Goschka Gawlik
Some things you lose, some things you give away, schlebrügge.editor, Vienna 2007.
Katrin Plavcak’s Painting and the Hypostases of Outer Space
Until recently, the history of painting signified the history of the changing criteria for the
function and role of art. With all of its revolutionary upheavals, its incessant pursuit of
the new and its expansion of forms, painting for quite some time has ceased to be the
driving force in art, as its strength lies in syncretism. Nonetheless, the unshaken belief in
the potential and experimental possibilities of the painted image can today still be found
in many artists. Naturally with the knowledge of the entire burden of the experiences
and the adventures of modern art in the 20th century – with all of its instability, all of its
revaluations and ruptures, the diversity of artistic declarations, and the reluctance to
deal with any contents in the face of the growing domination of form. Painting has long
since overcome the boundary between figuration and abstraction, meaning and
meaninglessness, between the expressive exactitude of an object and the autonomy of
color. Painting has also created a great deal of indifference between the objectivity of
the exterior world and the subjectivity of the inner world, in much the same way as it
has blurred the illusion of reality with the many claims on it. Art in general and painting
in particular have in fact become nearly absolute, because their borders were
paradigmatically created under the imperative of the merging of art and life, with the
demands of the new and the unbounded power of the negative.
Now that painting, according to Jean Baudrillard, has become “more of a commodity
than commodities themselves,” it further continues alterations of its forms of
appearance, defining its own borders and scope. Painting no longer needs any
usurpatory defenders insisting on new theories of painting, as every definition or theory
would constrict its newly found potential. Baudrillard continues, “The only radical and
modern solution consists in exponentiating what is new, original, unexpected and
ingenious about the commodity, that is, the formal indifference towards the dimension
of use and value and the ascendancy of circulation without bounds.” The conditions for
articulating such a non-essential dominance demands a certain indeterminability and
fluidity of the borders of artistic disciplines.
In the era of globalization, in the epoch “after the end of art” and the “end of history,”
many things can be considered to be art or painting, but it is not always worthwhile to
talk about everything. Contemporary painting, which stands open to social and
intellectual discourses, and maintains a differentiated relationship to the real, does not
necessarily call for a discourse alone. Contemporary painting tries to free itself from the
“yoke” of its own past, in the sense of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, freeing
itself from the cult of the sublime and from its presumptions, and it flows into the
everyday world of the media up to the verge of its dissolution. It is not a question of
staging the absolute difference between the space and that which should take place in
the space of painting, as was the case, for example, with Malevich’s white square on a
white background. It is also not a question of doing away with particular contents, but
rather of attempting to keep the limits of painting in a medialized environment fluid and
flexible and open to stimulation from and transgressions to the outside. (1) The visual
flood of images constitutes here the new, fascinating field of many examinations,
reconstructions and experiments in painting, for these medial worlds and their
respective forms of visuality cannot be categorized exclusively in traditional intellectual
disciplines, although in this context film and visual studies have already accomplished
commendable progress in this direction.
Painting does not merely have one history – which of late it often recalls – but rather it
has many histories in that it is linked to other existing political, philosophical,
(techno)scientific or social entities of global capital and with this realizes an
extraordinary aesthetic effect between abstraction, the visionary and the banal. In this
way, contemporary painting expands the space of its effectiveness and this kind of
growth of space implies the constitution of increasing communicability, which according
to Peter Sloterdijk displays a “higher accessibility from members of social systems.” (2)
Space considered within the experience of painting can also make reference to its own
history and in times of the formal reduction of painting is marked or encoded by the
grid, column, structure or series. If however the rational, instrumental standpoint and
the emotional intensity expire, a new virulence arises in which apparently arbitrary and
vital possibilities and potential appear.
