Cleaning lady decided that modern art in church is rubbish

From 2016

Whether something is art - or rubbish - is also known to be in the eye of the beholder. A cleaning lady decided in favour of rubbish when it came to this question and severely damaged a work of art in the Philippus Protestant Church in Mannheim.

The cleaning lady threw parts of the installation "Behausung 6/2016", which consisted of gold-coloured rescue foils and addressed the refugee crisis, into a rubbish bin. This was confirmed by the artist Romana Menze-Kuhn on Wednesday.

The mishap had already happened at the end of January. "At first I was very shocked and thought, this can't be happening," said Menze-Kuhn, who has been exhibiting at the Philippuskirche since mid-January. She quickly realised that the work could not be repaired.

Romana Menze-Kuhn took advantage of the incident and incorporated the dustbin into her work.

Therefore, she said, she integrated the foils torn off the ground with the dustbin into which they were thrown into her work. "This gave it a new meaning." And therefore now bears the name 6a/2016.

However, the artist, who was born in 1957 and lives and works in Eschborn, Hesse, cannot understand the incident. After all, the work with the foils stuck to the floor, which were sculpturally shaped like people seeking refuge, was clearly recognisable as a unit. "I was very annoyed, this is disrespectful. You can think what you want about art, but the fact that people intervene in art and take something away, that really outraged me."

According to the Philippus Church, Romana Menze-Kuhn's work is a reaction "to the daily news about people fleeing violence and misery". Her artistic metaphor for the suffering of the refugees is a dwelling "combined from European pallets, the standard measure for the transport of goods, and a first-aid rescue blanket".

Despite everything, the exhibition will be on display until 14 February.

It is not the first time that a work of art has been accidentally destroyed while cleaning. In an Italian gallery almost two years ago, a cleaner had disposed of artworks she thought were rubbish. The exhibits consisted of newspapers, cardboard boxes and pieces of biscuit scattered across the floor.

The artist Joseph Beuys was hit twice: in 1973, a bathtub covered with gauze bandages and sticking plaster was misused to rinse glasses at a fun party evening in Leverkusen, and in 1986, his famous Fettecke in the Düsseldorf Art Academy disappeared in the caretaker's cleaning bucket. In 2011, a cleaning lady scrubbed a rubber tub clean in a Dortmund museum, damaging a work by Martin Kippenberger; the damage amounted to 800,000 euros.

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