“Songs for Gay Dogs” is certainly the biggest exhibition outside Germany in recent years devoted to Cosima von Bonin, a leading artist on the Cologne scene. Known for her textile, sculptural and multimedia works, she has no hesitation in reappropriating icons from art history, pop culture and emblems of the luxury goods industry in order to highlight the absurdities of our society, the power relations that exist within it and mass consumption. She is a common practitioner of reappropriation, not hesitating to declare that in her work “everything is stolen,” and is happy to play with tensions and paradoxes: the soft and the hard, the funny and the dark, popular culture and art history...
After growing up in Austria, von Bonin (born 1962) moved to Cologne in the 1990s. At the time, she was part of an artistic trend that was a reaction to the dominant style of painting in Germany at the time (A.R. Penck, Martin Kippenberger, Günther Förg, Jörg Immendorff...), in an artistic ecosystem where there was no longer any money and where artists were resourceful, getting together to organise their exhibitions and set up their own galleries. With no artistic training, she learnt from others. Disciplines mix readily and von Bonin, for example, is close to the world of music. She is even developing her own label.
Irreverent, provocative art
From this culture of community and multidisciplinarity, von Bonin also retains a strong critical spirit and readily adopts an irreverent and provocative tone in her art. For example, she uses textiles not as a way of questioning feminism, but as a critique of consumer society. She practices the strategy of reappropriation openly and cheerfully, creating works from ready-made objects and regularly leaving clues in her titles to identify her sources. She also draws her inspiration from other works of art, such as Mike Kelley, who also uses cuddly toys in his installations, or Martin Kippenberger, from whom she ‘steals’ the motif of the lamppost. But art isn’t her only fount of inspiration: the world of pop stars (Missy Elliott and Britney Spears, among others) also inspires her.
This strategy of re-appropriation, misappropriation, enlargement and accumulation also allows her to introduce a playful character, while at the same time instilling a grating, disenchanting quality. The missiles are as colourful and attractive as XXL toys, but are nonetheless motifs representing weapons of mass destruction. What’s more, the artist gives them specific characters, describing the little models as “losers,” for example. Daffy Duck is a character that is familiar to children, but his desperate and stubborn character says much more about the failings of our society.
The Mudam exhibition brings together a body of work produced over the last ten years. It’s an opportunity to discover a whole range of von Bonin’s creations, including her work in fabric, installations made with cuddly toys and an installation featuring fish sculptures, reflecting the artist’s fascination with the marine world. It’s a playful, joyful world that becomes subversive and denunciatory in the end.
Cosima von Bonin: Songs for Gay Dogs, at Mudam, until 2 March.
This article was originally published in .