Perpetuum Mobile

1st Exhibition in the 15th Nidbach Series

Shimon Weitzman utilizes common everyday objects, taken from public garbage bins or else common web images to build an installation-machine, which despite its name (Latin for “Eternal Motion”) does not produce a thing. At the most, it contains the memory of motion. Regardless of the seemingly inferior quality of the materials and objects used, Shimon Weitzman succeeds in creating a “poetics of readymades,” the semantics of which are based on remembrance. Beginning with Fritz Lang’s mythological Metropolis, and the “Underworld” that was it’s activating power despite it’s rusty components, and finishing with E.T.A Hoffmann’s Olympia – who was created as an ultimate object of desire and turned out no more than a mechanical puppet of a vicious inventor, in her present reincarnation she appears as a show window doll, with a sewage drainage grill screwed into her rather than a feminine breast. The viewer drains through this grill to Marcel Duchamp, who brought the readymade to the world and to art with a urinal transformed into a fountain, a womb or the Madonna. Another important component of his work is the gaze – which is related to the economics of the male-female glance, to the gaze as source of power and pornographic voyeurism. Pure aesthetic pleasure is a non pragmatic; it comes from the image alone, when the functional purpose of an object is totally removed. This is the aesthetic imperative, and the essence of the readymade.