Black culture, hip hop, basketball: these are the elements from which Mathias Pöschl forms his exhibition you must learn at the 21er Raum. The title derives from a song by KRS-One, who also uses the pseudonym The Teacher in calling out for struggle against the discrimination of Afro-Americans. Gil Scott-Heron also makes an appearance in the exhibition; as one of the inventors of spoken-word performance, he was known for concerts reminiscent of lectures on social issues. The title of a 1992 song by Eric B. & Rakim has also been integrated in the exhibition: Don’t sweat the technique is a reminder not to waste time on the details. Right next to it is a picture of shoelaces, whichappear three times in the exhibition as a unifying element. They are red, black and green after the colors of the Back-to-Africa movement founded by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. These are also the colors dominating the exhibition as a whole, while the shoelaces themselves reference another figure: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Beginning in 1990, he played basketball in the NBA under his original name Chris Jackson, which he changed upon converting to Islam in 1991. The basketball player became more widely known on account of his refusal to stand for the American national anthem, and also on account of his style. According to sport theorists, he played like a white man – allegedly whites, in contrast to blacks, play less creatively but more precisely, because they tend to do more of their training alone. Abdul-Rauf trained alone because he has Tourette syndrome. And it was on account of this condition that it took him forever to tie his shoes. Pöschl is dealing with issues like time and order in disorder, a parallel to the Minimal Art of the 1960s and to Robert Smithson’s concept of entropy. This artist appears as a quote at many points, and he is set in relationship with sociopolitical content, for instance when Pöschl forms a (basketball) hoop out of Smithson’s Heap of Language, or when he relates the theme of mirrors and glass to photos of shot-out storefront windows in the context of the Black Panthers. The artist lets the organization’s female icon, Kathleen Cleaver, collide with Wade Guyton’s Color, Power & Style, while also stylizing pictures of the Nation of Islam in allusion to the reduction of their member’s surnames to an X.

Mathias Pöschl employs characteristic forms of Minimalism in describing a subcultural system. He translates into sculptural qualities ideas like striving against entropy, perfectionism, the development of structures, pivot leg and free leg, enduring to raise endurance, or the methodical doing-one-thing-after-another of training practices. Mixing the political and the cultural, he makes from them the entity of a literally social sculpture. And yet at the same time he goes against the grain of Minimal Art’s pretenses relating to the absolute. The attempts at producing order miss the mark in the end, dissolving into an unstoppably advancing entropy.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni is not the title of this exhibition, but of the series from which the works on display at the 21er Raum derive. The phrase is a palindrome, meaning the same when read from left to right or right to left: “We wander in circles at night and are consumed by fire.“ The exhibition, too, makes us move in circles, among several lines of narrative.

It is obvious that most of the photographs on view were not made during Susanne Kriemann’s residency in Vienna. They show some vertical reddish rock, the interior of a cavern, and a landscape that seems more or less American. The pictures were taken during a research trip in Texas. The archive of images resulting from this journey is huge, whereas the selection made for the exhibition has been narrowed down and is extremely focused: five landscape views piled on top of each other, showing the region around Barringer Hill. Kriemann’s pictures were taken with the vision in mind of shooting the images of the Barringer Hill photographic collection again in our day. In 1887, a number of minerals were discovered in the region, including fergusonite and gadolinite, both of them rare-earth types. When the Westinghouse Electric Company acquired the patent for Nernst lamps in 1901, the mine became the chief supplier of glowers required for these lamps and made of the rare-earth minerals in question. By 1910 Nernst lamps were already out of date, with light bulbs having found their way into most every household. In 1937 the mine was flooded with water, which now extends beyond Barringer Hill as Lake Buchanan. In the meantime the demand for rare-earth minerals have increased more than ever before. In LEDs they are once again used for emitting light, and neither LCD screens nor plasma displays can do without them. Currently, China is in control of the market for rare-earth minerals and in 2011 delivered 97 per cent of the global production. In the USA, mine sites are presently being redeveloped in order to reduce the degree of dependency on China for the urgently required minerals.

Kriemann herself employed a technology based technique on rare-earth minerals in order to solarize her landscape images – the light of her iPhone in the production of her photographs. For the picture of cave walls, which creates an anthropomorphic impression, LED spotlights illuminating Longhorn Cavern near Barringer Hill were implemented. 

One of the larger pictures was not taken in Texas, but in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. To create it, gadolinite, a radioactive and rare-earth mineral, was used in combination with large-format film, in a process that lasted about 20 days. The artist describes the result as follows: “The stone looks as if it were flying towards you directly from the cosmos. You can truly lose yourself in this image. The cave landscape, on the other hand, looks as if you were able to recognize something but the longer you look the less you know what you see. It’s as if the moment of confusion has prompted you to move in two directions: in the first, you don’t know what you see and try to define it and in the second, you know exactly what you see but get lost and eventually know nothing at all.”

The last picture in the exhibition was also taken during the Texas research trip. It is a digital photograph showing a monolith of red granite. It occurs naturally in the place where it was installed: near Amarillo Ramp, the last land art project by Robert Smithson. In 1973 the artist died in a plane crash when surveying the site, and his wife, Nancy Holt, had the rock installed in this very place.  

Smithson borrowed a term from physics in order to use it for societal and universal phenomena: entropy. According to Smithson, the second law of thermodynamics is the fact that it is easier to lose energy than to conserve it, so that the degree of disorder (in social sciences also referred to as uncertainty) is constantly increasing. He sought to create moments between decay and renewal or chaos and order while everything is subjected to continuous change. 

Entropy also meanders through the exhibition: a mine that is now a lake and a lake that is also a mirror and simultaneously represents the potential of a mine cavern to turn into an eroded landscape with rocks transforming into a kind of sculptural process. That Smithson has slipped into the exhibition metamorphosed into a rock underscores Susanne Kriemann’s almost mystical approach to the subject of entropy. The rare-earth minerals constantly change their appearance and meaning as the exhibition progresses with the invisible radiation of the stones turning into a metaphor for the radiation of the screens by which we are surrounded today wherever we go, and for the many things we only believe to see, but actually do not. 

Living in a permanent exchange of information leads to a constant verification of potential knowledge, which is as repetitive as the impressions of the photographs from the artist’s series, all of which resemble each other closely, although they are not the same. Similarly, the phrase “we wander about in circles at night and are consumed by fire” has different connotations in different languages. “While we stroke the skin of light bodies in order to roam the realms of information, we permanently look into the light. What is in between is glass, so that the devices are actually showcases and the images and texts have already been archived and turned into museum exhibits, i.e., they are no longer alive,” Kriemann maintains. We can only hope that entropy will soon be on the decline again and we won’t end up like moths attracted to light.