Rise And Fall, Randy As Fuck, Random Automatic Fire
Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof Museum
January 1999
Curated by Hayley Newman in Small Pleasures
Beaconsfield Artworks (BAW) were invited to make interventionist work in Small Pleasures curated by artist Hayley Newman, and produced by as part of Sensation – young British artists in the Saachi collection at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin.
BAW (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) created 3 works alluding to the moniker of the left-wing militant group, The Red Army Faction. The works responded to Sensation within the wider context of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, the city of Berlin and contemporary German political history. Dressed as Hamburger Bahnhof security guards, with authentic museum ID, Crawforth and Siderfin performed general guard duties in the exhibition halls.
For Rise And Fall, a suited figure of the last communist leader of the DDR, Erich Honecker (a mannequin sourced from a local theatre ‘s props cupboard) was suspended by the feet from an elevated stairway, a reference to Marc Quinn’s suspended rubber self-portrait No Visible Means of Escape visible through archways from the next gallery space.
For Randy As Fuck, BAW references Tracey Emin’s sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995, exhibited elsewhere in the museum as part of Sensation. They hired a young German couple, working in the Berlin pornographic industry, to enter the tent at specific times to have sex, their bodies only visible through the tent fabric in silhouette and via visceral sounds. The duration of the piece was dictated by their sexual climax after which they would unzip the tent, get dressed and blend back into the museum crowds.
For Random Automatic Fire BAW a stereo PA was installed with one speaker at each end of the long gallery hall. Underneath each speaker an invigilators chair was placed and for a duration of 15 minutes each day two security guards (Crawforth & Siderfin) would sit with laptops that controlled audio triggers replicating high caliber semi-automatic rifle fire across the museum hall space – aimed at the opposite guard, and recalling the historicised sound of shattering glass.