Tuesday, 26 December 2017 16:20

Erwin Wurm – ‘Performative Sculptures’

Curated by Severin Dünser and Alfred Weidinger

21er Haus, Vienna

2 June – 10 September 2017

Attempts at Liberation in the Fog of Sculpture

On Erwin Wurm’s Performative Sculptures

“You can try to find the sculptural quality of everything. Whether anything comes of it, is another matter. Is there a limit to sculpturality, and if so, where does it lie? I have been thinking about these things for decades.”1 So says Erwin Wurm in conversation about his work. And indeed, for over 35 years he has been on an artistic Odyssey aimed at expanding the classic concept of sculpture.
It all began with sculptures of wooden slats Wurm banged together with nails in the early 1980s. He then painted them in bright colors, in a fashion similar to the style of the “Neue Wilden” (New Fauves) who were active at the time. Classified as “Neue Skulptur” (New Sculpture) the works were the exact opposite of what was hip at the time, such as Minimal or Conceptual art. But soon these novel ideas also became part of the canon, and Wurm sought again to liberate himself from his association with “Neue Skulptur.” So he discontinued his previous approach to work and tried to overcome the pathos and gravity of art.2 He abandoned the sublime and looked for a different tool with which to redefine his art. What he found was the paradoxical.
In the late 1980s, Wurm began to use garments as the basic material for his sculptures. He placed jackets, trousers, shirts and the like over cubes and cylinders. What made these works effective was their reference to the human body as opposed to the alienation of that same body when imposing a geometrical form upon it. In 1990, he developed this idea into the Hanging Pullovers which were no longer bound to an object, but hung on the wall picture-like, and were lent a sculptural character by being folded in a specific way. Conversely, some garments were folded and then placed in boxes. These were followed by the first “instructions”—drawings and notes to explain how the garments should be folded. In these garment-objects Wurm, on one hand, alluded to the classic methods of sculpture while also making an everyday item into a work of art by depriving it of its function. On the other hand, he shifted the focus away from the object itself to the sculptural process of creation, which was then potentially transferred to the recipients.
Then in the video Still I from 1990 we see a man standing motionless. He has covered his head with a bowl that hides the play of emotions on his face. The video is looped, creating a static impression that runs counter to the medium itself. Here for the first time, using a technique alien to the art, Wurm turns a person into a sculpture—a method that would soon become characteristic of his approach to sculpture.
The Dust Sculptures also saw the light of day in 1990. These consist of white pedestals with dust on their surfaces. But the dust is not everywhere, for there are also blank spaces as if something had stood there for a long time but has now disappeared. Normally of course, sculptures are put on such pedestals in exhibition rooms. With the Dust Sculptures Wurm has had them disappear or moved elsewhere: in our heads, where they must be imagined in all their immateriality. What the artist addresses here is time as a potential sculptural quality, and which expresses itself quite literally through the dust. In addition, Wurm introduces the principle of reproducibility to his creative work—after all, the dust sculptures can be produced again by other people according to exact instructions—and consequently he removes them from transience, while he also satirizes the exhibition business with dust-dry humour.
In Fabio zieht sich an (“Fabio Gets Dressed”), 1992, a man removes all the clothes from a coat stand and puts them on. Consequently, he disappears from the picture as a shapeless, swollen figure. In this piece, Wurm combines his point of departure, clothing, with an actor who performs a sculptural action within a certain time limit. The act of dressing is heightened and becomes a metaphor for sculpture (in that the work deals with volume); Wurm has joined the abstract process of creation with an everyday act and infuses it with social importance.
That same year he also produced the video 59 Stellungen (“59 Positions”) in which garments are put on in 59 different ways and in certain positions. As with Still I the people in the video remain in one position and move only minimally. “For the first time aspects such as ridiculousness and embarrassing behavior were added. Normally, you would like to produce brilliant, serious art, but I noticed that the ridiculous, the embarrassing and the frail are fundamental states of people that interest me more.”3
From here it is only a small step to the One Minute Sculptures, which have been produced from 1997 onwards. In these works, Wurm invites his audience members to themselves become sculptures for the space of a minute. In an interaction with certain objects following the artist’s instructions and comments, poses are adopted and become charged with meaning. The simple arrangements often involve complex questions or brainteasers: for example, think about Montaigne while pressing a felt pen against the wall with your head; guess the mass of a piece of wood that you are lying on; or think about your own digestion while lying down and balancing a bottle of toilet disinfectant on your head. But the instructions can also be simpler: say, being a dog, eating a sausage; drawing a pullover over your head like a terrorist. As well, subjects are asked to depict abstract topics as a kind of monument, such as the theory of labor, the organization of love, the theory of painting or the speculative realist. Paradoxes of a certain ridiculousness have become an integral part of the One Minute Sculptures. Techniques that had been featured in earlier works—the inclusion of observers who perform the work within a specific timeframe (and do so repeatedly), the use of everyday objects and the use of video and photography to capture sculptural actions—were all combined in the One Minute Sculptures.
These were followed by photo series such as Instructions for Idleness (2001) and Instructions on How to be Politically Incorrect (2002), which emphasized the socio-critical aspect of Wurm’s oeuvre again. Also produced at this time was Fat Car (2001), a “life-sized” car, which is bloated and somewhat too well-endowed to meet any ideal of beauty. Fat House follows the same principle: it is simply overweight and overflows at its sides. Once again the artist takes a basic principle of sculpture—namely, the adding of volume—as his starting point. He then transfers the human equivalent of overeating and getting fat from everyday life to the visual world of sculpture. The adipose status symbols of prosperity represent obesity in society and its underlying reasons such as addictive consumption and overproduction. You might say they are vanitas themes, symbols of transience.
