This artwork is a full scale, two-story contemporary American Suburban house that stands on the seawater of Venice, Italy as a special project of the 2009 Venice Biennale. Sitting exactly flush with the sea surface, this empty house floated on water until it sunk. The house itself is an exact construction of a new American Suburban house. Constructed from a wood frame with vinyl sided exterior, asphalt shingled roof, traditional windows, white interior walls, nighttime lights and a garage door.

The concept for Manifesta 11 (2016), “What People Do For Money”, hosted by the city of Zürich, was based on pairing an artist with a particular profession. Mike Bouchet had chosen to work with the city’s waste water treatment facility. His work for Manifesta 11 is titled “The Zurich Load” and Bouchet presented an 80 ton sculpture made of human sludge in the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. The city of Zurich has a population of 400,000 people, and on average produces 80 tons of sludge per day. This collaborative sculpture is a literal display of one day of the citizen’s “production” and provided a renowned context for everyone to see what they collectively produced.

A few years ago, independently from one another, Paul McCarthy and Mike Bouchet both had made a work that transformed the Guggenheim New York into a toilet. This coincidence sparked an ongoing conversation about shared interests in the politics of art institutions and their architecture. It has lead them to develop a site-specific project for Portikus.

The center piece of the exhibition is a sculpture of the Guggenheim Bilbao, originally designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry. An over-scaled architectural model, this version of Bilbao is reminiscent of a battered, ragged warship that has washed up to the shores of the island after defeat. A long pipe extends upwards from the sculpture, through to the ceiling of the upper gallery. Here, hundreds of liters of liquid gummi are disposed of into the very core of the museum. This is also where the production of the A-Hole Sport Drink happens, a beef and banana flavored sports drink acting as a pseudo-exhibition sponsor through aggressive product placement. The drink is needed to create the adrenalin-boosting concoction The Bigga Picka Uppa—one liter of A-Hole with a Snickers bar dropped into it.

My Cola Lite is a sculpture composed of 2000 one liter bottles of diet cola and a five meter long painted shipping container. Mike Bouchet produced the cola with no sweetener or sugar, hence the “lite” or diet moniker. The artist wanted the cola to be black, like oil, and had the cola produced with the maximum amount of caramel coloring possible. The resulting “Black American Water” is also used as a pigment for paintings. The paintings, more properly referred to as stainings, are created by staining white cotton with this cola.

Self described as “Cabaret for Parisians”, and toying with the popularity of cabaret in commercial film and tourist destination, Mike Bouchet created an immersive environment, which includes various motifs, paintings, sculptures, and 3 hour dinner event at the Galerie Azzedine Alaïa. Every element of the performance was conceived by the artist: dialogue, music, choreography, set design, dinner menu, costumes, lighting, …  even the waiters actions. “MR2” engaged with the romantic notions of Parisian cabaret, contemporary culture, and the meaning of life entertainment for artists, performers and audience alike. 

This unique performance was a 3 hour spectacle with actors, dancers, musicians and other performers: an actual cabaret. After the event, the space was opened to the public in which the remains of the performance was be left for the gallery visitors to see. 

Realized in March of 2004, involved the production of several thousand denim pants. Bouchet produced the jeans in the country of Colombia. The jeans are of his own design, and have a unique style. They are “one size-fits-all” with an elastic waistband. They have two large pockets in the back, a marsupial style pocket up front, and a long pocket on the side that runs most of the length of the right side.

Once the jeans were completed, Bouchet threw half of them out of an airplane in the region where they were produced. The remaining pants constitute a sculpture.

Over the following year, the artist threw many jeans into public areas in several locations around the world: out of a building in New York City, from a convertible car in Antwerp, Belgium and from the top of a shopping mall in Frankfurt, Germany.

Working with a meat canning company in Germany, Bouchet has developed a hamburger in a can, with a shelf life of two years. The hamburger is sandwiched between two buns, has tomato ketchup and mustard already on it, and has a pull top lid for easy opening. In the month of December, 2007, Bouchet placed a stand offering free samples of the Canburger at the Enfant Rouge Marche in Paris. This public market was created under Louis XIV and is the oldest public market in Paris. The Canburger is a starting point for a larger investigation into some of the more manifest issues involved in one of the worlds most popular food items. For the bronze hamburger sculpture (and shiny metallic hamburger cans) Bouchet produced 10.000 canned burgers and takes the current trend for what can be called “spectacular materiality” to its uncomfortable extreme.

The personal rescue enclosure (PRE) or “rescue ball” was developed as a solution for transporting astronauts from one Space Shuttle to another in case of an emergency. The ball allowed a crew member to curl up inside and put on an oxygen mask. The oxygen supply should thus be secured for one hour, during which the rescue sphere would have been carried to the rescue shuttle by a space suited astronaut. NASA eventually abandoned the PRE, in part due to Public criticism of their processes after the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entry in 2003. Mike Bouchet had been producing Simulated versions of the PRE since 2002. In 2007, the artist produced 500 of these SPRE (simulated personal rescue enclosures) also known as Polished Space Bags, these alternative rescue enclosures were produced in Poland, composed of white PVC, a black zipper and no window. For a performance Bouchet has re-created particular episodes of popular television programs, such as “The Big Bang Theory” and “MTV’s NEXT”, with actors in these bags.