Responding to a desire from the gallery to do something spectacular, the artist flooded a gallery in Austria with water and used it as a habitat for fish. In doing so, visitors to the gallery, along with the gallerists working there, become performers unwittingly having to negotiate drastically altered and absurd conditions. The piece forces the audience to interact rather than merely view the artwork, which isn’t so much displayed as it is an environment that is enacted by the viewer/participant – rocks must be hopped over to traverse the space and one foot wrong could result in wet shoes. The agency one usually has over the gallery, a space to view objects that are for sale, is given over to the very natural ecology the white cube strives to separate itself from. In many ways too the work embodies what Josef Strau calls ‘the non-productive attitude’, a refusal to create (in fact, flooding the gallery inhibits the ability of the gallery staff to get work done, to make sales, etc) that draws attention to the social and relational aspects of art making.