In contrast, Wurm did not infuse any human characteristics into the Narrow House of 2010, let alone human proportions. It is not bloated, but has been compressed. Narrow House is a copy of his parental home in its original size—but shrunk down to a width of 1.1 meters. As a prototypical building from the 1960s in Austria, it symbolizes the widely realized dream of owning one’s own home, along with the attendant feeling of confinement that was manifested in petty bourgeois, stuffy and depersonalized living spaces. Finally, the artist goes one step further in the direction of inner feelings with the series Bad Thoughts from 2016. These shapeless clumps of material in tied-up garbage bags reject any ironic reading. The black surface hides from sight the objects inside, and only the amorphous bulges provide clues as to the bags’ content. In their material quality as bronze casts they suggest a heaviness that in combination with the title brings to the viewer dark moods and imaginings. There is something similarly and suggestively introspective about a body of work that Wurm was been working on with increasing intensely since 2011, namely the Performative Sculptures.
These include the previously mentioned Hanging Pullovers from 1990, and Pillow from 1992. The cushion can also be “worked” according to drawn instructions and turned “into a face,” “chicken,” “neck,” “ass” or ”someone squatting”. Wurm continued this group of works from 2012 with House Attack. This comprises models of European and American houses, some of them well-known buildings or by famous architects, and some anonymous buildings with which Wurm has a personal connection. The artist made the models out of clay and before being cast, he subjected them to further treatment: he attacked them in every conceivable manner. He might bash in a model, or sit on it and thereby squash it. For example, he lay down on his parental home and squashed it out of shape thanks to his body weight; he jumped onto the Fools Tower (a psychiatric hospital in Vienna), inflicted gashes on San Quentin prison, dug a hole into the high-security prison Stammheim, and aimed a kick at a German World War II bunker. In other words, certain types of buildings—those associated with the function of correcting behavior—are maltreated. The destruction of the closed shape—and thus the shell that keeps life in a certain order—becomes a rebellion against conformism and regulation. For Abstract Attack (2013), Wurm let sausages loose on the houses. The sausage is likewise a symbol of Western consumer culture. And it is an abstraction of food, as it is hardly possible to tell just what its innards are comprised of. The title Abstract Attack derives from this analogy, and provides an ironic spin on the almost Modernist austerity of House Attack.
From 2015, Wurm has developed two additional sub-groups to the Performative Sculptures, namely Furnitures und Objects. For Furnitures, he focuses on items such as sofas, armchairs, lounges, chests-of-drawers and refrigerators. Objects comprises such items as a soap dispenser, a wall clock, a mobile phone, a tape measure and a pistol. Here again Wurm follows the same principle that he used for House Attack. He makes models out of clay – which in the case of the Objects sometimes go beyond the size of the original—and he finds ways of acting violently towards them, even including running them over with a car. At the end he often casts the damaged models in bronze, aluminium, iron or synthetic resin, or he coats them with paint.
A final subgroup completes the Performative Sculptures. The works of Beat and Treat are begun in 2001, but are anticipated as early as 1995. However, unlike the other Performative Sculptures there is nothing mimetic about them. They are not based on houses or other objects. Their starting point is a material in its raw industrial form: the block of clay. The artist works the block with the entire force of his body. As the title infers he “beats and treats” the clay, going wild over it until the work is finished. It is hardly surprising that he has used the title Zornskulpturen (“Anger Sculptures”) to describe these works.
In the Performative Sculptures the artist seems to give free rein to his aggression; in other words, he portrays an expression of anger towards something. As in his earlier works he borrows from everyday life when he transfers such outbreaks of anger to the creative sculptural process. In doing so he exaggerates the principle of the sculptural gesture and satirizes it. Similarly, in these works allusions are made to the ridiculous and the embarrassing—after all, losing one’s self-control and destroying things in order to get rid of bottled up anger usually tends to happen in private. And if it does happen in public, onlookers generally feel embarrassed.
Erwin Wurm emotionalizes sculptural creativity here. At the same time, he psychologizes the observers’ point of view as they scan the objects for traces, and attempt to draw conclusions about the artist’s motives, his darkest depths and state of mind at the time of the sculptural action.
It is important for Erwin Wurm to be physically involved himself again: “I have noticed that many artists hardly do almost nothing at all themselves, but rather let their works be produced by others. That really strikes me. It irritates me because I have lost contact to my work, so to speak. And so I am trying to regain that contact, by creating everything myself, or at least for the most part by myself.”4 Naturally, one can argue that Wurm has many of his works performed by others—such as the One Minute Sculptures—and that this is a fundamental part of his oeuvre. Others might object that new ideas are largely developed during hands-on experimentation, an experience that cannot be made up for by abstract planning, and is indispensable for the continuation of a complete work. In addition, Wurm has never relinquished his role as author: even when visitors are allowed to perform his sculptures the artist remains the author of the work.
His Performative Sculptures are not only charged with emotion, they are also charged with authorship. Indeed, in this body of work authorship is overdrawn. And as an expression of this authorship the impacts of the artist’s body upon the material can very definitely be read as gestures. These gestures transport the aura of the unique, but simultaneously question them in their reproducibility by being cast. That said, the direct nature of the gestures supports the maintenance of an authenticity of expression. What is at stake here—and this is similar to gestural painting in Arte Informale—is the transparency of the gestural impulse, the energy transferred to the material. In emphasizing the creative process, implications of direct personal expression and speculations regarding traces of the apparently unconscious are thus connected here.
Through this exaggeration Erwin Wurm’s gestures can also be read as critical allusions to the myth of the artist, even though the artist himself leaves us in the dark about the status of his actions. Nonetheless, gestural expression is receiving greater attention again today as it unites qualities that counter the digitalization of everyday life with something refreshingly physical.
The main impression left behind by the Performative Sculptures is the emphasis on a creative process by which Erwin Wurm makes the physical objects in this body of work almost literally collide. The moral of the story? Things lack permanency, but by opting to take action it is possible to take control of one’s life. What Wurm advocates in other words is critical reflection of one’s own actions in the context of society, so as not to become an object (rather than a subject) oneself. But as Erwin Wurm himself once said: “My work deals with the drama of the triviality of existence. Whether you try to get a handle on it through philosophy or a diet, in the end you always draw the short straw.”