The social construction of power and visuality, as well as their merging into our visual
and imaginary worlds, was described by Michel Foucault in the 1970s as the power of
the panopticon, in which the physical presence of both parties – the viewer and the
viewed, the controllers and the controlled – was implicit. As a result of the rapid
development of new satellite technologies, the view that spatial thinking and spatial
orders have become something of the past has become increasingly common and that
now only the criterion of temporality remains of relevance. The proponents of
contemporary thought today again reclaim the recognition of space, and even Foucault
in his essay “Other Spaces” asserts that the current epoch will be that of space and
techniques of its allocation. In the field of demographics and the accommodation of
man, he first mentioned the issues of placing, stacking and storing, and in the broadest
sense also of housing “which the indications and classifications for the aspects of being
human in certain situations and for certain purposes should be preserved.” (3)
After the end of the panopticon, painting is confronted with the dilemma of whether it
should revolt against the ambiguous inconsistency of such living conditions, or if it
should integrate them in their quest for images and place them into a new context,
following the teachings of post-structuralists such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida or
Gilles Deleuze. Does painting have the need to cling to any kind of self-referential
position, where sculpture and architecture since the 1960s have once and for all freed
themselves from the purely formal-aesthetic canon and since then have continually
asserted the claim that they represent everything and that everything flows into each
other? Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture was meant to help everybody to creatively design
their political and economic existence, and architecture would have developed into an
inhabitable sculptural theater full of megalomania. Under these conditions, how can
painting in its creative process reclaim the “space of the outside” (Foucault) and not just
use it as a stylistic device illustrating social phenomena?
After the expansive emergence of the different media in the domain of art since the
1960s and 1970s, contemporary art and with this Katrin Plavcak’s work engage in a
dialog with the different manifestations of space. Already the 1980s witnessed the socalled
spatial turn – where in theoretical discourse space had been transformed into a
process. In art, this paradigm shift illustrates the transition from objects which merely
served the purposes of visual perception, into performative spaces which impart
subjective experience and sentiment. The tactic of confrontation was thus replaced by
the practice of “submersion.”
With its spatial development and in regard to the unfolding of its awareness of a general
atmosphere which “stands in the center of the self-explication of culture in the 20th
century,”(4) Plavcak’s painting also belongs to this trend. She has always explored the
different patterns of circulation in the shimmering fragmentation of space, its
“psychographic” navigation and its nostalgic, postmodern idleness. The experience of
space in her paintings is fragmentary, cognitive and relevant to society as it draws on
the distant tradition of situationist spatial techniques. The affirmative side of Plavcak’s
pictorial thought in spatial categories has its roots in her interest in and production of
socially-engaged and stylistically heterogeneous pop music. Music and sound constitute,
as it were, her own social space capsule in which she conceives her performance of
painting.
In her early work, the artist turns her attention mostly to her private, familial spaces,
her dreams in which relationships, intimacy, passions and diverse hurdles encountered
in the world sought their explicit articulation in an abstract-expressionistic manner of
painting. Gradually her image-world expanded to wider social and public spheres and
the ubiquitous mass-media with their inner spaces, which in her imagination did not
entirely correspond to the visible world (Orange, Plattentektonik). By virtue of their
highly pronounced, comprehensive attitude, Plavcak’s pictures appeal to an imaginary
world that is constantly aware of “the triumph of the moving (electronic) image” in a
society dominated by the media. Martin Prinzhorn wrote in her first catalog that the
“freshness” of her painting continually remains in motion. (5) This “surfing” on the
surface of the painting describes the formal method of Plavcak’s work, which includes
visible brushstrokes, continual explosions and lapses of the painted forms and situations,
combinations of colors applied in a carefree manner that are smooth and highly
subjective (e.g. violet, green, and grey). Axial disruptions of the pictorial plane,
permanent apprehensiveness and sometimes a kind of cloudy haze cover her imageworlds
like a mysterious veil.
Plavcak also paints diverse “milieu” paintings, which address leisure time and the now
obsolete topic of labor. She also painted a series of youthful faces and other striking
large-format portraits which, with their multiple picture surfaces and diagonally zoomed
perspectives, you can either warm up to or perhaps they might leave you cold,
appearing dull or distorted. There is a somewhat cyborg-like physique to her heroes
where the real and the fantastic appear to be of the same value. Thus she has claimed
new, irrevocable definitions of space in painting which suggest an altered position of
man in the world. Her portraits, which sometimes are disguised as self-portraits, are not
metaphoric but, not unlike large scale advertising posters, show the visible effects of a
compulsively functioning modern spatial structure and a primarily urban/political spatial
planning. They bring the classical easel painting (or the painting hanging above the
sofa) back into public discourse which before was usually mostly reserved for other
artistic media or genres of painting. This was additionally emphasized by making use of
rhetorical provocation using such phrases as “for the birds” as the title of an exhibition
or through buzzwords usually found in the media such as “growing fear” or “secret life.”
