Christian Gonzenbach

The Living Desert

The Living Desert, 2010

Gerbils, Corn Flakes, camel skull, video

280 x 350 x 90 cm

A couple of gerbils lived in a world of their own with cornflake-covered landscape, camel’s skull, a screen showing Clay TV by Gonzenbach, a fox whose skin has been turned inside out and a photographic image of a human skull made of bologna – a fine line between heaven and hell even for a couple of gerbils. These mice left to their own devices in this improbable desert – a kind of El Dorado, if you will – had no food other than the cereal flakes that composed their environment. This manipulated condition reflects our current lifestyles of being well fed and over-saturated with technology which, in turn, also reveals itself as a paradoxical situation where liberal consummation becomes toxicity.