Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Some objects arrive disassembled for transport and are put together at the museum, as was the case with the Italian artist Mario Merz’s Objet Cache-Toi! (Hide Yourself, Object!, 1968). The curator, the head of the installation team, museum technicians, museum conservators, and occasionally the courier-conservator who accompanied the work are all involved in the process.

The work by Mario Merz resembles an igloo. According to the artist, the igloo is ‘a perfect example of how people should deal with the resources of space and warmth’. The object is displayed in the room, ‘Worlds for Living In’, and is not the only igloo that Merz built. He was constantly trying out new materials and texts.

Hide Yourself, Object! is a graffiti slogan that was sprayed on the walls of the Paris Sorbonne during the student protests in May 1968. The French student graffiti had already found artistic expression in Italy. That May, the Galerie La Tartaruga in Rome had the poet Nanni Balestrini dictate the slogans over the telephone from Paris, and painted them on the gallery walls.

Merz chose this particular graffiti as a direct response to the overproduction and excessive consumerism of modern culture and fine arts: ‘I thought about hiding the object in an idea. The idea can be directed against the object.’