At the front of the ‘Werftbrunnen’ (shipyard fountain) at the weekly market in the centre of Bremerhaven, an unusual sculpture mingles with the usual stalls: it lies there like a washed-up whale, cut into four parts and slightly collapsed. Its grey-red surface glistens in the sunlight.
As part of a group of works to which Zerbst gave the title ‘Tired Garden’, this installation was dedicated to narratives of stress, exhaustion and depression. Now it lies between the market stalls and next to it the artist is courting its dismemberment, calling for its sale by weight in the manner of a market barker. Appropriately equipped, he points out a vegetable scale and standard shopping bags to facilitate the removal of the purchased artworks.
Art is offered here as a ‘staple product’ and equated with food that can otherwise be purchased there. This frees the work of art from any sublimity or even the perception of it as a luxury good. Instead, the performance shows an artist struggling to survive – going so far as to destroy his own art. Or to bring it into a more saleable form?
In the shadow of the closed, asbestos-contaminated Karstadt building in Bremerhaven-Mitte, his sculpture was decomposed, utilised and this gesture discussed at length with passers-by.
In a later work step, Lukas Zerbst built frames for the cut-outs of the sculpture from roof battens that were originally used as the basic framework for the sculpture. A total of 40 pieces of different sizes are neatly embedded behind Plexiglas. The neon-orange label affixed in Bremerhaven is part of each piece, although the price has increased, as already announced on the market.
