Deadheading

2003-2004

Installation | Photographs | Video

Each day, flowers are brought to (place to be decided) in the morning.

Flowers are arranged, and then the flowers are cut off.

The stems are left on display for the rest of the day.

At the end of the day the stems are removed, while the cut bulbs remain where they fell.

With the progression of time, the bulbs/deadheads grow, and grow, and grow into a mound of ‘deadheads’.

"Deadheading" is an installation composed of a bouquet of flowers on a pedestal and two photographs. On the ground lay the chopped flower heads, a poetic and cruel accumulation of growth being nipped in the bud. The implicit reference in this work is dual. The limited lifespan and brilliance of a flower clearly echoes the ephemeral and unpredictable character of celebrity. The changing tastes of a society of representation always ready to behead those beings that seem weary is evoked as well in this installation. The brutality of these decapitations betrays as well a distanced echo of Justice and American society in general. Based in Amsterdam for several years, Otto Berchem benefits from this distance from the media culture in which he grew up to detach himself from it and to develop a particularly (acerbic) critical eye.

Amiel Grumberg