Invited to participate in the 1994 exhibition “Passieren” at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “sculptor” Andreas Slominski had a crew of workers remove an enormous window from a storefront at a local mall. In the empty display, the artist placed a wooden Popsicle stick he’d picked up outside. Once the tiny artifact was positioned and lit to satisfaction, the pane of glass was reinstalled. The following year, Slominski orchestrated an even more labor-intensive operation at the Museum Haus Esters, located in a former Mies van der Rohe house in a tidy quarter of Krefeld. To realize Golfball-Aktion, 1995,

Most artists value the barrier between art and its public, the assignation and maintenance of various roles (e.g., active artist, passive consumer): don’t touch, don’t smell, art is here, life is there, Ladies and Gentlemen, stay behind the cord. Very few take up the gamble involved in giving art over to general consumption as did Joseph Beuys in his Documenta 7 project to plant 7,000 oak trees and install 7,000 basalt columns, each inscribed with the name of an individual subscriber. That Beuys called into being 7,000 status symbols and an equal number of “Beuys-Tree-Preservation-and-Cultivation

Anyone who has visited the Bob van Orsouw Gallery, with its four distinctive central pillars, will be curious about the latest response to its architecture. Fabrice Gygi’s installation did not disappoint. Upon entry, the eye was momentarily stunned by a luminous orange atmosphere: a wall of plastic tarps, the kind used at stadium events, cloaked the center of the room, so that the visitor had to navigate along its perimeter (whoever set foot inside had to remove his or her shoes and deposit them on a nearby shelf). On the far side of the balustrade was a lectern—then again, it could have