Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s groundbreaking installation Celebration? Realife was originally created for ‘Three Life Situations’ at Gallery House London in 1972. The work is a strange hybrid of scatter environment, a theatrical stage and a performance piece. Meant as a critique of modernist objectivism, Celebration? Realife is also a consciously messy and ambivalent reaction to the clean conceits of Conceptualist and post-Minimalist tendencies.

Tom Holert argues that with Celebration? Realife, Chaimowicz makes a strategic and important meditation on the changing role of the artist, who in this defining work simultaneously becomes art director, choreographer and participant. Celebration? Realife probes the relationship between art, design, popular culture and performance at a moment when these disciplines, genres and milieus hardly ever met. Holert shows how this influential work inventively anticipates and helps to define an important and increasingly popular tendency in art.