STATEMENT:”What A Wonderful World!”
Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (KMD) is tremendously impressive, because is the world’s “smallest” museum (an exhibition space on two floors, 45 cm wide and 75 cm high) and an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s “Box in a Valise”. When I first saw its image, I thought it was an artwork of the internationally renowned artist Ugo Rondinone, sculptures of whom we have encountered many times in public places, but when I read the accompanying press release, I realized that this is a real museum located on the shores of Lake Geneva. Not far from the waterfall Le Forestay, when in August 1946, Marcel Duchamp spent five weeks at the Hotel Bellevue near Chexbres. During his stay he discovered and photographed the Forestay waterfall. No research was ever done as to why the artist chose this waterfall and not another to become the starting point for, and ultimately the landscape of, his famous final masterpiece, “Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage”. KMD is actually a decisive, inverted ratio with a width of 45 cm and a height of 75 cm! Perhaps, it is the harbinger of a new era, based on the past and Marcel Broodthaers’ opinion, but also the opinion of the whole Modernism, on the meaning of the museum, after KMD is breaking the narrow and predetermined boundaries of space, but at the same time it is moving towards the future since the exhibition space is a capsule located in Place d’Armes, very close to the lake. The more I look at Ugo Rondinone’s work, the more I like it. I discover every time its charm in the minimal and how much can be narrated through the reversal of: size, scale, artwork, nature and architecture. It seems to be the transition from atopia and utopia of the 20th Century architecture bedazzlement, to a new era where art, artwork and the artist, will not be captives of the institutional space in the sense we knew it until today… it looks like a Wonderful World is becoming visible. -Efi Michalarou