New Texte zur Kunst editions by: Tobias Rehberger – Lucy Mckenzie

The artist Tobias Rehberger has toyed with personal childhood memories since his ear- ly work of the 1990s. Art operates in these pieces as a form of translation. A recollection is recalled, reformulated, and transformed into a sculpture, installation, or, as in this instance, a drawing. The inten- tion is not to give any realistic illustration of the past; rather, the work offers us a liberal interpretation of what he saw and stored in his memory: a visualization, that is to say, of the subjective perception of time.

For his edition, Rehberger selected a reproduction of “MAGGI (2s),” one in a series of colored pencil sketches showing the hamster he had as a child. The drawings also served as templa- tes for a series of sculptures. Rehberger’s pet died in an awful accident involving a door being slam- med shut; hence the painful sight of Maggi’s body shattered into two parts. With gruesome irony, the picture invites associations both of the warm glow suffusing early memories of cute pet rodents and many a chilling anecdote of the demise of a child’s beloved animal. Who doesn’t have a friend whose hamster or parakeet was felled by this or that tragic mishap? Reconstructing the dismemberment of the hamster with brutal determination, the series of drawings stands as Rehberger’s morbidly humorous memorial to Maggi.

The artist Lucy McKenzie understands how to combine motifs from the histories of design, architecture, fashion, and art with the utmost precision and attention to detail in her compositions in such a way that a fan of references is unfolded to reveal a series of new associations. To this end, she makes use of various images and objects from the past to reflect on the conditions of the present.

And so the city map “Glasgow 1938 1966” is also a painted superimposition of two historical models. One map from 1938 shows the city’s tram routes, while the year could be read as a critical reference to the so-called “British Empire Exhibition, Scotland.”The city most likely built a great deal of infrastructure for the great spectacle; the rails on McKenzie’s map therefore also refer to the historical background of this event, of which only a few buildings have survived to this day, the Palace of Arts being one example. The other map, from 1966, documents the territories of the ruling gangs of the time. One of them, known as the Young Team, was infiltrated by a young sociologist under the pseudonym James Patrick. His experiences were documen- ted in “A Glasgow Gang Observed” (1973), a damning testimony of the effects of slum housing
and urban poverty.

Lucy McKenzie’s edition, which functions not only as an unfolded map but also as an object, thus serves as a reproduction of a detailed painting on the one hand, and on the other as a testimony to Glasgow’s history, one that in its presentation offers the reader various possibilities to embark on a journey of research.