Gummy Bear Heaven…

The Sheer Size of It, 2013 (Kasper Kovitz)

Gummy bears galore

Traces of Disappearance
January 18th – April 13th 2014
Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo

This winter, when my colleague Kasper told me that he was making an entire art installation out of gummy bears for “Traces of Disappearance” at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, I was tempted to hop on a plane to Japan to see it installed. Unfortunately, I missed my chance, since I was on my way to Sudan. But I’m still hoping to catch a glimpse of his candied masterpiece in person–before the gummy bears melt away.

Conceived by curators Murielle Hladik and Eva Kraus, “Traces of Disappearance” invites visitors to reflect upon “what is about to vanish,” by contemplating the current condition of our fragile world. In a way, Kasper’s “The Sheer Size of It” strikes me as a modern art mandala (沙坛城)–made with candy instead of sand. Over time, as the heat of the sun begins to melt this gummy bear panel of “paradise,” paradise will be transformed from a utopian vision to a grotesque mess.

Here’s an excerpt from his artistic statement about the piece…

                                      ***

Kasper Kovitz


Utopia has two equally possible translations as ‘good place’ and ‘no place’. I found on the street one day a discarded religious publication and in it illustrations of a paradise. I was immediately struck, a room full of anonymous illustrators in the headquarters of a religious sect diligently conjuring the afterlife, free from artistic pretensions merely elucidating the ‘facts’ of paradise, a banal narrative of harmonious coexistence in an idealized landscape. The paradise I present here is a compilation of disparate images from this literature…

Thinking about a reconstruction of the illustrators’ work in a different format and with different materials, with the particular choices that I faced in the process, I realized that for me, a non-believer, the subject of paradise had to be a grotesque one in terms of its size and materials. The process had to reflect a futile (because of its temporality), enormous undertaking. So, the landscape is now not simply punctured by the image that diverts from its endemic language of universal peace and harmony but, most importantly, by its size and the process of its material decomposition as the more than 100,000 individual candies melt into each other.

To produce this work was impossible for me alone and because of the typical financial constraints of most artists, I made a call for help to my immediate community. The result was that my neighborhood in Los Angeles rallied and came out in force to help. Friends brought their friends and we worked together on this seemingly endless task of constructing an image of a paradise together. This is and will be the most enduring and endearing memory that I carry away from this project.

Kasper Kovitz, Beirut, November 2013

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