1 Erwin Wurm in interview with Tobias Haberl, “Gott sei Dank gibt es noch die dunkle Seite,” in: Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, no. 46, 18 Nov., 2016, p. 25.
2 See Erwin Wurm in conversation with Max Hollein, “Photography Knocks at the Door,” in: Aperture, autumn 2013, p. 50.
3 Erwin Wurm in interview with Brigitte Neider-Olufs, “Die Welt wird zunehmend breiter,” in: Wiener Zeitung, 15 Oct. 2010.
4 “I have come to realize how much contemporary art suffers, or has suffered, from the fact that artists’ studios have been transformed into manufacturing workshops. I have noticed that many artists do almost nothing at all themselves, but rather let their works be produced by others. That really strikes me. It irritates me because I have lost contact with my work, so to speak. And so I am trying to get that contact back again by creating everything myself, or at least for the most part by myself.” – Wurm/Hollein 2013 (as note 2), p. 51.

Exhibition catalogue:
Erwin Wurm – Performative Sculptures
Edited by Stella Rollig, Severin Dünser and Alfred Weidinger
Including Texts by Severin Dünser and Stella Rollig as well as an interview between Erwin Wurm and Alfred Weidinger
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/English
Hardcover, 29 x 22.5 cm, 216 pages, numerous illustrations in color and b/w
Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna, 2017
ISBN 978-3-903114-40-1

Published in Ausstellungsdetails

Wednesday, 18 January 2017 17:08

‘The Grasping’

Heinrich Dunst, VALIE EXPORT, Franziska Kabisch, Barbara Kapusta, Peter Weibel, Tina Schulz, Javier Téllez

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

30 November 2016 — 22 January 2017

The expression “grasping” defines the process of intellectual realization and is used synonymously with “understanding.” Etymologically, it is derived from the physical-haptic act of touching—similar to the term “conceive,” which stems from the Latin “concipere,” and translated literally means “to grasp things together.” The exhibition attempts to pursue what converges in the terms: manual act and intellectual reception.

For example, with his work “Writing the word hand by hand,” Peter Weibel inquires into the ability to confirm the existence of things, processes, and relations—and, first and foremost, the existence of the hand. There are very good reasons for this; already in early childhood, the hand is used to affirm external reality. In the bible, for example, doubting Thomas is quoted as saying, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”1 The philosopher Helmuth Plessner describes our perception as “eye-hand field,” which became a characteristic of humans when they learned to walk upright: “The eye leads the hand, the hand confirms the eye.”2 This seeing with the hand and the experience it brings is also at the center of Barbara Kapusta’s “Soft Rope”. In the video one sees a rope that the artist explores with her hand while sketching out her impressions of the procedure in a poem. Also Javier Téllez’s film, “Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See” (which can be seen in the Blickle Kino on the ground floor) is about tactile perception. Based on an Indian parable, the film shows six people who are blind, exploring an elephant with their hands. All have a different experience of the animal before them and their interpretations do not coincide—their subjective perceptions do not lead to an objective truth.

The hand is, however, an instrument not only for touching, but also shaping. Richard Serra made the film “Hand catching lead” in 1968. In it, one sees a hand that is trying to catch pieces of lead and form them before letting them fall again. In Serra’s film, the same gesture is repetitively iterated, and no successful or failed products can be detected. Instead, focus is on the process of making, the film becomes a metaphor for sculpting per se. Tina Schulz adopts the film’s gestures and repeats them—however, without lead. What remains are the hand’s seemingly aimless motions, which only make sense when compared with the original film, and become exaggerated by the reduction.

The hand, seen as an object, is the subject’s performing agent—especially when the ego is an artist, such as Heinrich Dunst. In Dunst’s work, the hand does not “act” as it did in Schulz’s, but instead, is addressed. “Hello Hand” says Dunst to the Hand, which he has placed like an exhibit on the table. In a monologue, which he directs just as much to the hand, as the viewer and himself, he attributes the parts of his body functions that they actually do not primarily hold. He delineates a structure of relations that begins with perception and ends with communication—as a metaphor for acting, which keeps thought in balance with physical existence.3

Martin Heidegger wrote on this: “Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a shrine. At any rate, it is a “hand-work.” … but the work of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and this is the true hand-work. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent.”4

VALIE EXPORT also refers to Heidegger in her video “Visual Text: Finger Poem”, as she loosely quotes him by saying “Ich sage die Zeige mit den Zeichen im Zeigen der Sage” (“I say the showing with the signs by signing the saying”). She performs the sentence with her fingers in “visual sign language”. “The body can thus be used to impart both intellectual as well as physical contents. The body as information medium. The human is adapted to the social structure by the body,” she explains about the intention of her video. And also Franziska Kabisch’s “Deklinationen (Can I inherit my dead parents’ debts?)” is about the social communication surrounding the hand. Beginning from the gallery of professors, which exists at many universities, contemplated is how knowledge production and scientific norms are manifest in postures—especially of the hands—and how they are adopted and continued. This final quote by Martin Heidegger is also from the university context, from a lecture: “It is only to the extent to which man speaks that he thinks and not the other way around, as Metaphysics still thinks. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason, hardest, hand-work, if it would be accomplished by oneself in time.”5

1 The Gospel of Thomas

2 Helmuth Plessner, Anthropologie der Sinne, (1970), Suhrkamp, 2003

3 “I think and compare; I see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies (1788–1790)

4 Martin Heidegger, “What is Called Thinking?” (1951–1952), trans. J. Glen Gray, Harper Perennial, 1976, pp. 16–17.

5 Ibid.

Published in Ausstellungsdetails

Wednesday, 04 January 2017 18:23

‘The Gestural’

Thomas Bayrle, Andy Boot, Christian Falsnaes, Roy Lichtenstein, Klaus Mosettig, Laura Owens, Markus Prachensky, Roman Signer

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

8 September — 20 November 2016

Painting is the application of paint onto a surface. Brushstrokes are the constituent parts that make up an image. Unified through the process of painting, it is around these individual elements that this exhibition revolves.

A recent donation to the Belvedere, the painting ‘Rouges différents sur noir - Liechtenstein’ by Markus Prachensky, will act as the starting point for a discussion surrounding aspects of style and the very essence of the gestural. Completed in 1956/57, the painting was named after the Liechtensteinstraße, where Prachensky created it in a studio he shared with Wolfgang Hollegha. Incidentally, this was the place where these two founded the artist group “Galerie St. Stephan” in 1956 together with Josef Mikl and Arnulf Rainer. The painting comes from an initial series of images in which Prachensky painted with red paint on a black background. The color red became a recurring element and something of a characteristic in the works that followed. Prachensky’s work is totally committed to Informalism, which made its way to Vienna from Paris, where it was initiated at the end of the 1940s. The movement was developed in response to the phenomenon of geometric abstraction, with which it shared a rejection of classical concepts of composition. However, unlike geometric abstraction, Informalism was defined by its formlessness and spontaneity. Prachensky was, therefore, mainly preoccupied with the tracing of a gestural impulse and the energy applied to a canvas.

