The German artist Andreas Slominski (born 1959) is a prankster and gameplayer, a self-appointed fool to the court of the contemporary art world. His works have the quality of throwaway gestures or gnomic utterances and many survive only in the form of anecdotes, or trace elements in the memories of those who once saw them. Being something of an artful dodger, it is perhaps not surprising that theft is one of his favoured strategies. His principal contribution to an exhibition at Portikus, in Frankfurt, in 1996, was to exhibit one of the penalty spots that he had dug up and purloined from a nearby football pitch. Likewise, the aptly titled Stolen Bicycle Pump, a work from 1998, consisted of an air pump that he had appropriated from a bicycle chained to some railings in Berlin – said pump having been pinched, with deliberate perversity, not simply by removing it from its brackets, but by sawing away the entire portion of the bicycle frame to which it was attached.

Bicycles are something of a Slominski leitmotif. In 1995, when invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Museum Haus Esters Krefeld, he enlisted the aid of a glazier in inserting the valve of a bike wheel into one of the museum’s windows, supposedly in order to provide gallery goers with a breath of fresh air. Another work from the same year, The Lemon Squeezer, consisted of the seat of a man’s racing bike, tilted to a vertical position so that citrus fruit might be squeezed on its upturned tip. While participating in the Munster outdoor sculpture project in 1997, Slominski had a street lamp excavated and its underground wirting disconnected so that he could slip the inner tube of a bicycle around its column. His other contribution was...

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