GERMANY: GERMAN GROUP FUZZY LOVE DEDICATE THEIR MUSIC AND LIVES TO THE COLLECTION OF KITSCH

Record ID: 391589

  • Title: GERMANY: GERMAN GROUP FUZZY LOVE DEDICATE THEIR MUSIC AND LIVES TO THE COLLECTION OF KITSCH
  • Date: 3rd June 2001
  • Summary: (REUTERS- ACCESS ALL) SCU SOUNDBITE (English) GORDON MONAHAN, SAYING: "We don't have a defined border - there is a border that exists, but you find that out by doing it. So if you fail, and suddenly you go 'oh, that was really interesting', then that was a very successful failure, then you are making a totally ironic definition of taste that is unexpected because you don'
  • Embargoed: 18th June 2001 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVAA5D73YEKPOKKVVX9VYWI3KDOC
  • Story Text: The best of kitsch lives on as the self-declared Collectoholic, Laura Kikauka and her musical friends, the 3-man band Fuzzy Love, bring their performance, the high art of kitsch, to a Berlin club.
    Laura Kikauka, a canadian artist, gained fame through her Berlin underground club "Schmalzwald". Located in the hip Prenzlauer Berg section of the city, it boasted the largest collection of kitsch from the past four decades: the pinnacle of colourful, fur-lined and plastic tastelessness in furniture and design and the music propelled Schmalzwald's visitors into another world.
    A year ago, Kikauka closed her club, her kitsch disappeared into boxes and now fills her apartment, to reappear in public for performances with the three-man band Fuzzy Love.
    According to their website (www.fuzzylove.de) the band's origins are in the late 1980's when Kikauka, Gordon "El Gordo" Monahan, and Gordon W. began producing 5-day-long "irritainment" events in rural Ontario, Canada.
    "They took their show on the road, forming a collective with about twenty internationally acclaimed artists to collaborate on 18-hour performances where only three songs were played over and over again....They later formed a 3-piece band (with singer JJ Jones) that would do cover versions of great songs from pop history...they honed their craft by playing weekly at the famous Berlin underground club Schmalzwald. It was at Schmalzwald that they seized upon the idea of celebrating extremely trivial aspects of our pop culture through song." The music is minimalist and at the same time complex, dominated by JJ Jones' voice, a hammond organ, drums and Gordon W.'s homemade instruments. The stage, instruments and band members are decorated by Laura Kikauka's kitsch.
    "What is important is that Laura collects these things -- they are not kitschig, they are cultural trash -- and she recycles this trash into art and we are also recycling music at the same time so that is what the Schmalzwald concept is made of," says El Gordo.
    "It is not important to understand this as "kitch" but rather as recycling," he adds.
    And every show is as different as it is personal, Kikauka says.
    "You look at the space and go 'oh, well this is interesting, they have this form, they have a pillar here, this electric elk head will look good on the pillar,' you stand back and look.... I mean, we never do it in the same way which makes it more interesting for us as well," she says.
    Fuzzy Love has brought the Schmalzwald show to Berlin and Munich, and will be performing in the Canadian Pavillion at the annual Biennale in Venice this June.
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