What Prachensky emphasizes in this image is the procedural moment in the production of the image – with all its implications, reaching from unmitigated personal expression to speculation around its echoes of the unconscious. These gestures on a monochrome background come forth as clearly legible and thereby manifest a stark contrast. They are themselves transformed into their own kind of sign, a recognizable symbol of the gesture. This was also employed by Roy Lichtenstein in his series Brushstrokes, which took form between 1965 and 1968. Ironically, using oil on canvas, Lichtenstein transformed individual, overlapping brushstrokes into his typical cartoon style – making, as it were, caricatures out of the spontaneous moment, while also referring back to Abstract Expressionism. In the case of the Little Big Painting Reproduction, the theme of the series was also translated into chromography, industrially reproducing the uniqueness of painting and reducing personal expression ad absurdum.

Thomas Bayrle works with reproductions and the repetition of forms. As in Pop Art, these forms often refer to objects of consumer culture and can thus be read through a socially critical lens. He distorts individual pictorial elements by way of mechanical and digital manipulation; from there arise systematic structures that tend to reflect their constituent parts and so refer to the underlying logic behind image making. In Variations of a Brushstroke, Bayrle appointed the brushstroke as the primary motif. Arranged in differing deformations that amount to a collage covering the entire picture’s surface, this meta-painting questions the authenticity of its expression through its mechanical repetition.

Since 2007, Klaus Mosettig has been translating works by other artists into his own drawings. He projects the works onto paper and, over months of diligent work, records his interpretation into different shades of gray in a way reminiscent of print processes. Despite his elaborate manual process, Mosettig leaves behind no detectable mark of his hand. And yet, he has afforded his works an artistic autonomy beyond the originals they seek to reproduce. This could have to do with the time he invests in his works, which becomes clear upon close inspection. The template for Informel 2 was a child’s drawing. Analogous to the movement mentioned in title, the child’s drawing is an attempt toward direct expression, toward the experimental search for a personal visual language. Mosettig alters the reception of small gestures through appropriation, by copying them with pencil and enlarging them.

Roman Signer is known for his actions, but sees himself as a sculptor whose works deal with temporality, speed, and transformative processes. Pyrotechnics are a recurring element in his oeuvre. In the 2006 video Punkt, he sits at an easel in a meadow, dips his brush in paint and holds it to the canvas. Shortly thereafter, a box explodes behind him and startles him. Jumping at the sudden loud noise, he plants a point on the painting surface. The result of Signer’s premeditated startle-response corresponds almost literally to the transference of energy to the canvas that was realized by Informalism – save that Signer exaggerated this process of gestural painting in order to find an authentic expression of his own.

Andy Boot dealt in the depiction of expressive gestures early on, an example being his work e who remained was M that is part of the Belvedere collection. Boot takes noodles that have been dipped in colored paint and lets them fall to the surface of a canvas placed on the ground. The result is a neo-abstract-expressionistic pattern that dilutes the absurdity of the gestural moment to that of an ornament, thereby caricaturing its dynamism as illusionism. However, his 2012 work Untitled (light blue) indulges in these gestures without a hint of irony. In this work, he draped a light blue ribbon typically used in rhythmic gymnastics within the frame and filled it with wax. The use of this sports device meant to make movement more visible somehow produces something reminiscent of an abstract composition – a sort of meta-painting that points to the gestural in painting, without itself actually being painted.

Laura Owens as a painter is known for both her abstract and figurative works that cross and overlap in their application of different media, while taking a variety of references from art history and elements of popular and folk culture. She often chooses to focus on smaller aspects and details in her images when she tries out new techniques, thereby changing the style once again. The brushstroke as a decorative element and sign, feature increasingly within her works over the past few years. For example, her 2013 work Untitled (Clock Painting) does not stray far from the decorative. In this painting, she has incorporated part of a clockwork in which a hand moves over the image. What is part of the process of painting is also linguistically part of the clock: the pointer is also called “hand” and the strike of the hour “stroke.” Therefore, the second hand can quite literally be read as a metaphor for the arm that moves while painting on canvas and virtually takes the form of a stroke, enabling Owens’ allusion to time as a factor in the production of images.

Performance being his medium of choice, Christian Falsnaes works with pre-made scripts that he follows more or less, and which motivate the audience to interact. He is concerned with making group dynamics accessible, but also with drawing attention to rituals and norms of behavior, particularly those within the art world. For this exhibition, Falsnaes has developed a new iteration of his piece Existing Things, in which the public is prompted to paint a picture together with a performer acting as the brush. The action effectively dissolves individual authorship into a collective process, leaving multicolored brushstrokes within the exhibition.

In general, the brushstroke stands alone as a metaphor for art itself and, especially within the contemporary context, can be read with critical reference to the myth of the artist. The exhibition shows how the views of individual authorship, artistic authenticity, and originality have changed. These categories, terms which we use to perceive and reflect upon art, seem never to have fallen out of our collective imagination. However, the possibilities afforded by technical reproduction and medialisation have transformed our attitude towards the nature of the gestural in painting. Gestural expression has recently gained new appreciation because of its unification of qualities that hold something genuine, unaffected, and refreshingly corporeal over the digitization of our everyday lives.

