Herbert Distel:
Museums, especially museums of fine art, are places where we become conscious of time. Like a preserving jar, they have the task of conserving and presenting a subject curdled with time - the artwork. But through and behind these works the artists appear, falling out of the screen of time, as it were, and become immortal.*
Object artist Herbert Distel, born in Berne in 1942, had the idea of using a former cabinet for reels of sewing silk from an old haberdasher’s shop containing several hundred equally sized compartments (4.3 x 5.7 x 4.8 cm), each of which he allotted to an artist who could place a work of art in it. The wooden chest of drawers has 500 small "rooms" (which are housed in 20 drawers, each with 25 compartments). Every small room contains an original work of art, primarily by artists from the 1960s and 1970s – among others John Baldessari, Lucio Fontana, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol and Richard Pettibone. The object itself stands on the 501st work of art, a metal base by Ed Kienholz.More here + here.
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Distel is pre-empting all sorts of esoteric modern projects ... Everything condensed and portable, squashed into as small a space as possible, still legible, yet also lost in transition.
