Malcolm McLaren Peep Show Box

For the exhibition “Musical Paintings” at ScheiblerMitte gallery in Berlin, which ran from November 2008 to January 2009, we developed a peep show box for Malcolm McLaren’s work “Shallow”. With it, the punk pioneer and former manager of the Sex Pistols presented 21 “musical paintings”: reworked film sequences set to sound collages made from fragments of pop culture. The exhibition was curated by Bernd Wurlitzer; McLaren’s work was complemented by pieces from artists including Damien Hirst, Alicja Kwade, Gregor Hildebrandt, Jim Lambie and Andreas Schulze.

The box stands as a free-standing, dark grey volume set at an angle within the bright gallery hall. Its interior is entirely devoted to focused watching and listening: walls and ceiling are lined with grey molleton, the carpet matches in colour, and an overlapping curtain at the entrance shuts out light and sound. Visitors sit in the dark on a bench facing the projection wall, surrounded by loudspeakers and a subwoofer beneath the seat. The result is an anonymity in which one can surrender entirely to the power of image and sound.

On the outside, the box takes on a second role: its closed exterior walls serve as hanging surfaces for the works of the other artists and divide the large hall into different exhibition areas. The box is thus cinema, sculpture and exhibition architecture at once.