START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

Machines and apparatuses have always been an important theme in modern art. Rather than representing an optimism about civilization they often bear ironic and critical features. This line begins in dada with Duchamp’s and Picabia’s apparatuses and through the self-destructing machines by Jean Tinguely it leads all the way to the Cloacas by Wim Delwoy, complicated and scientifically constructed devices which produce real excrements from inserted edibles. Marcel Grosse’s work belongs to this tradition. For several years he has been creating his own versions of technical and scientific appliances in a DIY fashion, they have a particular aesthetic connecting critical irony and almost naive fascination. This work is an interpretation of the celebrated accelerator of elementary particles in the scientific centre CERN in Geneva. (mf)