John Waters. How Much Can You Take?

The American John Waters (b. 1946, Baltimore) is best known as a filmmaker who made his break-through in 1972 with Pink Flamingos and achieved a secure place in film history with Polyester and Hairspray. But at the same time Waters is also an artist who started as an enfant terrible in a scene which – ‘avant la lettre’ – was as politically incorrect as possible. As a queer, Waters assumed a double coded, shrill, camp style that deliberately exaggerated and felt closer to bad taste than to an allegedly sophisticated aesthetic of bourgeois boredom. This brought Waters the label of ‘Pope of Trash’ or ‘Master of Bad Taste.’ Probably the most comprehensive collection of works by John Waters is owned by This Brunner (b. 1945), who worked as a film producer and program expert at film festivals, has known John Waters since his youth and donated a large package of Waters-works to the Kunsthaus in 2014. The Exhibition was curated by Christoph Becker, at that time the Kunsthaus Director, assisted by Cathérine Hug. About forty quite varied works could be seen – mainly photographs but also books, multiples or installations – which Waters had made from the early 1990s. After an initial appearance of Waters in Switzerland, in the Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2004, this show permitted a new approach to a work that the artist himself understands to be Conceptual Art. ‘All my work is Conceptual Art, I think it out before I create it’ (Tages-Anzeiger). As themes the works often take up American pop culture, for example in Beverly Hills John (2012), a satire on beauty ideals and plastic surgery. The exhibition met with a very positive reception and the vibrant artist was the universally respected darling of the reporters. The donation of the works by Matthias Brunner as praised as ‘wonderful’ by Eva Hess and Waters was admired as ‘Master of Holy Horror’ (Sonntags-Zeitung). The Badische Zeitung celebrated Waters as ‘Grand Master of Trash,’ while Christoph Schneider could see ‘Trash and Melancholy’ (Tages-Anzeiger). The exhibition was accompanied by ‘John Waters. Werke aus der Sammlung Matthias Brunner’, published by Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess and including an essay by the Swiss philosopher Stefan Zweifel.