Piling up tonnes of junk in the corner of a gallery is an old trick. This showroom is tiny, its corners everywhere, and Menk’s collection of electronic circuit boards, wires, and half-broken peripherals thus looks almost as impressive here as Christoph Büchel’s equivalent once did in a warehouse.
But volume alone is trivial, each item in this mess offering less to the eye than the last. Menk knows this: he used most of this matter before. Not always to such “rubbish” effect, either: e-waste was a game of research for him only three years ago.
For an artist so young, Menk’s electronics are very old news in the age of the chip implant and cloud computing. This could be intriguing but, in this rendering, isn’t. The form-factor turn on history’s scrapheap offers no interpretative powers.