Painting Impossible or the Idiosyncrasies of the Arbitrary
In its tendency towards formal dissolution as an impression of fluidity and transience,
Plavcak’s painting is paper-thin in its alternation of color and material, and it resists
giving away its all-too-definable figures. Rarely things appear to be transformed into a
permanent context. Instead of producing opposition to the real, she opposes the
commonly accepted consensus which merely obscures acute conflicts and phobias. Her
current work attempts to indicate, from the perspective of an ironic diagnostic, certain
tensions, shifts and aporias in the domain of a symbolically apprehended culture and
science and thus to generate a distinct and apparently unpredictable space of
knowledge. The aesthetic and critical theories or scientific explanations that make up the
current cultural discourses on, for example, migration, the conquest of space, religion,
energy resources and biopolitics serve as a dispositive for the canalization and discharge
of (libidinous) energies,(6) in order to change these in the process of discussing her own
standpoint and reassessing her own preconceptions. Jean-François Lyotard’s notion
based on painting of the liberation of space as “chromatic inscription” can make visual
and haptic aberrations and disruptions effective on a meta-level. In Plavcak’s work -
drawing an analogy to her music - these resemble a state of euphoria, a jarring note or
interface wizardry which short-circuits the integrated circuit of the respective system.
What can be considered to be collective and general, what is individual and authentic in
Katrin Plavcak’s paintings which are informed by images taken from the world created
by the media? “Not the indifference of the general nature with respect to singularity, but
rather the indifference of the general and particular, of the genus and species, of the
fundamental and secondary brings about the arbitrary.”(7) This arbitrariness is an
expression of the particular in an unrepresentable space. For Agamben, who states in
The Coming Community that “the coming being will be the arbitrary,” the arbitrary
signifies agio, “the ease which stands for the area of action and the opportunity,” and
continually emerges to oscillate between the particular and the specific, between
“appropriation and impropriety” in the relation between general form and singular
existence. And precisely in this free space, the particularity of the arbitrary comes into
being, refusing to belong to any kind of set or classification. As Agamben writes, “In this
sense – and only in this sense – the good must be defined as a self-grasping of evil, and
salvation as the coming of the place to itself.” As an example he cites Dostoevsky’s idiot,
the Prince Myshkin “who can effortlessly imitate anyone’s handwriting and sign any
signature (…) the particular and the generic become indifferent, and precisely this is the
‘idiocy,’ in other words the particularity of whatever.” (8)
In this sense, Plavcak’s cyber-like or cartoonesque images are “idiotic” and arbitrary in
the way she selects, transforms, distorts, stretches out, remixes and reinvents in her
paintings the subjects and motives found in the media, in film, comics, the internet,
science and her personal archives. She then takes these elements and through an
appropriate examination of the source material in a “process of scanning” – in the sense
of Vilém Flusser – creates a continually more open method, transposing them into an
independent existence, a taking place. Agamben, in reference to Plato, calls this kind of
taking place the transposition into an “idea.”
Medial tidbits which the artist transposes and then transforms into the language of her
painting manifest such arbitrary, that is, following Agamben, such endearing
“singularities” that they hardly resemble anything definite in the outside world. In this
sense it is not the “new” which is surprising in her pictures but rather that which is
apparently recognized, and the way in which she extracts from forgotten archives of the
past and repeats that which disappears or is disregarded in the next flood of images,
and then creating it anew if not at the same time heretically-defiant as the “texts of the
real.” The failure of the viewer to be able to identify the “original” seems to be built-in.
The absent reflection of her source-material often evokes a feeling of “unpleasure,” or
also a mysterium only leading to further irritation.
Renovation, rehabilitation or merely the pangs of remorse? Or are the culturaltheoretical
concepts which draw upon the legacy of the modern and its myths closer to
recycling and revision? That which disappears from sight appears again in the new
clothes of painting – all of the pictures which will be produced in the near future,
according to Derrida, belong and have for a long time belonged to a gallery of pictures.
It is only a question of guessing in which room they would be best suited. Some of
these new pictures would best fit into the category of the “fetish,” because the “end”
has already come. Such appropriated images also exist in Plavcak’s works, for example
in Sexy Architecture, reflecting a sexualization of violence through the traumatic
repetition of the monstrous-machinic, which again recalls the history of avant-garde film
and the modern practice of the aesthetization of power.
Recently the diversity of the interrelated connections and networks of exterior spaces
and possible references that Plavcak uses in her form of presentation have increasingly
expanded to a kind of heterogeneous stage-like scenery. Such a mobilization of painting,
which she herself calls a “scenic-sculpture,” pursues its extension and visualization
beyond the modern flatness of painting into the third dimension of space and then
further into the weightlessness and the immaterial, cosmic sphere of outer space (H.
