TEXTE / VORTRÄGE / PODIEN AUSSTELLUNGEN / PROJEKTE BÜCHER

1  2  3  4  5

Proceedings in Space A Freestyle Exhibition Reading

Space & Perceptive Action Black lines have been drawn into the room. A construction that seems to belong to the realm of planning, of architectural drawing, of geometry – a drawing yet integral to the material ›  (1). The fine lines – appearing extraordinarily delicate as they extend through space – form a sculpture that describes and outlines a separate room within the exhibition room. In Carbon Drawing #5 Christoph Weber recasts the perceptive behaviour of visitors, as it were ‘in situ’, as perceptive action and in so doing, brings about its reification: his construction ascends from the entrance to the hall. From a virtual focal or vanishing point in front of the hall, the three-dimensional drawing extends into the room ›  (2) towards Sascha Schniotalla’s mural, along the axis of a reversed central perspective. In so doing, it simulates our gaze. Carbon Drawing #5 contains, structures and syncopates the room in the same way that we, as the observing subjects, habitually move through it: straight – in so far as the columns lining the room allow for any notion of ‘straight’ – towards the works of art, our attention on them intensifying as we get closer.

Christoph Weber, Carbon Drawing #5, 2004 (carbon fibre rods, steel joints)

It would be easy, then, to see Carbon Drawing #5 primarily as a didactic construction, exposing our way of looking, our movements, our reception as a pro cess of constructing space ›  (3). This didactic understanding reaches its limit at the point where Carbon Drawing #5 meets Schniotalla’s painting: here, on account of a single distortion in its length, it unexpectedly gains height and thereby opens up a whole new conceptual space. In counteracting the logic of the line construction›  (4), Weber renders implausible that the upper part of the three-dimensional polygon be perceived of as a surface, in the way that is conceivable with all the other sides. In so doing, he denies the spatial object any formal or conceptual closure. Instead he allows a different aesthetical logic to prevail: one which is constituted on (or from?) the margins of immateriality, thus finding resonance with the methodologies of historical conceptualism. It is the potential, theore tical, aesthetic, and utopian space evident in works such as Douglas Huebler’s printed black line on paper from 1970 – which he induced us to believe was revolving around its own axis at the speed of one revolution per day ›  (5) – that Weber’s Carbon Drawings set out to explore on today’s terrain of the installation. On reaching the far end of the sculpture, when standing by the wall facing back towards the vanishing point, the larger one of the two three-dimensional polygons appears to dissolve. As we are enclosed within the space defi ned by the installation, its altered proportions create the effect that from this viewpoint, the space resists comprehension. We are now also too close to Sascha Schniotalla’s mural to be able to perceive its totality. From the many and varied possible closer and more distant perspectives of regard, its shapes – in car paint and multicoloured fills – intentionally guide the viewers gaze in a pendular motion, shifting between distinct poles. The fundamental graphic form, sharply outlined against a white base has considerable figurative suggestive power: drawing on a repertoire of shapes spanning from the technological, the scientific-rational to science fiction. The Moebius Strip, interior design, the Starship Enterprise … the field of symbolic-figurative attributions is to remain uncompleted. The aesthetic vocabulary suggested by each visual element can also be related back to the surrounding architectural space of the exhibition hall. It appears to derive from and be subsumed under the functionalism of the factory building, so the work positions itself against the free interpretation of shapes as well as for example the option of creating form consistent with an autonomous style of painting bound to abstraction. Upon closer inspection it is, however, precisely the latter that becomes predominant as a central theme: following the surfaces and textures of the ‘painted’ spatial body (which appears to be protruding from or standing in front of the wall, much like a shaped canvas), its plasticity and tangibility start to disintegrate; the different surfaces are positioned against each other at implausible angles; the spatial perspectives are contradictory; back and front become confused; and finally coloured fields open up into a depth of perception that seems to transcend the bodily. Yet, none of the aesthetic promises that are being proposed – whenever we are close to being taken in by a false Rothkoesque paint ‘barrel without a bottom’ or tempted to mistake a Pollock-like gesture for the whole All-over – are ever fulfilled. Whenever we imagine ourselves in the presence of an authentic painterly sensation, that Schniotalla uses all sorts of false pretences to simulate, our perception slips back to the surface, exposing its object as mere design.

