Jutta Koether, Vienna 2009
Catalogue for the exhibition Human or Other
NON-FREE ASSOCIATION
“The dialectic does not have resolution, it is infinitely problematic!”
(Jean-Luc Nancy)
So: The exhibition will feature a mural, a sort of map of the whole project, a navigation model. In the meantime, though, I will be singing along to the chorus of Katrin Plavc¹ak’s new song, News from the new No-Colonies…, eventually trying to create a kind of conceptual mapping of her exhibition Human or Other in the Secession.
KP’s coordinates are defined by decisions for painting, sculpture, installation, more concretely manifested here by means of notes, song lyrics, textual realities. It is just like in her artistic work where she ever develops her KP world along the lines of given visual realities. The realities are the condition and the basis for statements, yet at the same time for what is to be overcome.
This happens by virtue of a sort of tender dialectics. More oscillation than reasoning, from one contrast and case to the other. And yet bound within the material.
I call this method Non-Free Association.
Somebody out there?
Pick me up
I feel like leavin’
I got stuck
On this o’ planet where
I was born
what about a spacecraft?
away we dive
load full of memories
the world is back behind
more about to leave it
and say good bye bye
What was it that clinched it for me, getting me interested in her work? A commission, which, however, turned into a sort of concern. Because what became visible then was a research of images ever re-articulating itself, a kind of zombie zone of painting. That is because painting places itself at the disposal. As part of the effort to describe these permanent sets of
contradictions which constitute reality and to realize these struggles in the material.
A thing that got a little out of hand.
How does the demeanor of the images work? Towards the world, towards themselves, towards the artist? Are they recalcitrant, do they open other doors, are they whistling and lilting? Painted images are perceived as a problem.
A particular kernel of uncertainty.
They are no safe place. Nothing is.
Anyway. If one looks at a whole series of KP’s images in fast succession, it spontaneously leads to this impression: Definitely Disturbing Painting!
There is a lot of stress. Anxiety attacks. States of exhaustion. And yet with KP it always seems to go on. There is no climax, no drama. A certain compulsion always to continue is in the air. Excessive bouts of production, leaving a strange feel. Anchorless and yet restrained. Like
underwater feedback. Almost all the visual material has such a peculiar filter.
You look at it, again and again, but somehow you never get at it.
Infinitely problematic.
Because it pulls you in, just about endlessly, into the KP filter and into KP space. Neocolonization, off-off science, aircrafts, new age phenomena, escape scenarios, etc. And then those already fiercely conversing and convertible painted images are additionally charged with sculptures, videos, song and dance of an installational variety. Artistically unmanageable. Like a hipster’s hair dandied up so it looks like a bed head. Authentically cool. And it remains unclear if the lifestyle has been arranged in a way so that it is “true” (authentically disheveled), or if it has taken hours to furbish the styling like that for the moment. That means you are being arbitrarily confused. Then again pictures and with them topics appear in a rather concrete way. Semiagitprop- like. Quite authentically disheveled.
If you then look at KP’s work, it does not seem to be just one band playing: it’s a hell fest!
Different arenas with quite different approaches, held together by an intention:
“What if not only paintings and objects, but the whole space gazes, stares at you?”
That’s what it’s like with KP’s pieces. Altogether they form a space that gazes at you and asks you to comport yourself in it. Except that this “gaze” is by no means a straight one. Now direct, then indirect, hazy, cloudy, swiftly sweeping. Then again almost too close, too defined… There is nothing left to hold on to in the gaze. It’s the unstable reality of the images that is constituting the gaze.
In another text about her I read somewhere that the images were like her music, in other words “socially engaged, stylistically heterogeneous pop music.”
Yet again I also see images that exactly do not want to be that but rather create feedback,
interruptions, minor disturbances. Then again some that assign themselves tasks, going on demonstratively to more than complete them. Then again those that just turn away.
As far as the gaze of the images is concerned in particular: scarcely one of them looks at you directly, and if it does, then the gaze is deranged, partly hampered, or obstructed, or the eyes are entirely left out.
