Exhibition view: RM, Anus Horribilis, LOK by Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, August 24 to November 10, 2024 © Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, photo: Sebastian Stadler
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For all of us enthusiasts of speed, pigs and bets, October in St.Gallen means OLMA, the popular fair with its pig race. Pigs are monogastric, meaning they only have one stomach, just like dogs and humans. An anatomic information that will prove useful to discuss Anus Horribilis, the museum exhibition of the two-person collective RM (formerly Real Madrid), curated by Kunstmuseum Senior Curator Melanie Bühler.
The title evidently plays on the homophonic links between anus and annus, the first being the anatomical part we all share as human beings, the second the latin name for year. The expression “Annus horribilis” describes a particularly horrible year when fate strucks heavy-handedly. A feeling of loss that frames the entering into the exhibition: the main room opens up with a fabric stretched over a circular metallic frame. It shows patterns - produced with an embroidery factory from the city of St. Gallen, once a world-renowned textile capital - made of undulating lines, reminiscent of sand dunes, an aleatory motive infinitely propagating itself. This seemingly generative order is broken up by the punctuation of a cactus and a bush. Those motives, sewn onto the fabric with their formal and decorative qualities, concur to procure a feeling of silence and processuality, leading the viewer towards the rite. The huge lens, made of black tulle, appears then as a veil, standing between the viewer and the exhibition, thus filtering it. Death, or rather rituals of the living to grieve, places the whole exhibition in the active site of lamentation from the get-go.
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Exhibition view: RM, Anus Horribilis, LOK by Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, August 24 to November 10, 2024 © Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, photo: Sebastian Stadler
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To pass from mourning to shitting is daring, but RM’s practice is particularly well equipped to pull it off. The collective distinguishes itself as being virtuosic in dealing with uncertain discursive terrains, as if they are always eager to enter moving sands just for the thrill of seeing if they could escape from it. In their work, this aim for cornered situations takes the form of discourses undulating - as the pattern - between high and low, seriousness always counter-balanced with a pinch of ridiculousness - or at least the risk thereof. I’ve always seen it as a technique of diffuseness, to avoid elevating the work in a sphere where it would become untouchable. In Anus Horribilis, this strategy mainly takes the form of a statue made of copper, Shitperson (2024), who already appeared in the Alice in Wonderland-esque animated video work tale placed at the very entrance of the exhibition, Two Actions Together in One Frame (2024). Standing proudly towards the back of the space, its hammered copper plates that compose it take the shape of rounded tubes, or, as the artists call them, shit rings since they play the role of excrements - a person made of pieces of shit - and reminding, at least a European audience, of Bibendum, the popular mascot of the tire manufacturer Michelin. As chunks of plastic dissolving into the microplastic pollution, tires are themselves situated in an active digestive process.
From mourning to shitting, all follows the monogastric trail, as humans are indeed flow-producing machines, desiring organisms responding to a binary set of rules: production always coupled with another site of production, another machine being always connected and regulating a section of the flow - as the mouth and the anus. If humans are located in those active processes of transformation, it makes sense to represent them as a stacking of tubes. This consideration extends RM’s interests over the last years, coming from a focus on the skin, on sexuality and desire and more recently on STDs, their transmission and the discourse in which they exist symbolically and politically.
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Exhibition view: RM, Anus Horribilis, LOK by Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, August 24 to November 10, 2024 © Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, photo: Sebastian Stadler
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Following this discussion of flow, two structures cut through the space as fences, diverting it inwards. Both are made of multiple identical metallic blue syringes held upwards. Their lengths differ (one is notably longer), highlighting their variability as sections of one piece titled A Prune That Is True (2024). They are reconfigurations of previous existing works called Pointer (2023), individual sculptural syringes resting on their needle, standing still as the medical institutional stability they point to, but also pointed downwards, maybe signifying the spiral hole that is drug addiction. Turned upwards in St. Gallen, they suddenly appear as miniature skyscrapers, a series of Empire State Buildings turned into a garden fence. The strong symbolic character of both the syringe and the skyscraper give the work an archetypal character, seemingly interested in delving into pathological responses to popular culture. The concrete use of the fence in the space and, as the exhibition text says, the symbolic opposition to the syringe - the latter piercing through, the former holding back - bring it closer to a spare gesture suggesting potential engagement. The metallic structure indicates a clinical detachment, and the presence of the skyscraper could indicate the gulf that separates us from proper institutional care and a coherent and proactive political action against the increasing opioid crisis that decimates a bigger part of the population.
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Exhibition view: RM, Anus Horribilis, LOK by Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, August 24 to November 10, 2024 © Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, photo: Sebastian Stadler
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Through the embroidered veil, the viewer first saw Flyperson (2024), the work of the exhibition that recalls most strongly the concept of transformation, since it is so much connected to the idea of metamorphosis. As a real Kafkaesque character, it seems to suffer from the weight of alienation as much as it resolves it; here, laying its eggs on the rings of shit of Shitperson - its companion as the sole other copper structure - is made of, so that the larvae can feed themselves.
If Anus Horribilis builds itself on the dooming narrative of the eat-shit-die - the fatal end is recalled by the sculptures made of coffin wood -, RM’s capacity to deal with rich symbolism and their repeated elegance in the balancing act between the existential and the ridicule give the exhibition a tenderness that fills up the space with a sense of hope, an activation that is welcome in the cold space of the LOK. In those dynamics of digestive transformations and the anti-bourgeois connotations of the anus - this for example of Yoko Ono’s movie Bottoms (1966) -, the defecating person is the real actor of change, just as was the medieval jester, the comical king capable of inverting the dynamics of power.
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