Untitled is an animatronic sculpture based on the protagonist of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum, which tells of a boy who wills himself to stay a child as he lives through World War II. The boy’s most prized possession is his drum, which he plays when he is fearful or confronted with danger. In one key episode, he disrupts a Nazi rally with the pounding rhythm. The motif of the drumming becomes like an act of resistance
or a warning. Indeed, the idiom ‘to beat a tin drum’ means to create a disturbance in order to draw attention to a cause. Positioned on the edge between life and death, the child is playing a drum, as if suggesting the spectacular activities of institutions of contemporary art in recent years. It is not clear whether the rhythmic phrase played is a death march or serves to attract the attention of visitors as if to a fair or a circus.
The drummer boy could be symbolic: a call for caution, for us to look to the past in order not to repeat its mistakes.