Lumber to carbuncle: Why an artist presses his entire work into diamonds

Installation is one of the domains of contemporary art. Rooms, entire halls are installed in the museum, sometimes even a complete house, as in 2001 in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, when Gregor Schneider won the Golden Lion there with “Haus ur”. The sculptor from Mönchengladbach-Rheydt has set up many elaborate room complexes over the past few decades, and he takes care of their storage himself, as he occasionally shows visitors to his depots on the Lower Rhine. This is associated with effort and costs, and yet it cannot completely suppress the uncertainty of what should happen with it in the long term. After all, not everything is as highly valued by posterity as El Lissitzky's “Prounenraum”, an incunable of modern installation art from 1923,which is even repeatedly reconstructed, or the relics of Joseph Beuys' “honey pump at work” in the collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.

Christoph Büchel is also confronted with this circumstance, an artist for whom the title

could have been invented. The Swiss staged refugee camps, swinger clubs, political fairs, mosques in museums and exhibition halls, often and occasionally also convincingly hit the nerve of a general gesture of indignation and most recently polarized with the wreck of a refugee ship at the Venice Biennale; Occasionally he reaches his limits, as at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, which canceled an exhibition with him in 2016. What to do with the legacy of all the interventions, most of which are focused on place and time, but are less useful for further use and apparently cannot be placed on the market?

150 diamonds are to be created in the current year

It could also be thoughts like these that gave the artist an idea.

He wants to compress his previous material work, as far as it is still in his hand, into a collection of laboratory-grown diamonds and everything from his future production that will not be sold from an ongoing exhibition.

This is how a work in progress should be created, Büchel announces, which will only be completed when he dies: "The Diamond Maker - The Estate".

All material that cannot be used for the manufacture of the rough diamonds is disposed of; for their growth process, in turn, “inoculating diamonds are made from the artist's DNA”, meaning his feces. The resulting collection, presented in a case, is said to be based on Marcel Duchamp's famous “Boîte-en-valise” (1935 to 1941), the “Merda d'artista” by Piero Manzoni from 1961, which was offered in tins at a gold price, and at HG Wells Alluding to the short story "The Diamond Maker" from 1894. 150 diamonds are to be produced in the current year. If you want to purchase the suitcase, you have to enter into a permanent contract with the artist, the Kunstsammlung Jena, the producer of the work, said on request. Certainly there is a lot to regulate here. Because the owner, if he can be found,is also financially involved permanently.

In a play by Yasmina Reza (“Art”) one would consider all of this to be a successful parody of the art market.

However, it should be positioned against the rampant phenomena of “certification, ownership, authorship and auction prices” and serve as an “instrument of potentiated perception”, as Büchel states in his bulletin.

As if the hype about crypto art wasn't sobering enough, diamonds are now being proclaimed to save a “potentiated perception” - and an artist is offering his leftover ramp in the form of diamonds!

The new art year has started well.