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.