THE GOLDENROACH

Other countries` exhibition-goers have already had the chance to encounter the insects of the Goldenroach project. The isnects which Kiss smuggled into prestigious exhibition halls across Europe since 2011 are a part of a well thought and planned gerilla art movement. The artist made sure the insects that found their ways into the MuMoK (Vienna), the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern (London), the Louvre and the Centre George Pompidou (Paris), or the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) had the perfect display labels, that matched the look of the current exhibit with matching souvenirs that were put in the gift shops of the same Museums. Kiss never ceased to refine the Goldenroach project. He replaced what were originally real roaches sprayed with golden paint by dainty goldsmith’s works, and improving the method of smuggling.

A virtuoso of illegal entry and survival against the odds, the cockroach is considered one of the most obnoxious subjects of the insect kingdom, though only 30 of its known 4500 species are pests. Nevertheless, works of contemporary art frequently thematize living beings that provoke disgust or aversion (we know a lot of examples from Louise Bourgeois’s spiders to Banksy’s rat-alter-ego). David Wojnarowicz’s cockabunnies, which sported rabbit tails and ears are now a legend, as are Joey Skaggs’ roach vitamins, which promised to cure all ailments of mankind. In turn, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s sculpture of an androgynous child emphasized the cockroach nature of man in the late nineties, and Catherine Chalmers robbed the cockroach of the possibility of eternal life when a specimen is drawn on the rack in the 2003 work, Execution. Jan Fabre and Fabian Pena use the carcasses of dead cockroaches, their wings and legs, in their works.

Smuggled into the international temples of art, Miklós Kiss’s golden roaches are temporarily “deified”, as were scarabs in Egyptian culture. By contrast, the fake gold cockroaches in M0, Műcsarnok, made from injection moulded plastic (the mould itself being handmade), seem to lack all originality and majesty, like any other cheap, mass-produced figurines of the toy industry (even though the prototype of the manufacturing was the original roach of the action series, and these bear a striking resemblance to their golden counterpart). As a part of the exhibition there was a real 14 carat gold piece as well. Gathering in the middle of the M0 hall, and counting more than ten thousand, this army of insects also attests to the power of organization and representation. While in galleries & museum abroad the artist seeks to avoid the attention of security guards and cameras while placing the roaches, the golden cockroaches are now legally part of the exhibtion.
During their stay in M0, visitors could take one plastic “goldenroach` home with them as a souvenir which was exactly the opposite of what happened to goldenroaches placed in galleries before. Previously the artist smuggled them inside hiding from security while now visitors can steal a piece of this installation followed by the eyes of security and anyone else watching the live stream on the goldenroach webstite. On March 25, 2014, the artist realized performed a successful new action in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
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