ROBERTO CUOGHI: KINDERAMA
Artist’s project by Roberto Cuoghi
Commissioned by the DESTE Foundation
KINDERAMA is a new commission by the DESTE Foundation, published on the occasion of the presentation of the Dakis Joannou Collection at the New Museum. For KINDERAMA, Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi brought a group of children to the exhibition A Guest + A Host = A Ghost and photographed them with a 3D camera as they interacted with the artworks: standing in adoration of a Jeff Koons, climbing on an Urs Fischer, playing with a Maurizio Cattelan, staring in puzzlement at a Robert Gober. Simultaneously irreverent and affectionate, KINDERAMA takes the form of a stereoscopic viewfinder loaded with images, and seems to suggest that this thing we call art might simply be a children’s game.
Using a laundry brush, a cigar case, and lenses fitted in nutritional-supplements jars, I constructed a nineteenth-century-style stereoscopic viewer with which the viewer can re-experience the inauguration of the yacht Guilty. Afterward, on the occasion of the “Skin Fruit” show in New York, Dakis asked me to conceive a publication about a selection of artworks from his collection. So, Alessandra and I, traveled to Athens with three or four cameras, and asked Dakis to get the DESTE Foundation crowded with kids, maximum four feet tall. Dakis’s grandchildren were waiting for us at his house, and their classmates waited at DESTE. . . . Maybe I reduced a remarkable art collection to a kids’ playground, and maybe it hasn’t been an act of kindness to the artists, but I believe it has meant the maximum use of the collection. Thus the catalogue has become a little toy and, right after, a nice souvenir . . . because children grow up. —Roberto Cuoghi
Signed and Numbered Limited Edition of 250
Available at the NEW Museum for Contemporary Art
Read more about KINDERAMA on http://kaleidoscope-press.com/
