Marilyn Minter, Trickle, 2010 C-Print

Far from the sweaty sidewalks of New York in the cooler climes of Gstaad, better known for its ski resorts, Marilyn Minter is co-curating a show with Fabienne Stephan titled SWEAT. The show at Patricia Low Contemporary includes works by Matthew Barney, Kate Gilmore, Mika Rottenberg, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith among others – with depictions of the skin’s secretions ranging from the erotic to the mundane.

Cindy Sherman : Untitled 1985

Sweat is the conditional response of our skins, the body’s largest organ: try as we might to mask the hint of arousal and exertion, the thin wet odorous film is a primitive and instinctual expression of our latent desires, a Pavlovian reflex to fear and sex. While Minter’s work explores the erotic surface tension of dirt and sweat, Kiki Smith’s work is one of abstract crystallized droplets, and Ryan McGinley photographs a runner in the saintly glow of exhaustion.

In an interview for Spread, Minter spoke to me of her focus on body fluids, “ I am not interested in shock value; anything forensic, like scars, doesn’t interest me.  It has to be something that could happen. Nothing surreal, just things that exist: snot, drool…licking.”

Mika Rottenberg’s video, Fried Sweat, involves a sweaty bodybuilder that subsequently vanishes, the material body transforming into ether. It plays with the ideas of expenditure of energy as in her earlier video Tropical Breeze, where the product of labour results in sweat-soaked tissues that Ms Rottenberg once tried to sell on Ebay as an art experiment, but in this case, the result of perspiration did not lead to success.

Ryan McGingley, Coley (Injured) 2007 C-Print

Kiki Smith, Five Elements of a Dewbow, 1999 Glass

Rottenberg, who was once Minter’s student at SVA, had also collaborated previously with Minter on an installation for Sweat in Paris in 2008. Rottenberg described the collaboration, “It was Marilyn’s work, [with a photograph of] sweaty armpits – you had to move the piece and there was a peeking hole, and I had the video (Fried Sweat) behind her photograph.”

Interview with Mika Rottenberg in issue#5 of Spread p20-21 online;
Interview at installation set for Squeeze, 2010)
Patricia Low Contemporary, Sweat August 8-October 10th, 2010, PARKSTRASSE     3780 GSTAAD     SWITZERLAND