would be made crooked, all corners of the Middle Hall would be smoothed, the floor would be kissed nightly, visitors would be personally greeted and receive back massages, conceptual art would be moved to the back corner to make room for Zumba\u2026 the list of conditionals goes on. Yet Prouvost\u2019s sensuous envisioning is grounded in layers of historical contention. Her invitation for viewers to \u201ctouch everything\u201d challenges the hegemony of vision within the traditional museum. Moreover, it continues the historical struggle of restoring the sensory body to institutional spaces beyond objectification, reminiscent of feminist artworks like Yoko Ono\u2019s Touch Poem for Group of People <\/em>(1963), a one-line imperative to \u201cTouch each other.\u201d In another scene, breast milk is ebulliently squirted over Prouvost\u2019s museum walls in the style of Jackson Pollock-like drips, advocating the return of embodied pleasure against its historic-institutional rendering as othered, abject, and excisable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If It Was <\/em>concludes with Prouvost narrating that in her Haus der Kunst the viewers would lie down and all of the artwork ever shown would float above their eyes. She further exclaims, \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have to talk about the problems of the world.\u201d Through visualizing the ideological space of what gets swept under the rug at Haus der Kunst, Prouvost authorizes the fantasy of floating away from its dirty past. Yet Prouvost\u2019s insistence on what her museum would become positions the future of the past in the historical time of now, the sensory present separated from the future of would<\/em>. Until then, floating away from the dirty past still requires lifting up the museum\u2019s floor to occupy the contestation of its history.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"89_CR03_Kong_Prouvost_We](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_CR03_Kong_Prouvost_We-would-be-floating-away-from-the-dirty-past.jpg\")
We would be floating away from the dirty past<\/em>, installation views, DER \u00d6FFENTLICHKEIT – Von den Freunden Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016.
Photo : Wilfried Petzi
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"89_CR03_Kong_Prouvost_If](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/89_CR03_Kong_Prouvost_If-it-was.jpg\")
If It Was<\/em>, 2015, video still.
Photo : Courtesy of the artist, MOT International, Galerie Nathalie Obadia and carlier | gebauer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n