KP calls her exhibition Human or Other. The images desire to contain both within themselves
and to illustrate the relation between the one and the other. Thus they play around and argue in equal measure.
Disparate forms do not necessarily communicate in the same language. But they seize an
opportunity – the Secession building – as a temporary spaceship.
A conjunction in all this coming and going of images, that don’t have a permanent home except for KP space, is for this exhibition in Vienna the motif of the mustache.
Excerpts from KP’s notes:
“Among other things I got the idea for the mustache on the façade of the Secession from this painted-over poster I had recently seen at a subway stop. This may well be the ur-intervention in public space, a strong signifier.
Now the mustache is being cut from wooden plates and is supposed eventually to sit above the slogan Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit (to the time its art, to the art its freedom) – which will then be its mouth as it were.
The architecture of the Secession is an interplay of geometry and the organic; and together with the mustache a face is formed: the house is brought to life.
My exhibition is supposed to be about an alternative conquest of spaces. Space travel or
colonialization and its mechanics of power are demonstrated and satirized as methods.
Many colonialists such as Hernán Cortés and Viceroy Lytton from England, who under Queen Victoria was responsible for devastating famines due to profit maximizing, sported mustaches. Wilhelm II., the last German Emperor likewise wore the classic. On the brink of madness, they made decisions, killing thousands of people.
The image in my head was a woman who strips the bearded men off their conquest strategies and invents new ones.
Recently in Berlin female unionists demonstrated, all of them wearing fake mustaches. To this day women in Germany earn 75% of what men get for the same work – and this won’t be much different in Austria.
All the foundational members of the Secession had his beard, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, the architect of the Secession, and sure enough: this is also about men in executive positions of the great art institutions.
Men with mustaches I like: Marcel Proust, Helge Schneider, the singer of the Eagles of Death Metal, and Max Planck – there is something obsessive about it on my part. Beard envy certainly plays a role; I love beards.” (KP)
So there will be a big mustache on the façade of the Secession. A programmatic-propagandistic joke, physically holding sway above the programmatic engraved inscription of the Secession: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit! Which appears reasonable until you give it a second thought: what an unstable and partly paradoxical thing this phrase is as a motto! The dependency of art on the time which originates it, while at the same time commissioned to create something that excels its dependency.
So the mustache emblem is used as the much too large hook. Or as a sort of banner, an
announcement that here with Human or Other a cultural patch working/recycling is practiced and at the same time rendered null and void, while just all those processes of recycling and remaking, reusing, re-appropriating seem to be the condition and justification for cultural productions of all kinds, creating confusing economies. Hell fest.
And there they are, all the particles of reality, expressed in images and objects.
This doubtful basis, which is also very much none, this circumstance, too, is then dealt with quite concretely in the paintings. Doubt is painted into them, quite specifically into this one image that looked at me first thing I got there and that she described as follows:
“One issue for me in painting is the transformation of objects into something alive. Those things in the painting The Bearded Ones are supposed to be black smokers, smokestacks of deep-sea sources, at whose periphery another kind of life beside ours has established itself by means of chemosynthesis. Just like in the book by Karel Capek, War With the Newts. The assumption is likely that equal conditions could have formed underneath an ice layer of the moon; here the connection to space.” (KP)
I like the way in which she describes her intention. And how she affirms proactive illustration. The cartoonish, fast made, slightly deranged. And also a bit annoying.
The image – The Bearded Ones – is a painting. And it is exactly about this circumstance that yet something else is suggested. It is a strange door opener into her painted world that pulls me into what images ought to be, can be, can ask.
What is their concern for meaning, how is it being expressed materially? To what extent are the images techniques of the contingent, the ephemeral, of that which exhausts itself before our eyes? To what extent are they a result of self-reflexive criticism, and/or a pure construct, or an illustration of ideas. Painting as itself and not as itself. In this in multiple ways. No wonder they look so exhausted, The Bearded Ones.
The Bearded Ones: are a Magrittian joke, linguistic image, but they also form an animated
sphere, become a constitutive element of the pictorial space in their cross breeding with the roller blinds. Become space themselves. The individual gaze has long been abandoned, the bearded ones do not have sense organs, just only beards instead. Thus they form a substitute sense via pictorial space. They embody this “Space as Gaze.”