Published in Ausstellungsdetails

Sunday, 14 August 2016 15:04

Andy Boot

‘Überfläche’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

14 November — 9 December 2012

Überfläche (Übersurface) is the title of this exhibition by Andy Boot. The title suggests two things: firstly, that there is something that lies above the surface, and secondly, that this something is sublime. In our present-day life, which continually surrounds us with images, the underground is less and less able to break through all its smooth and shiny surfaces. It is not that the human being has been made transparent by surveillance, but that the individual has become a media entity. Andy Boot’s investigation of surfaces and patterns corresponds with this progressive blurring of the boundary between being, presenting and representing.
But what surfaces are to be seen in Boot’s exhibition? There is, for instance, the Bacterio pattern, designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1978, which withdraws from unequivocal identification and oscillates between the abstract and the figurative. The designer used it as a laminate for his Memphis furniture, as a means of negating materiality and structure, and in repetition as an industrial pattern, elevating it to the status of an antiform of its own. Boot applies the pattern to a sculpture mounted on rollers, which itself is made out of a supporting material – in this case shelves. On another occasion it appears as an object at rest within itself: as pure laminate, unsure as to whether it should be material or surface. In sharpies thumb a canvas is unpretentiously painted over in black; upon its surface Boot has mounted a photo showing two youths who in the course of perpetrating an unsuccessful burglary colored over their faces with a felt-tip pen to mask their identities. Here the gesture of overpainting doubly marks the fine line along which surface balances: between beautifying and disguising. Untitled also plays with this tension, and here again on two levels. A bronze cast of a makeup item is set in a wooden board, alienating and disguising its original function. And yet the surface structure of the makeup continues to transport the character of the product, which wanted to be applied to the skin. Another sculpture presents not makeup, but a backup – at the same time it marks the end of a container and conceals the space behind it, similarly to a work on canvas primed in white, except for an X that has been painted onto it. As a symbol borrowed from a graphic program, the X serves as a placeholder for an image yet to be defined, here for a self-referential metaphor of acrylic on canvas. A further definition of image and painting is found in a canvas painted light-blue, upon which Boot has put little cat stickers. Here the gestural aspect of abstraction is treated ironically as the mere covering up of the surface, while the stickers on it invite one to touch their furry surfaces: Boot’s decoration would like to be understood as sensuous figuration. The largest work in the exhibition also ventures a jibe at Pollock: in e who remained was M, Boot drops noodles dipped into paint onto the canvas. This produces a neo-abstract-expressionist pattern, which on account of its absurdity degrades the gestural to mere ornament, thus opening the floodgates for illusionism in his paintings. Something similar happens in Untitled (ambassador), a concrete cylinder in whose top side the inner space of a martini glass (after a design by Oswald Haerdtl) has been left open as a concave – robbed of its function, it is only readable as a sign.
In Andy Boot’s work, the querying of surface’s status also entails reflection on materiality and functionality. Through the transformation of patterns in materials, gestures and painting in ornament and decoration, and all of this vice-versa as well, he puts our perception of surface above both form and function. Ornament and its repetition is no longer a crime, rather a reflection of reality. A reality in which being, self-presentation and self-representation have become increasingly blurred, where even the ego itself is visualized and lived as a mediatized entity. The individual has become a screen with the largest possible surface, an Überfläche: I am the message, because I am the medium.

Andy Boot, born in 1987 in Sydney, Australia, lives and works in Vienna. Recently he has presented solo shows at Croy Nielsen in Berlin and at Renwick Gallery in New York.

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Published in Ausstellungsdetails

Sunday, 14 August 2016 14:57

Constanze Schweiger

‘Scrollwork’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

20 December 2012 — 13 January 2013

The exhibition Scrollwork by Constanze Schweiger revolves around various aesthetic phenomena related to painting, fashion and social ties. The artist translates specific elements from her blog (constanzeschweiger.blogspot.co.at) into exhibition objects and its texts into printed form. In the same way as Scrollwork sometimes resembles acanthus leaves, sometimes an abstract pattern, the exhibition oscillates between objects that tend in different directions and yet still form a coherent whole.
The slide projection Peppermint, Cheerleader oder Schlechtes Gewissen [Peppermint, Cheerleader or Bad Conscience] shows color charts made by the artist. For the work, Schweiger transfered all the acrylic colors she uses in her paintings on square cards, to be able to appraise the chromaticity after drying - a reflection upon production, while refering to the rich suggestivity of color names with the title of her work. Furthermore displayed on the table: Sox by Michael Part, a picture by Nicolas Jasmin, a photo of a plant in front of a pattern, trousers, paint on shoes, two textiles, a book, a wall clock, a record, a color chart, a postcard and an older publication by the artist.
The particular exhibits are connected by Schweiger‘s blog and a new publication (free to take). It contains the artist‘s blog texts on individual things, out of which an all-over re-evolves: a continuous meta-ornament, the Scrollwork.

Constanze Schweiger, born 1970 in Salzburg, lives and works in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include shows at school, Vienna (2012); Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg (2012); Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna (2011); Ve.Sch, Vienna (2011) and Magazin, Vienna (2010).

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Sunday, 14 August 2016 14:48

Anja Ronacher

‘Void’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

23 January — 24 February 2013

“I operate under the assumption that at the basis of the photographic image there is a desire,” says Anja Ronacher, whereby she understands desire as an evolutionary product of archaic needs. These same needs are satisfied by the containing vessel, of which Heidegger writes: “The void is that aspect the vessel which holds. This emptiness, this nothing within the jug, is what the jug is as a holding vessel.” Furthermore, he describes the thing in itself through nearness: “In nearness is that which we are accustomed to calling a thing. But what is a thing? Man has given as little thought to the thing as a thing as he has to nearness.”(1)
Thus, in a certain sense, Anja Ronacher’s photographs are also placeholders for the void, for the signifier that the vessel stands for. That relates to our elementary needs; we have, as it were, a natural relationship of nearness to this thing. The same is true of fabric, which we approach primarily via the haptic. Ronacher’s photographs of drapery play on the absence of a body, despite the fact that textiles are indivisibly associated with corporeality. “The work of draping is a slow advance toward form, which is both being worked upon and is occurring.” And, Ronacher continues, “the way in which time occurs in images is also twofold: in the time of working on the material and in the time of the exposure.” The time of exposure determines the degree of darkness. Draping is a work of lessening and reduction, “a return to the depth of the world,”(2) as Deleuze notes in an essay on Leibniz. In photography, the fold becomes form without matter, a “disembodied similarity,”(3) as Maurice Blanchot writes. Similarly, the artist’s photographs of archeological objects and vessels demonstrate a simultaneous presence and absence in the images, whereby the producers of the things and the draperies are also unknown: depersonalized and deaurafied (in accord with Ronacher’s ideal of the artist).
The object comes before the image, and thus the image becomes a site of loss and of invocation: an invocation of the magical, the uncontemporary, the historical. “The point is, the image doesn’t define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through its form – its “internal tension” – or through the force it gathers to make the void or to bore holes, to loosen the grip of words, to dry up the oozing of voices, so as to disengage itself from memory and reason: a little alogical image, amnesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering in the open,”(4) writes Deleuze. Like photography, the vessel is grounded in its negative. In the vessel this negative is an emptiness, a gap: “void”.

