Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy

“Anyone can find or make one or more rooms of any shape, size, proportion, and color—then furnish them perhaps, maybe paint some part or everything. Everyone else can come in and, if the room(s) are furnished, they can also arrange them, accommodating themselves as they see fit. Each day things will change.”
—Allan Kaprow, Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann

Allan Kaprow’s 1963 “furniture comedy” Push and Pull invites us to collectively reflect on what a museum can or aims to be: a place where objects are not only to be viewed, but also activated and transformed. The work serves as the starting point for a new collection exhibition at mumok that specifically brings together works whose qualities derive from the way they are suspended in a kind of limbo: Artworks or everyday objects? To look at or to use? Disruption or invitation? 

One central focus of mumok’s collection is a generation of artists working in Europe and North America during the 1960s, who challenged the museum as a site of collection and preservation, while questioning the object-based and commodity-driven conception of art. They often addressed their viewers directly, inviting them to complete the work by touching or transforming it. Participation was not a matter of comfortably going with the flow, but a process of negotiation that entailed friction and uncertainty. In their works, art and life become entwined, while their restlessness reflects the tensions of the period in which they were made.

Allan Kaprow is often considered the founder of the Happening as art form, and the event-like character of everyday life was of central importance to him. His work Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann lies at the heart of the exhibition: a performative and participatory installation that is constantly being updated by the audience’s interventions. Visitors are invited to rearrange furniture and objects into new configurations within the given space. Each act towards this end thus becomes part of the open-ended work as it constantly takes on new forms. Here, “pushing” and “pulling” also entail a redistribution of roles: the curators who “furnish” the space become artists, while the visitors who continually alter and “compose” the installation’s materials become its curators. Central to the work is also a question of liveness: Kaprow’s piece has its roots in the 1960s, yet it explicitly stipulates that each new staging must reinvent the work. This is but one reason why the present version also embodies a spirit and freedom that connect art history with the present.

As an exhibition, Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy is part of a broader exploration of forms of attention. Alongside Terminal Piece, which hinges on the act of looking, and Verena Paravel’s exhibition Exuviae, which focuses on listening, Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy turns to the embodied experience of the space: touching and becoming active oneself. For mumok, such gestures of openness and a generous attitude toward the audience are essential. Kaprow’s radical plea for an institution in flux is thus complemented by works from the collection that make museum routines visible and incite active participation, articulating forms of openness and collectivity. They thus invite visitors to reconsider the relationship between art and everyday life beyond the confines of the museum itself.

With works by
Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Peter Baum, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Corita Kent, Milan Knížák, Julius Koller, Park McArthur, Ree Morton, Christian Philipp Müller, Yoko Ono, Cora Pongracz, Franz West, Heimo Zobernig

Curated by Vanessa Joan Müller and Matthias Michalka
Exhibition design by Robert Müller