Project Title
The Little Switzerland Mobile Gallery Assistant

Project Proposal Summary
The Little Switzerland Mobile Gallery Assistant is a gallery-within-a-gallery in the form of a constructed, motorized, front desk/office/cabinet/exhibition space/Roomba/bumper car hybrid containing fluorescent lighting, shelves, binders, catalogs, a sign-in book, computer desk, a painting, and a seated uniformed gallery attendant. The construction will migrate slowly around the space conducting its own business, cleaning the floors, gently bumping into walls, reversing direction, and occasionally assisting in the day-to-day operations of its host institution.

Full Project Proposal
Little Switzerland is a conceptual project intended to explore issues surrounding the commodification of art and of artists. The project is built around a loose fictional narrative concerning Little Switzerland, an artist-run space founded in Zurich in the 90s, the idealistic group of recent art-school graduates who started it, its move to Berlin in 1997, and its increasingly commercial ambitions before its demise in 1999. The project incorporates painting, photography, installation, performance and printed ephemera which taken together describe a set of interpretative communities, mythologies and physical and theoretical structures which inform our understanding of art.

The Mobile Gallery Assistant will call into question the boundaries between artwork and context. The construction is itself an artwork comprising painting, sculpture, performance and text. It has a reflexive or parasitic relationship to its host institution, moving with a limited amount of freedom and autonomy, but ultimately contained within its context. Little Switzerland is a fictional art gallery, but like Pinocchio it dreams of becoming real. To some degree it aspires to the same status and condition as its parent, but is continually frustrated. The extension cord which powers its motor is like an umbilical cord which cannot be cut. It bumps against the walls, unable to escape from the frame. It is able only to mimic and reflect the operations of the hierarchy in which it exists.