(1) Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”
(2) Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”
(3) Maurice Blanchot, “The Two Versions of the Imaginary”
(4) Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted”, in Samuel Beckett, “Quad” (plays for television)

Anja Ronacher, born in Salzburg in 1979, lives and works in Vienna. She studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London and the Estonian Academy of Arts in Talinn, as well as scenography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her works have recently been shown at Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2012), Museum of Modern Art Salzburg (2010), Salzburger Kunstverein (2010) and Fotohof Salzburg (2009).

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Wednesday, 10 August 2016 21:46

‘Love Story’

Anne & Wolfgang Titze Collection

Marina Abramovic, David Altmejd, Carl Andre, Matthew Barney, Georg Baselitz, Valérie Belin, Larry Bell, Matthew Brannon, James Lee Byars, John Chamberlain, Nigel Cooke, Richard Deacon, Thomas Demand, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Lucio Fontana, Barnaby Furnas, Adrian Ghenie, Antony Gormley, Rodney Graham, Kevin Francis Gray, Andreas Gursky, Wade Guyton, Guyton/Walker, Eberhard Havekost, Thomas Helbig, Gregor Hildebrandt, Shirazeh Houshiary, Nathan Hylden, Kathleen Jacobs, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Jacob Kassay, Anselm Kiefer, Yayoi Kusama, Claude Lévêque, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Robert Longo, Sarah Lucas, Robert Mangold, Piero Manzoni, Christian Marclay, Agnes Martin, John McCracken, Adam McEwen, Julie Mehretu, Mario Merz, Matthew Monahan, Robert Morris, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Giulio Paolini, Adam Pendleton, Joyce Pensato, Grayson Perry, Paola Pivi, Jaume Plensa, Seth Price, Rashid Rana, Gerhard Richter, Charles Ross, Sterling Ruby, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Wilhelm Sasnal, Thomas Scheibitz, Sean Scully, Dirk Skreber, Tony Smith, Peter Stauss, Frank Stella, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Günther Uecker, Bernar Venet, Kelley Walker, Jeff Wall, Rebecca Warren, Lawrence Weiner, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Christopher Wool, Erwin Wurm, Lisa Yuskavage, Toby Ziegler, Thomas Zipp, Heimo Zobernig; curated by Severin Dünser and Luisa Ziaja

Belvedere Winterpalais and 21er Haus, Vienna

15 June — 5 October 2014

As hinted at in the title, the exhibition revolves around a passion: the passion connecting the French-Austrian collecting couple Anne and Wolfgang Titze and fine arts. This special relationship began rather cautiously regarding certain forms of expression and materials, such as the formal coolness of Minimal and Concept Art of the 1960s. Through an intense involvement – also with the more easily accessible Arte Povera – a common passion grew out of initial reservations and flowered into an outstanding art collection. Some 20 years later, Minimal and Conceptual Art as well as Arte Povera are still at the heart of the collection that meanwhile has been purposefully extended to include the most current developments. This is the first public appearance of a selection of ca. 130 works of around 90 artists, in a charming interplay between the baroque interior of the Winterpalais and the modern pavilion architecture of the 21er Haus.
At the center of the exhibition at the 21er Haus, works by the pioneers of reduction of the 1950s, Minimal and Conceptual Art of the 1960s converge. Recent trends in painting, sculpture and photography revolve around this junction and re-adopt issues of body, space, gesture and image. A steel sculpture by Bernar Venet, located between Upper Belvedere and castle pond, confronts historical architecture and contemporary form – a leitmotif that is continued in the Winterpalais. There, the site-specific presentation brings conceptual and figurative painterly approaches, such as post-war German art, works of Arte Povera, modern and post-modern sculpture in a variety of materials as well as current imagery in dialogue with the former residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy.
Between the white museum wall and gilded stucco the exhibits unfold an interaction of appealing contrasts, which here and there opens up new perspectives both on the spaces as well as on the works staged in them.

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Tuesday, 09 August 2016 19:21

Franz Graf

‘See What Sees You’