They are no aggressive “Bad Painting.” Rather a melancholy “Bad Painting” standing tall.
(Here I would like to note that as far as mustaches have been treated in painting one absolutely must refer back to the artists John Graham and Albert Oehlen, although these two assume a rather aggressive-melancholy attitude.)
I’m not sure if this image “transforms something into something alive.” It is an act of
transformation, but rather “to make the material properties of pain available to discourse.”
This image slithers over to many other images, becomes an attractor, places itself into the light, is simultaneously underwater, opens and locks itself. An image that embodies something specific but that at the same time relinquishes all function. Seems exhausted. Becomes a transit station. Disjointed. Inauthentic. A quiet disturbance. Holistically articulated. But not merging a holistic consonance. Matching colors, and yet out of tune.
Most of KP’s images that I have seen have a low-key palette.
Other images belonging to this category are Mother, Rollo, Sonnenfinsternis, Wolke imitiert Landschaft, die Vergesslichkeit, Die Summe der Teile (Mother, Roller Blinds, Solar Eclipse, Cloud Mimics Scenery, The Forgetfulness, The Sum of the Parts).
“The principle of being in space. Space – a medium that precedes and determines the objects that it comprehends?”
Critique and Construct! In order to understand what the demeanor of KP’s images is all about I would like to compare her understanding of space to the following:
“‘If a thing is distant from another, the distance is in fact a relation between the one thing and the other; but at the same time, the distance is something different from this relation between the two things. It is a dimension of space, it is a certain length which may as well express the distance of two other things besides those compared.’ (from Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value) Marx’s insight is that the structure of homogenous space is neither identical with, nor uniquely associated with visual perception. Instead, it is a type of subject-object relation that determines the form of material productions, as well as that of intuition, representation, and scientific knowledge. Under capitalism, commodities are produced for purpose of exchange, rather than for consumption by their immediate producers. Because value serves as the basis of comparison in exchange, commodities are conceived as bearers of value (i.e. embodiments of social labor) rather than as objects of use. According to Marx, ‘all products as values are compelled to assume a form of existence distinct from their existence as use-values’ – they become completely interchangeable ‘exchange values’. Like perspectival construction, exchange casts a coordinate net over the world of objects, evacuating them of their content and replacing it with a single, homogenous relation. In Cassirer’s words, ‘It ... operates as a schema through whose mediation the most diverse elements which at first sight seem utterly incommensurate, can be brought in relation with one another’ (from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms). For Marx, value is therefore not analogous to space. Space is itself a pure analogy.”
(Daniel Berchenko)
And going on with KP’s comments:
“Some of the images will be about the imagination of new land, utopias in the process of
constituting themselves as in Die Summe der Teile (The Sum of the Parts) or an unobstructed view in the New Colonies or a science fiction war of the worlds between an Entomopter (flying robot) and its eco-counterpart. A category also shared, I believe, by the relatively abstract paintings, mirror images of actually existing sites, spaces that by means of doubling become a new territory.” (KP)
Now looking at the pictures. The Bearded Ones but also such as Zack, Phänomen
(Phenomenon), and I Ball, Der Sub am Mars, Raketenmann (The Rocket Man), Quiet Traveler, They Got Horses, Solar all point toward holding fast to a utopia. Buckminster Fuller-ish. Sun Raish. Even though aware of the dependency of space, hinging one’s own construction on something outside of the image. Simultaneously, there is the determination to realize this quite concretely in aesthetic manifestations.
“I am a big fan of Buckminster Fuller, of his spaceship Earth and his geodesic domes, and the essay: doing your own thinking, against bureaucracy and for the realization of your own ideas.” (KP)
The perspective construction, detached from the construction of exchange and economy, is ridden by reality and thoughts of detachment, slightly softened by the gently dialectical use of the Outer Space Idea. In Human or Other an exhibition becomes a social space capsule.