Poincaré’s fourth dimension). In this sense, the artist attempts to offer an efficient
sculptural tool for the visual comprehension of complex systems, reconstructing virtual
realities, or that which are understood as their metaphors. As though she wanted to
communicate with the extraterrestrial and fantastic. When she exhibits an “uncolorful”
photograph as a document directly next to the paintings, or a scenographic dispositive
related to the paintings (e.g. the accumulation of the seemingly improvised living units
in the work City or the rudimentary monochrome Planemos in the exhibition “For the
Birds”), or when sculpturally raw unforms presented on the floor which she calls “Black
Smokers” tower up to the ceiling, then an ecological phenomenon from the
subterranean sphere is being reproduced, corresponding to theoretical models of
thought in science, and it is not merely a question of the legitimization of the particular
object which has been declared to be art (Duchamp). On the one hand this signifies
disruption and estrangement of visual representations, on the other hand it contains the
broken representation of acquired and unresolved problems of natural sciences, which
continually have at hand new terms and visual patterns for unexplored phenomena of
the Earth or cosmos and fetishize these as merchandise within the framework of the
capitalist economy. The concretization of the curious scientific terminology or of the
advanced technologies in the physical artifact, in the space of painting, robs it of its pure
scientific character, conveying the impression of a transfigured theatricality and the
nomadism of the modern age of the spectacle. The scientific findings are thus put into
the service of an emancipatory understanding of painting, which for its part is less an
illustration of a scientific hypothesis and its cognitive logic, than much more an attempt
to contribute to the disruption of the consensus and a plastic expansion of its global
context. The realities which are created through painting and the connections between
the unequal art forms begin to oscillate and buzz in the interfaces between fiction and
reality, idea and body, the act of cognition and the hallucination.
Expansion into the Cosmic
The polished, seductive and dreamlike images from outer space and space travel, which
for a long time only existed as a mere simulation showing various roaming objects in the
cosmic spheres and the visions of diverse spaces of technology and architectures which
we know from science-fiction films and futurist models, also awaken associations with
the classical “white cube,” which
Brian Doherty during the period of the cosmos-euphoria defined as a “free floating white
cell.” In a similar vein, with respect to space travel Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s also
deemed modern man to be a “cosmic frogman.”
Sometimes the closest, most obvious seeming thing can also be the most distant, in
order to call into question the mechanisms of power, manipulation and control. The
exploration of outer space, the landing on the moon, dark matter, antimatter, satellites,
aliens, space capsules and the many media-derived clichés connected with them, the
gradual conquest and forced exploitation of the cosmos for military and commercial
purposes which are falsely presented as the romantic freedom of the universe are
transformed by the painter into her own alternative designs and an interpretation of
dreams, not to enthusiastically identify with them, but rather much more to aesthetically
approach from a distance the theme of the cosmos and the belief in the atmosphere in
times of human uprootedness and the absence of “niches of security” (Sloterdijk).
Being a postmedial painter, her approach to the utopian legacy of modernism and the
1960s and 1970s is mostly a reflexive modification, which can be understood to be as
much a eulogy as a celebration. Is it possible to rejuvenate and regenerate found
images in the same way as brain cells? Can painting perhaps create real prostheses in
order to construct a brave new world? And how (un)serious is all of this supposed to be?
As Timothy Leary already remarked, “The parts of the system that observe the system,
modify the system itself through the act of their observation.” (10) In Plavcak’s pictures,
the acts of watching and observing and the mirror image are often used as a motif. In
her composition They got horses, the moon and a satellite observe the magical affairs of
the inhabitants of Earth which is asymmetric to a cosmic puritanism. Nowadays, as the
technologies of information allow increased individual approaches to a global
intelligence, Plavcak investigates in her own way the possibilities of human survival and
their cultural habitus in three intertwined atmospheric spatial spheres: terrestrial nature,
the technically radiant cosmos and the bottom of the ocean in its hydrothermal fields.
The first level is plagued by a loss of reality, the second is post-heroic and the last is
secret, also because some researchers believe to recognize in its ecological systems
which do not need sunlight the origin of terrestrial life and its differentiation through the
emergence of forms of exclusion and isolation.