Among other things, with exhibits by Franz Graf and Marc Adrian, Estera Alicehajic, Theo Altenberg, Ferdinand Andri, Anouk Lamm Anouk, Nobuyoshi Araki, Magnús Árnason, Johanna Arneth, Snorri Ásmundsson, Rudolf Bacher, Franz Barwig the Elder, Lothar Baumgarten, Selina de Beauclair, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Joseph Beuys, Binär, Herbert Boeckl, Anna-Maria Bogner, Herbert Brandl, Geta Brătescu, Arik Brauer, Günter Brus, William S. Burroughs, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Nina Canell, Ernst Caramelle, Anna Ceeh, Larry Clark, Tamara Dinka, Iris Dostal, Marcel Duchamp, Dejan Dukic, Rudolf Eb.er & Joke Lanz, Valie Export, Helmut Federle, Ernst Fuchs, Walther Gamerith, August Gaul, Ron Geesin & Roger Waters, Gelitin, Liam Gillick & Corinne Jones, Allen Ginsberg, Sara Glaxia, Gottfried Goebel, Karl Iro Goldblat, Martin Grandits, Fritz Grohs, Mario Grubisic, Kristján Guðmundsson, The Guerilla Art Action Group, Tatjana Hardikov, Friedrich Hartlauer, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir, Rudolf Hausner, André Heller, Herbert Hinteregger, Benjamin Hirte, Marcel Houf, Françoise Janicot, Ali Janka, Ana Jelenkovic, Robert Jelinek, Hildegard Joos, Donald Judd, Tillman Kaiser, Felix Kalmar, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Didi Kern & Philipp Quehenberger, Richard Kern, Leopold Kessler, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel, Peter Kogler, Franz Koglmann & Bill Dixon, Zenita Komad, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Brigitte Kowanz, Angelika Krinzinger, Elke Silvia Krystufek, Zofia Kulik, Doreen Kutzke, Marcellvs L., Bruce LaBruce, Eskil Loftsson, Daniel Löwenbrück, Sarah Lucas & Julian Simmons, Victor Man, Mark Manders, Michaela Math, marshall!yeti, Otto Maurer, Paul McCarthy, Andrew M. McKenzie, Bjarne Melgaard, Cecilie Meng, Merzbow, Rune Mields, Chiara Minchio, Milan Mladenovic, Klaus Mosettig, Otto Muehl, Wladd Muta, Adam Mühl, Gina Müller, Mario Neugebauer, Hermann Nitsch, Oswald Oberhuber, Erik Oppenheim & David Kelleran, Charlemagne Palestine, Manfred Pernice, Goran Petercol, Rade Petrasevic, Raymond Pettibon, Walter Pichler, Begi Piralishvili, Elisabeth Plank, Natascha Plum, Rudolf Polanszky, Franz Pomassl, Arnulf Rainer, Raionbashi / Krube., Konrad Rapf, Jason Rhodes, Paul-Julien Robert, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Dieter Roth, Fiona Rukschcio, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, Alexander Ruthner, Gerhard Rühm, Kurt Ryslavy, Nino Sakandelidze, Georg Sallner, Ed Sanders, Markus Schinwald, Eva Schlegel, Conrad Schnitzler, Philipp Schöpke, Claudia Schumann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Frederike Schweizer, Björn Segschneider, Jim Shaw & Benjamin Weissman, Jörg Siegert, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Tamuna Sirbiladze, Linnéa Sjöberg, Dominik Steiger, Nino Stelzl, Curt Stenvert, Alexander Stern, Rudolf Stingel, Martina Stoian, Johannes Stoll, Ida Szigethy, Lilli Thießen, Bjarni H. Thórarinsson, Manfred Unger, Franz Vana, Jannis Varelas, Walter Vopava, Wolf Vostell, Klaus Weber, Peter Weibel, Lois Weinberger, Herwig Weiser, Wendy & Jim, Adam Wiener, Ingrid Wiener, Oswald Wiener, John Wiese, Judith Weratschnig, Stefan Wirnsperger, Eva Wohlgemuth, Helmut Wolech, Iwona Zaborowska, Thomas Zipp and Heimo Zobernig

21er Haus, Vienna

29 January — 25 May 2014

Franz Graf is a thoroughly distinctive artist. He cannot be pigeonholed in any of the usual categories, and his works, indeed his oeuvre, cannot easily be described. He is neither a conceptual artist, painter prince, misunderstood genius, an artist of the state or of the market, nor even a critic of the institutions, and yet he has something of all these traits – and is always one step ahead when it comes to eluding all-too conventional structures and the classifications that go hand in hand with them.
After training under Oswald Oberhuber at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from the mid to late 1970s, he worked with Brigitte Kowanz until 1984 on the fringes of the Neo-Geo movement. In the following years, he evolved a visual language of his own, which, though extremely reduced, has sometimes been described as „expressive geometry“(1). Addressing the most fundamental element of drawing – a dark line on a pale ground – he developed a vocabulary that is essentially based on the juxtaposition of contrasts. Geometric forms and ornamental symbols dominate his works, which became increasingly corporeal towards the end of the 1980s. At the same time, he broadened his technical range, focusing more on the carrier materials such as tracing paper and on the installative integration of the work. He rolled back the classic boundaries of media and art: drawings became sculptures, sculptures became furnishings, furnishings became installations and installations, in turn, became spatial ornamentations. And amongst all this, painting also took on an increasingly important role. Graf is constantly expanding his field of action: curating, music, writing, events, and even teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1997 to 2006.
This intermeshing of art and life is also reflected in his works. Franz Graf sets in motion a visual machine that devours everything that crosses its path. It is like a Machine Célibataire that drives the artist on to become a collector, archaeologist, documentarist, explorer and archivist, creating a world of his own through the synthesis of all his findings. They undergo a seemingly alchemistic process that orders things anew and melds the resulting structures into an idiosyncratic reality. In this universe, all things are one and exist side by side on equal terms, yet are also interwoven. A need for symmetry appears to underpin this cosmos, suggesting a pure and higher order in which moralistic, pecuniary and even worldly laws no longer hold sway. This world order is beyond good and evil and is subject to no ideals or hierarchies, following only the transcendental and the dualism of black and white.
Yet, for all of this, Graf remains true to drawing. Its reductionist form of portrayal permits abstraction in conjunction with depiction, which lends the drawings a certain autonomy from subject matter and signification alone. And this is precisely where Graf begins, using the natural patterns of perception – the instinctive quest for something recognisable – to alienate what we discern from our own reality, allowing it to disintegrate into strokes, lines and planes, as well as ideas and signs. The signifier becomes as visible as the signified and as signifying itself.
Franz Graf pursues this approach on a grand scale in his exhibition at 21er Haus. Processes of perception are unleashed, a cosmos formulated. „See what sees you“ is the motto of this show, which not only showcases Graf‘s works, but which also lays claim to presenting the current state of an artistic universe and putting it into context.
For his exhibition at 21er Haus, Graf dovetails the many aspects of his oeuvre in a new way, playing out his typical game with emptiness and fullness, black and white, delicate detail and iconic grandeur, archaic and modern. Specially created works can be seen here alongside older works, which he has placed together with works by contemporary artists both international and local, as well as pieces from the Belvedere collection and from his own private collection.
Some of his works are figurative. All are black and white, but some also abstract and ornamental. Some are based on circles, almost like mandalas or meditative objects. Others consist of combinations of letters that form fragments of words or quotes, the meaning of which can suddenly emerge, only to be lost from grasp just as quickly and form new meanings. Graf’s handling of letters echoes his handling of figurative subjects. His distinctly eclectic approach in combining elements lends them new form that emerges through his material poetry. The cultural technique of copy-and-paste is one of his stock stylistic devices – appropriation and alienation his accomplices, structure and repetition his accessories. Drawings, photographs, audio works, canvases, prints and everyday objects dovetail in Graf’s formation of open systems that are more akin to aesthetic spaces of experience than multimedia installations.
In the exhibition, eyes gaze at the viewers. Their unsettling gaze is at once seductive, coy, accusatory, fearful and profound. This is not about the eye of Big Brother, but about the image at eye level. Like mirrors, they reflect the gaze back upon the viewer with an intensity that makes seeing the theme in itself: triggering an awareness of our own ways of seeing and, consequently, of our perceptions and apperceptions.
But the title „See what sees you“ also implies reciprocity. It suggests that you can not only see, but be seen (and read) as well. The question this raises was indeed the starting point for the concept of this exhibition: is there a way of seeing that does not involve being distracted by the presentation of our own gaze and the ossification of representative gestures? Practical experience of exhibition openings tells us that there is no escaping this. Either we get used to the idea of coming back alone to have a look, or we try to act naturally and risk being distracted. For the exhibition, we decided to take that risk – by showing the work with all it entails and encompasses, rather than isolating and stylising it.
The framework for this is an architecture of elements normally used for scaffolding or stage construction. The display consists of carrier material that is quite literally used to visualise structures that would otherwise remain in the background. In this respect, there is a symbiosis between the presentation itself and the display of the construct of representation. The sum of the parts not only adds up to an exuberant exhibition in the main room of 21er Haus, but also creates a stage on which Franz Graf constantly expands his installation throughout the duration of the show, by repositioning and rehanging pieces, and with regular performances and collaborative art productions. Visitors thus step onto a stage on which, together with Graf, guest artists and inter-related works, they themselves become actors in a process of ongoing adaptation to an ever-changing situation. But is there more to it than simply being there? Can the exhibition break free from the patterns of representation and offer direct, sensory access to, or perhaps even allow entrance into, the world of Franz Graf? Blessed indeed are they that „have not seen, and yet have believed“(2).

