Having the bad luck to be in Denmark on a cold and rainy day we went to Louisianna - by which I mean the modern art museum near the Re railway from København to Helingør, rather than the Purchase - for a shuffti at the sculptures and the gardens. Sadly, the exhibition at present is Chaos in Art. Yes, it means at least a roomful of Mandelbrot sets, but we were out of there soon enough. There were also several surprisingly entertaining video installations [er, um, did I say that?] but the star of the show was dusty, noisy, and very mechanical.
I have carefully lost the shortform catalogue in which I had noted down all the useful details, such as the name of the artist guilty of Corner Basher. It is however sufficiently distinctive that you should be able easily enough to recognise it if it ever comes your way. It occupies a room from which the visitor is excluded for what will be obvious enough reasons, and consists of two plastered breeze-block walls set at right-angles to each other (corner) and a machine (basher) tethered about two feet from each of them by heavy chains fixed to the floor. The machine consists of a six foot metal tall pole mounted vertically, rotated by a motor controlled by the viewer. From a bracket at the top of the pole, a couple of inches off the axis, is hung a heavy metal ball on three or four feet of chain.
When the viewer starts the motor, the chain first wraps around the pole and then unwraps, alternately getting ahead of the rotation of the pole and falling behind it. Eventually the ball is able to swing far enough from the pole to hit the wall, and then it bounces off. Gradually, the energy of the system builds up, and the ball hits the wall harder, with the chain flailing around wildly and the ball sometimes hitting one, or both walls. Every now and then it knocks down a great chunk of plaster and clearly the wall has been replastered several times in places where the damage is concentrated.
It might not sound all that much, but it is really quite fascinating to watch. And the destruction is quite compelling too. It appears that a ceiling on the floor below is also being remodelled by the same artist, at no extra cost. Heh. I want one in our new building.
Also worth a mention is 1492 Records, which consists of 1492 LP records (well, what did you expect) close-packed over the floor of a room which you have to pass through to get to some of the exhibits. We hazard the opinion that the ones we looked at closely were scratchy. The sponsors of this, er, installation were TP Musik Marked, a local discount record supplier with warehouses full of expensive CDs. We were hard put to it to decide whether 1492 would make us more, or less, likely to patronise them in future.