Germany: simple, but effective.

Liam Gillick brought it home for the Germans.....curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen, director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. Here's the thing - this pavilion bothered a lot of people, but I loved it. And it couldn't have worked any other way. The unexpected sterility of untreated wood grain and the sheer mundanity of the space had to be overwhelmingly obvious for gillick's narrating cat to succeed, and succeed he did. If we can't count on art to give us anything out of the ordinary, what can we count on it for? It was refreshingly absurd and lite (in this regard, more diet coke than manet). Imagine that awful way you feel in a really boring space. As uninteresting, as uninteresting can be, kind of space. I hate that feeling - some offices have it, some homes. It's not bad taste, it's not even ugliness, it's just vacancy - a lack of things to LOOK at, a lack of things to distract your vision or your interest. That was this space to a tee.....and then, there was the cat. Perched on top of the back 'kitchen' cabinet in the middle room, a cat tells a revolving story in a low, soothing, uncomfortably seductive voice....as that nauseatingly insipid feeling quickly dissolves from my being. Bravo Deutschland, bravo.