Transparent Landscapes, 1994
Transparent Landscapes (1994) is an installation with small bottles filled with a transparent lemon lime tasting liquid specially created for Meta Sex. The snowy mountain landscapes printed on the transparent label attracted me as I remembered Baudrillard’s words “the instant things become man-made products, artifacts, signs, commodities, they perform an artificial and ironic function by their very existence, whose origin is transparent.” I contacted the wholesaler and obtained some 200 bottles, then I painstakingly inserted on each green label, letter after letter, a word from the sexual dictionary of plants. Displaced from their usual descriptive context, these names related to the previous installation, the greenhouse Nature Morte (1992). They also bared a relation to human sexuality – Hybrid, Sterile, Asexual, Bastard, Hermaphrodite, Mother-Plant, Daughter-Cells. These two words, Mother-Plant and Daughter-Cells were linked to the puzzle Mother and Daughter 1963 (1994) and to Interior, works also exhibited in the show. The bottles, now with a name, were no longer mass-produced objects of consumption, but instead had become unique. Soon the bottles were to disappear from the market. This was the first time I manipulated a product label, later that year I contacted the company Jordan Honey and inserted my text into their labels, creating the special signed and numbered edition of 1000 honey jars, entitled: None of Your Sting, None of Your Honey (1994).
I placed the bottles on transparent Plexiglas shelves around the walls of the room especially built to enclose the work Untitled (1994). The bottles around the walls echoes the legs surrounding the potential viewer peeping through the peep-hole of Untitled. The snowing landscape on the labels of the bottles also related to the Swiss landscape of my childhood visible on the puzzle, behind my mother holding me tight.
