LIGHTSPEED RETAIL

Julia Geissler & Felix Schwentner
Opening: 25.09.2025, 18.00
26.09.-03.10.2025

accompanied by a text by Oren Yehoshua @pinesplash8

Lightspeed Retail
In a world where every object had to be sold, where every gesture was an
advertisement, my clown-skeletons remained unmarketable, fetishized yet
uncommodified, or objects with no meaning at all: weights. None is more or less an object than any other.

When I was seventeen, I met Yonatan: alcoholictattoo/artist, a millennial saint of self-destruction – rich with followers, poor with money – who went by the name Auto. Through him came Lucas, who had moved from art school to marketing, where he applied American Apparel’s “sex sells” strategy to burger-chain commercials. They were ready for a new project; a CERAMIC STUDIO!, with his wife by his side, a former stripper who became a jeweler. The studio’s brand was built against softness, against the yoga-mom hands shaping cups in community centers. Instead, they built a religion of hype: vases shaped like bodybuilders and bleached, sulfur-tinted glazed mugs. Yonatan’s
pieces were free-formed, asymmetrical vases, white and scarred with his second-order poetry (e.g. people’s phone numbers or other kinds of urbanist bad-boy scavenger pearls).

But my skeletal, whimsical spirit-creatures never survived the oven; they cracked like prophecies no one asked for. My real contribution was modeling: topless, white bow tie and net tights by a fountain, pigeons pecking at the birdseed they scattered on my skin as I held one of Yonatan‘s vases. In return, they let me kneel at the wheel, pressing clay into clowns with wings already destined for ash. The photos consecrated me as part of their marketplace, their Instagram cathedral. The selling of objects and the selling of workshops were packaged like sacraments; people were confused about what they were
selling. Lucas, the former marketer, tried to sell ceramic objects or workshops but ultimately sold marketing itself. My devotion to Yonatan became another offering to the studio’s altar. When I made my clown-skeleton spirits, I wanted them to last, but the fire refused them as Yonatan’s heterosexuality refused me. He tattooed someone’s back with my text, but he never loved me the way I wanted. Their failure was their truth; they were clowns.

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung durch Stadt Wien | Kultur

Fotos: Felix Schwentner