"Hyperactive Hippie Gestures"
The Press on Agathe Snow's All Access World
Agathe Snow has taken the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, and the Colosseum-motifs familiar to everyone-and blended them to make mobile sculptures. Visitors to the Deutsche Guggenheim are invited to move them like chess pieces across a world map. "All Access World" is the title Snow has given to her installation, which is the 16th commissioned artwork for the Deutsche Guggenheim. Her playful interactive cosmos met with great enthusiasm in the press-and has inspired authors to astonishing comparisons´.
Peter Richter (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung) speaks of "Sightseeing Wolpertingers" [mythological German creatures]. On the other hand, Laila Niklaus (Tip) feels transported into a "forest of pop-like monument sculptures" while Ingeborg Ruthe (Berliner Zeitung) is reminded of a "county fair for the tourism trade" and Ulrike Mattern (Freitag) of an "outpost of Pippi Longstocking's Villa Villekulla." Evidently, Agathe Snow's room-sized installation All Access World sends authors rummaging through their boxes of journalist's tricks. Richter writes that the "guarantor for a good mood in the museum" has "stuck together the most iconic attractions of all tourist destinations." The result: "In any case, the accessibility of this art of hyperactive hippie gestures is greater than that of the actual world, in which most of us unfortunately do not have an all-access pass to things. It would be nice to spend a night there."
"The carnivalesque and the war, the effort to remain cheerful during late capitalist, asocial times: this is the core of her artistic work," remarks Sebastian Frenzel in his preview of the show in Monopol, while Ingeborg Wiensowski writes in Kulturspiegel that Snow's All Access World seeks to knock world-famous monuments "down from their pedestals." Art has dedicated a double-page installation view to the "colorful art landscape," while a wide variety of newspapers such as Kulturnews, Artinvestor, 030, Financial Times, and Musikexpress recommend a visit to the Deutsche Guggenheim. In Tip, Laila Niklaus detects a "philanthropic end time humor" and rates the work "worth seeing" for its "playful approach to national shrines." "In a collective process of deconstruction and appropriation (…) Snow shreds humanity's cultural legacy and seeks to inscribe it into the public space, making it accessible to all," writes Ulrike Mattern in Freitag. To Christiane Meixner (Tagesspiegel), the exhibition feels like "anarchic fun." "Snow's project grows with every minute spent in the show, because it becomes apparent that the trashy constructions also harbor a serious intention: the search for what connects these monuments-because while their outlines might be familiar to all, everyone associates a different story with them when they pull out their cameras." For Ingeborg Ruthe (Berliner Zeitung), Snow's "sarcastic way of dealing with everyday things, sacred symbols, and majestic signs" also harbors a meta-level: "what seems so playful and trashy is in fact very seriously arranged in an artistic laboratory. (…) This is a balancing act between apocalyptic disintegration and the unshakable belief in human genius and community spirit."
For Tom Mustroph (Neues Deutschland), Snow has turned the Deutsche Guggenheim "into an over-sized playroom," subjecting "monuments, landmarks, and other historical sites to new forms of appropriation. (…) She succeeds in doing this in a grotesque way that recalls the incorporation practices of a Pere Ubu." In the FAZ, Lisa Zeitz underscores the interactive character of All Access World: visitors are "allowed to touch, move, climb, and cuddle." In this way, Snow has cleansed the monuments of "all nationalist undertones, all the affectations of victory and imperial pomp, dressed them up in cheerful costumes, and made them dance: Let's party."
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