And that’s supposed to be art?

Irritation in the smallest of spaces: with the associative show „Fresh Window„, the Museum Tinguely illuminates the long liaison between shop windows and art: from a playground for beginners to a performative stage for a large audience.

This role play was very much to her taste. In 1976, Marina Abramovićswapped jobs with a woman from the red light district in Amsterdam for the performance „RoleExchange„. The prostitute took part in the opening of an art exhibition, while Abramović offeredherself as a commodity in her shop window and exposed herself to the gaze of passers-by. The curtain did not really protect her, because if she had used it and given in to her shame, it would have been an admission of capitulation to the prevailing moral standards.

A decade earlier, Christo rejected the commercial appeal of shop windows by recreating them as „store fronts“, in which a bright light aroused curiosity but nothing could be seen thanks to a fabric barrier. However, the idea of a window covered with black leather, which neither created incentives to buy nor promoted illusions, had already been conceived by Marcel Duchamp in 1920 with his sculpture „Fresh Widow„. This was the name of widows of soldiers killed in the First World War, which did not prevent him from repeatedly decorating store fronts to promote sales later on.

For the young Andy Warhol, this camouflage was out of the question. Like Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, he experimented with the fluid boundary between decoration and art in New York shop windows. As early as 1961, he showed his first paintings in the Bonwit Teller departmentstore , which redecorated on a weekly basis and thus caused a crowd.

Warhol also contributed an astonishingly playful wooden board display scrawled with cats and playing cards for the perfume brand Mistigri. From today’s perspective, these are legendary „exhibitions“, but most of the later celebrities were embarrassed by them, because nothing weighed more heavily at the time than collaboration with capital.

In any case, the peak of enigmatic shop window art had passed with the advent of shopping malls and catalogs. The iconic film still from „Prada Marfa“ by Elmgreen & Dragsetproves just how much the perspective on the „side job“ had changed since then in the exhibition, which is spread over three floors in a lively search for the most diverse display values possible . The irritating fashion store in the middle of the Texan desert has long been a classic of the duo and is picturesquely decaying as a memorial to the luxury goods industry.

In Gregory Crewdson’s photographs, empty shop windows also exude a melancholy mood of decline, while Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie as Atelier E.B. nostalgically display their fashion creations in showcases that revive the sales flair of yesteryear. It is no coincidence that the Museum Tinguely has chosen this pleasingly fruitful art-historical theme. Tinguely, whose 100th birthday is approaching in May 2025, first worked as a window dresser for the Globus department store, which was dissatisfied with the apprentice and terminated the contract. He then completed his apprenticeship with a professional decorator. The latter recognized him as a bad fit and advised him to attend the Basel School of Applied Arts.

The shop windows remained a source of income for the metal sculptor for a while. However, the fact that he did not attach any value to them is shown by the fact that only photographs of the displays have survived. Except for two abstractions that were used, which today are considered the only two surviving paintings. Most of the artists in the second half of the tour used a variety of media to more or less effective effect on their way from design to motif. Martha Rosler, for example , soberly documented in photographs how small general stores became internet cafés for hipsters.

Or the video artist Martina Morger, who performed the French expression for window shopping „Lèche Vitrine“ during the lockdown and licked the glass panes in the ghostly empty shopping streets. A pitiable flâneur of the 21st century who could only oppose the partition wall to the land of milk and honey of goods and objects with her desperate desire.

From the pandemic to the recession, the shop window model has recently undergone another transformation, as R.I.P. Germain laments with its replicated and always closed mock facades. They are masquerades for the clandestine sale of goods such as drugs and weapons that still exist when all other goods are no longer for sale – a final sales excess and a brilliant finale.

Read more: In the necropolis of the private tombs of Thebes is the burial chamber of Neferhotep, chief scribe of the creator god Amun. It is one of the largest private tombs in the burial site. The paintings in Neferhotep’s burial chamber were heavily soiled and have been extensively restored and researched since 2000.