Milena Büsch

Tiny Mutual Admiration Societies
Room 626, painting department, 6th floor, Schwanzer Trakt
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2
1010 Vienna
Austria

Laundering money in the basement on Lyal Road in London was a hustle. The long night shifts at Hessische Kulturstiftung residency could get blurry sometimes when pushing the boundaries of labour the body can handle. But cookies kept the energy up late at night and so did Joan Baez. If the amount of conversations had been recorded then no-one could ever claim again that artists are slackers. On the contrary, I have to admit that I am relieved that these conversations stayed off tape. Anyway, I was there, where were you?

This is the restaging of Milena Büsch’s exhibition that was the third in line of five in total that Niklas Lichti hosted at Geld during his year long artist residency in Bow 2018. The supply of Käsespätzle and the liquid gluttony that me, Milena and other visitors demanded became a full time job for Niklas that year. The generous gesture was cool again. But generosity can also feel excluding for the ones not invited. I mean you can’t be generous to every single person in the whole wide world… or… maybe if we take turns, each one in their own capacity, each one in their own style.

But hosting is not paying for itself, and paintings are not painting themselves, someone has to deliver. Counterfeit money, fake surface, surface on surface, paint on paint, paint on a headless toy packed in plastic. The chicken production filled the walls under the hatch on the ground floor. It’s hard to avoid considering that geld is not only a germanic word for money, it is also the word for removing the testicles of a person or an animal. Maybe the currency-themed project space was not laundering money after all. Maybe all the images of cash was just a cover up for another kind of business.

Text: Tomas Rydin

Contemporary Art Library

Photography: kunst-dokumentation.com