Art is what's on the pedestal - that's another life lesson. This could be the artists themselves, like Gilbert and George as the Singing Sculpture dancing on a coffee table. Or everything turns around and the pedestal is the art, as in Constantin Brâncuși's work, for whom the two amount to the same thing, blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. The 350 clay figures by the Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss, on the other hand, can be subordinated in all sorts of ways to have Plötzlich diese Übersicht [suddenly this overview.]

Even for the queen of the plinth, Michèle Pagel, everything is open. Her adipose, cast concrete caryatids support signs and symbols of culture and civilization–moments of world history as well as allegories of light spirits and heavy bodies. They balance the meaningful and the trivial, regardless. This could be the cool Rolls-Royce bonnet mascot Spirit of Ecstasy or a raised, clenched fist, the motif of the sculpture Widerstand [en. resistance] from the evn collection. This gesture for solidarity, strength and protest protrudes from a brutalist concrete pillar and resolutely combines political symbolism with a wooden club like the one carried by the Log Lady in Twin Peaks.

Vienna-based artist Michèle Pagel was born in 1985 in the GDR, when people there were still struggling with “real existing Socialism”. The echoes of the workers' and peasants' state of her childhood, the system-change there in her youth, and her time studying in the more open, albeit capitalist, terrains of Milan and Vienna resonate in sculptures that combine the seemingly incompatible and discrepant to create oblique, contradictory tableaux. Under the title Himmel voller Geigen, a gallows noose hangs from a balloon.

Pagel's mode of production avoids the beloved kneading and modeling of soft material; instead, she delights in sawing up bricks, grinding and smashing them, gluing and folding the pieces together, cutting, painting and glazing them, applying mosaic decorations and, where necessary, a touch of glitter. She shakes the materials of the physical world - metal, ceramics, bricks, cement - and stirs them with a few dried yuccas. Reassembled, the result is: parrot - typewriter - school desk, vulture - Bauhaus - umbrella stand, bar stool - shrimp - beer bottle.

She digs deep into the box of modernism: readymades and surrealist objets trouvées await her there. Rather value-free things, such as a GDR tile table, a supermarket shopping trolley, a door handle, a lady's handbag - that which a targeted dive into the junk stores of this world brings to light or the societal remains of profiteers as well as losers.

A repertoire that is powerful and subversive, picturesque and outrageously funny. Uncompromising, anarchistic, cool. Avant-garde, what else?

Text: Brigitte Huck; Translation: Virgina Dellenbaugh