Martin Kersels: Five Songs at Galerie Vallois, Paris

Martin Kersels presents 'Five Songs', five approximate stage devices awaiting activation or relegated to props after a hypothetical use. The ensemble was shown at the last Whitney Biennial. The work continues Kersels' obsessive museography of the life and death of sounds, seen earlier in 'Orchestra for Idiots' (2005). His 1993 piece 'Twist', a prosthetic leg-marionette with elastic nerves, opened a dance that never happened. Kersels' entire oeuvre can be seen as a musical adaptation of Fischli and Weiss's 'The Way Things Go' (1987), but without actors or music. Kersels was a member of the performance group Shrimps (1984-1993). After the group dissolved, he evoked that collective experience. 'Twist' is an amputated limb that continues to ache. Kersels was featured in 'Ne pas jouer avec les choses mortes' at Villa Arson in 2009. His sculptures are dead objects dreaming of return. The work 'Golem' (shown at 'L'Idiotie' in Reims, 2005) was a tree of dead trunks, Frankensteinian rather than Talmudic, defining art as perpetuating life in objects through illusion or dream.