Moholy-Nagy in his art perceived people fit for the future “design for life” as a positive
utopia. Sartre, on the other hand, developed the “I” or “ego” simply as a transitory
outward appearance that cannot be objectivated, as had already been anticipated with
Rimbaud’s “I is another.” Again and again, alienated human figures appear in Plavcak’s
pictures which she tries to accustom with precarious climatic situations which are
untypical for the planet Earth (e.g. in Raketenmann and Eiszeit). However her heroes
seem to be somewhat dilettantish and confused, as if they are haunted by the phantasm
of being in a displaced location. Other creatures also enter the stage which fracture the
conventional notion of time-space and appear to have arrived at their naturalized
perfection in a foreign world despite the conditions of fear (as in Roberta and Ball).
Architecture as an Eye-catcher for the Worldview
One believes to know the spaces in which architecture only exists as an exact boundary
for a floating, disintegrating perception, in that its modern manifestations carry the self
to extraterrestrial galactic worlds. The innermost background however is dark and quiet.
Such architectonic excesses are presented in Plavcak’s pictures Mobilmaschine and Dig
Deeper. They show large-scale space stations in the vacuum of outer space in which
terrestrial “lifeworlds” are in the process of coming to being. They remind us of places of
utopian metamorphosis of which around 1960 one still believed they could
accommodate a new society. In the foreground of the painting Dig Deeper, the
enormous digger reaches out towards the things which soon are to be transformed into
something useful like an oversized hand. It is the next step towards the fabrication of
the world. In the painting Mobilmaschine, like in the Greek polis, there is a circular
enclosed space in whose center is emptiness – a de-reality – that waits to be filled with
life. But what kind of life is this going to be?
Katrin Plavcak’s paintings make fluid and confuse references with respect to narration
dealing with the decoding of what is going on in the present. There are pictorial accents
and chromatic energy sources, UFOs crashing, blinking clusters of forms, stars and
lights; many codes can be applied at once because ideological constraints have
disappeared. In this way, her works simultaneously reveal a cosmos of human patterns
of behavior, feeling and their medial representation which strongly influence individual
fantasy and collective emotions. Here, however, attention is always paid to the stance
and ethics of a holistic spatial atmosphere: instead of a separation between the “I” and
the “Other,” machines and living beings, nature and culture, the Earth (here) and the
Cosmos (beyond), an originary synthesis announces its presence in which, instead of
conquest, wars and progress, the ideals of relationships based on partnership in a selfforming
community stand out in the foreground. The same intent also applies to the
relations between the various media which the artist implements in her oeuvre.
Otherwise, there is a risk that the “atmosphere itself threatens to become a special
strange new kind of battlefield.” (11)
1. Compare: Catherine Malabou, Was tun mit unserem Gehirn?, Zurich-Berlin, 2006
2. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III: Schäume, Frankfurt am Main, 2004, pg.78
3. Michel Foucault, “Andere Räume,” in: Aisthesis, Wahrnehmung heute, Leipzig 1992,
pg.37
4. Peter Sloterdijk, ibid., pg.162
5. Martin Prinzhorn, “Wenn aus der Form Attitüde wird,” in: Katrin Plavcak, Schlaflabor,
Graz, 2002
6. Jean-François Lyotard, ibid., pg.78
7. Compare: Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Minneapolis 1993, pg.14
8. Giorgio Agamben, ibid., pg.19
9. Compare: Michael Diers, Grauwerte, Farbe als Argument und Dokument, Fotografie,
Film, Video, Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie des Bildes, Hamburg, 2006 pg.53
10. Timothy Leary, “Das Interpersonale, Interaktive, Interdimensionale, Interface,” in:
Cyberspace, Ausflüge in virtuelle Wirklichkeiten, Manfred Waffender (ed.), Hamburg,
1991, pg.277
11. Peter Sloterdijk, ibid., pg.187
And something more
Naturally the tropes of interpretation mentioned here should be understood as a
provisional diagram which attempts to approximate the meaning of Katrin Plavcak’s art
and painting. At present, not only art, but also the theoretical approach to painting has
become “fluid,” fragmentary and capricious. Thus more subtexts or introductions than
strict academic texts exist about it. At best, one can work as a scout or tracker looking
for the often deceptive, pliable, distorted and blurred tracks and their rhetorical figures.
In order to get closer to a phenomenon, the broken fragments of a de-actualized theory,
a random interpretative idea or innate intuition might be more helpful and have a
greater power of seduction than any kind of conventionally accepted norm or form.