Sascha Schniotalla, o. T., 2004 (filling compound, car paint)

In trying to uncover how we interact with the world when we perceive, Merleau-Ponty used to fold the world into the senses and the senses into the world. It is possible – in front of Schniotalla’s wall – for our sight to become trapped in these folds, arrested in a perpetual oscillation between aesthetic experience and empirical disappointment. Like most other pieces in the exhibition, Arthur Zalewski’s sculpture was created on site within a period of a few days and could easily be described as a ‘mode of action dumped in the exhibition space’, or simply as ‘artistic creation cast in plaster’. The object – being two-sided and angular – could pass for a folding screen (it has the capacity to obscure) facing us (or facing away from us) first of all with its white, quiet side. From here, its five segments, made of solid plaster, appear as casts whose shape and surface texture have obviously been taken from corrugated iron or cardboard. We are dealing with some form of a print: a way of casting things into images, similar to a camera and its photographic processes, which are at the heart of Zalewski’s artistic thought. In walking around the object, its reverse side is encountered as a surprise, as ‘unforeseen’ (i. e. not seen before – the recovery of something obscured?). In contrast to the para-photographic, print-like character of the front’s visual surface, the back delves into a morass of apparent painterly expressiveness. The New Leipzig School of Painting has disappeared into the quagmire of myths surrounding the artistic creativity that it is quite possibly based on, leaving behind an oil paint slick, coalescing into a murky brown: Zalewski’s hands, purposefully endowed with artistic genius, mash, sweep and blot through the primary matter of image making beyond (or indeed, even before) any intent and composition, lacking any top or bottom, any vanishing points, any structure, any discourse – IT paints. How amazing!!

Arthur Zalewski, Trial and Error #3, 2004 (plaster, synthetic material, lacquer)

… And yet, it remains torn between gestures of denial (‘That there, that wasn’t me. I didn’t do it, I didn’t mean it, and I won’t take responsibility for it either.’) and gestures of affection for the unintentionally yet inescapably emerging beauty of the object … This is where creaturely passions and unconscious impulse spill into the artist-author A. Z.’s ambitions, when he succumbs to the temptation to touch up that curve, consciously enhancing it with determination, or to place this magnifi cent golden ochre next to that drab dark brown, just like, well … painting and, to finish it off, spilling some cheeky paint drops from the tin, yes, this is how Pollock, exactly how old Jackson must have done it back then! And after all, our colleague Schniotalla is quoting Pollock and his Drippings, too, I noticed, so why not do the same – it’s not like we don’t know who we are! And so we end up with this crudely made pitiful corrugated-iron-favela-façade in the middle of the room claiming to know, that the old question – where images originate, copied from reality or pouring forth and coagulating unconsciously from an artist’s hand – really only pertains to the two sides of one and the same coin. The only practical value, one could conclude from Zalewski’s point about some such coins lies in the fact that if you have fi ve of them, they can, if nothing else, at least support themselves. Only by placing them against each other in such a way that they are capable of supporting each other (a subtle take on the l’art pour l’art metaphor?) can he provide them with the necessary stability for them to confront us in the room as a potential site of image perception.

›  (1) The construction uses carbon fibre rods, an extremely light and durable high-tech material, as used in Formula 1 racing cars. ›  (2) Becoming aware of the fact that we are dealing with a construction based on central perspective, we can toy with the idea that the argumentative line of the exhibition finds its unacknowledged point of origin (by retracing the carbon lines in the direction of their invisible vanishing point beyond the entrance) far prior to the exhibition: with modern notions of the spatial. ›  (3) Carbon Drawing #5 is an exception in so far as most of Weber’s Carbon Drawings make reference to the public, urban space. ›  (4) The Carbon Drawings have a certain performative quality as they are created within the space of only a few hours – thus becoming a mode of action as much as being a drawing or installation. ›  (5) See: Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object … , Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1973, p. 167