Review of Mucosal Rapture: A Multimedia Excavation of Internal Landscapes
Let me begin by saying I have experienced a lot of art in my time: the sublime, the confounding, the moving, and the outright fraudulent. Rarely, though, does a show actively fight back. Torbin von Eel’s latest atrocity, Mucosal Rapture, doesn’t just blur the line between art and nonsense,it punches you on the nose whilst whispering “you’re complicit.”
This “immersive, bio-reactive experience” opens with an interactive piece called “Intestinal Cathedral,” in which guests are invited to crawl through a low tunnel lined with latex, raw cauliflower, and warm, wet towels while ambient throat-clearing plays at full volume. If that sounds disgusting,it is. But according to the provided pamphlet (a ten-page stapled manifesto printed in Comic Sans), it represents “the return to pre-digestive space, where shame is born and purged simultaneously.” Really? What it actually feels like is contracting a mould allergy in a tiny car wash run by lunatics.
Emerging from the tunnel you arrive in a room where you’re greeted by the words The Sacrum of Language painted in large letters on the wall. Suspended above you is a rotating door covered in used toothbrushes and Post-it notes bearing phrases like “My mouth is a graveyard of consent” and “Text me back ASAP.” Next to this is a flickering television playing a low-fi video of the artist shaving a kiwi fruit while sobbing.
The walls are smeared,intentionally, one hopes,with what von Eel refers to as “emotionally-charged pigment applications.” These are, in layman’s terms, paints applied to the wall without brushes. Tor claims this palette “rebels against Western retinal imperialism.” I am not convinced.
In the centre of the gallery is the show’s signature piece: “Mother, I Have Become Moisture,” a glass chamber filled with humidifiers and two mannequins in leather harnesses slowly inflating and deflating like neglected pool toys. Every fifteen minutes, a foghorn blasts while a recording of von Eel murmuring “I forgive you, or do I” plays from inside a tapestried lung suspended one metre from the floor. Two people around me burst out laughing, at which point a gallery assistant scolded them and had them removed – von Eel is clear that laughter is not a suitable response to his work.
One room of the show is dedicated to the artist’s “live performance pod,” where von Eel himself appears hourly to crawl on all fours in a flesh-coloured morphsuit while eating kale off the floor and muttering “I am me, I am need.”
I asked a gallery assistant what medium the artist trained in. She scoffed and replied, “He rejects the tyranny of medium.”
To call Mucosal Rapture pretentious would be an insult to every wine drinker who’s ever said the word “terroir.” It’s not that the emperor has no clothes,he doesn’t even have a body.
I left with a headache, a mild rash and a lingering sense that I’d just witnessed an extremely elaborate dare.
One star,generously awarded because I did briefly enjoy the absurdity of watching three art students take notes about a work composed of damp gauze as if it contained secrets from the universe.
Avoid this show unless you’ve recently lost a bet or wish to fully surrender your faith in the contemporary art world