(1) Donald Kuspit, in Franz Graf (exhibition catalogue, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, October 22 – November 26, 1988), Vienna 1988
(2) Gospel according to St John, 20:29

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Thursday, 23 June 2016 10:30

Sarah Ortmeyer

‘KOKO PARADISE’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

5 February — 17 April 2016

KOKO PARADISE is the final part of an exhibition triptych by Sarah Ortmeyer. At different times and in three different places (Paris, New York and Vienna), the KOKO trilogy deals with escapism and avarice. KOKO PARADISE shows palm trees in a tableau that is as beautiful as it is sad.

Sarah Ortmeyer was born in 1980 and lives in Vienna. Her works have been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016), the Monnaie de Paris (2015), the Swiss Institute, New York (2014), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013), the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent (2012), the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2012), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2011), the MAK Center, Los Angeles (2010), the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2009) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2009), among others. A new project in collaboration with Andrew Wyatt will open this Valentine’s Day at the MoMA PS1 in New York City.

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Wednesday, 22 June 2016 15:18

Simon Dybbroe Møller

‘Lettuce’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

5 December 2015 — 31 January 2016

We look at everything with photography. When we see a black piece of marble, often used in wet spaces and at memorial sites—bathrooms, kitchens, and graves—we notice its glossiness. It is so photographic. Look at its white veins, the snail shells, the mussels. See how it resembles a print made from a damaged negative. This is photography avant la lettre.

Of course, photography is different now. The growing breed of male tech enthusiasts posting online reviews of new camera equipment is inhabiting a complicated territory. In order to investigate and discuss the visual capabilities of the constant stream of new digital gear, they have to point their lenses towards something; they have to choose a motif. They mostly choose women or birds.

A cormorant drying its wings on an old withered wooden pole, for instance: the Jesus-like silhouette and the pride of its posture mirrored in the water surface. A truly pathetic image. It is said that the cormorant is the most ancient bird around; that it dates back to the dinosaurs. That unlike other aquatic birds it has not developed the oil sheen that would protect it from getting soaked, hence the crucifix-like pose: it does so to dry its feathers in the breeze. What an anachronism. A more constructive voice would frame it differently and explain how most creatures are naturally buoyant, but how for diving birds this is an issue. The cormorant is thought to swallow pebbles to increase its weight. Its main adaptation, though, is its open feather structure that does not trap buoyancy-increasing air but absorbs water instead. Regardless: imagine soaked feathers. Conversely imagine water droplets on a water-repellent surface. Let us think about this in relation to analogue and to digital image making.

Perhaps the wet white t-shirt was the climax of old world sleaziness. A last spasm of the analog, before our descent into the weight- and age-less universe of silicone and botox, the taxidermy of the technosphere; Into the waxed universe of the virtual. Do you remember Sabrina and Boys Boys Boys? Can you recall Samantha Fox? The way those singers exploited white cotton and water to produce images of their hefty bodies both concealed and enhanced. Images that seemed to transcend the slick surface of the glossy magazines by echoing the fluidity of analog processing and the stickiness of the emulsion coat of a photographic print. Tits and ass or draperie mouillée. A century earlier the realist Constantin Emile Meunier modeled his monumental sculpture The Dock Worker, depicting the toned figure of his subject draped in moist, clingy garments. In this fantasy even the soggy is solid, the saturated is steely. The patina of the bronze reminiscent of a vintage sepia toned black-and-white print; the lack of tonality melting the body with the cloth.

It is surely no coincidence that perfectly contained drops of liquid sitting on surfaces of things feature so heavily in digital image making tutorials. Like the techy garments used in the outdoor sports industry, these images inhabit a landscape of impenetrability. We know that the perfect water drops on the bright green leaves adorning our computer desktops did not occur naturally. That they were placed there, then elaborately lit. Possibly they are not water at all but either gelatin or resin or pure digital post-
production. Even when sitting on an absorbent surface they do not soak things; they do not evaporate into the air. We are dealing with digital image making here, with ideals. No earth to earth, but a world where things have borders, a world without entropy, a universe without decay. Like fresh lettuce lying on a minimalist polished steel kitchen countertop - its white veins piercing through the neon green translucent hue of its leaves, its objecthood amplified by the mirroring metal surface - so low in calories that digesting it requires the same amount of energy as it contains.

— Simon Dybbroe Møller

Simon Dybbroe Møller grew up in Greenland and lives in Berlin. His works have been exhibited most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Musee d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris, at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, and at Ludlow 38 in New York (all in 2015). Upcoming exhibitions of his works are hosted by Le Plateau in Paris, MOCA Cleveland, as well as the Kunsthalle São Paulo.

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