Which does not mean that it is necessarily optimistic. The “out there,” looking for its
manifestation. Here painting simultaneously works as a marker for this desire and as a blocker. Its ostentatiously rushed condition, wearing itself out quickly, as a self-cannibalizing effect, which is arbitrarily amplified by particular pictorial effects (haze, imperfections, painted
drawing). The alien is always present. It is no dramatic Other, no enigma, but just there. Is dangling in the gaze effects or in the roller blinds, the grills.
Transformation of objects into something alive? It is not the objects that shall be brought to life but the representation of relations. And if they are “alive,” it also means “unstable,” unlockable. A clear representation of relations is hardly possible, or rather can be analyzed only partially because there is a fundamental overstrain?
And which role do art objects and particularly pictures play in this hubbub? Are they markers for carving out the territory?
Means of analysis? Catalyzer? Accelerator? Yet since the hubbub itself is already one of the things driven by the massively slippery logic of capital the painted pictures and objects absorb this structure.
Painting as the development, enactment and exposition of the theory painting? That too.
Speculative questions concerning the meaning of art in individual painted pictures. Performing, cascading images, some are jokes, some might be screams thrown into a discussion. Not polite.
Loaded with moral confusions. Unbelievably unhinged. On the other hand tight tight tight.
Words glued together. Dislocated paintings. Journalistic, yet too manic, subjective. Bloggy. Then again: Decidedly not personal views. Painted generically.
The painted pictures, often modeled after photographs and illustrations, are often coated with abstract elements such as nets or roller blind structures or other geometric signs. Thus they are at the same time being illuminated, highlighted, mapped, but also arbitrarily disrupted in their being a picture.
They interrupt the process of reading, of assuming a position before them. They suggest a rearrangement. Pictures in space that deal about space and the politics of space.
It’s the hell fest… and isn’t every art show a disaster? Art as an ongoing traumatizing technique? Or yet holistic version.
Disjointed and inaesthetic at its best! Asserting a function only just to lose it again. I am
thinking of the pictures that tend to abstraction such as Fallen Landscape, Woman Trapped in Abstract Painting.
KP space is also always: seeking out the dimensions that remain obstinately amorphous and attempt to articulate a specific relation to the world, even though they perform this articulation in a more makeshift, unstable way, conceiving it as a vehicle about to head towards “their freedom.”
A set of things to act with.
Things that can be functional and extremely dysfunctional at the same time.
Hence the Secession as a place for devising a “New No-Colony”:
Like a dislocated spaceship of sorts. Creating an idiosyncratic form for a headlong rush into freedom. Alienated, excluded. Joyous. Space is pure analogy? And so they are singing
incessantly: “what about a spacecraft… away we dive.”
Space is itself a pure analogy.
People becoming pure analogy.
Text turning pure analogy.
KP’s obstinately amorphous materials, defying shaping in their own idiosyncratic way, that
describe what we will now see:
“Next to the helium balloon there will be a portrait of Joe Kittinger as an old man and a painted still of his case. Here also Max Planck and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, a young female scientist who thinks faster than light and tries to unite quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.
I find the connection interesting between science fiction and social topics or between the horror movie and social criticism/dystopias. For example with Sun Ra in the film Space Is the Place or Soilent Green. I’m generally reading a lot of Philip K. Dick right now and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and I love movies such as Dark Star and Mars Attacks!
As far as the topic of colonialization goes there will be a picture of Congo (Demokratie oder der Sohn des Königs – Democracy or the King’s Son), followers of Joseph Kabila, demonstrating for him; a fantasy of the exotic, Strukturalismus unter Koffein (Caffeinated Structuralism) and die Architektur der Insekten (Insect Architecture), concrete pictures, covered by a net/grill. The picture Vogel Ziz (Bombenangriff auf Beirut) (Bird Ziz, Beirut Air Raid) belongs here as well as Mista Chicken and the Subcomandante Marcos. There will be a portrait of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia, who right now is trying to get her country back on track, a great woman. Possibly also a group picture of African women – in an increasing number of African societies they are taking over the men’s business, outperforming them in matters of administration and organization. Through devastating civil wars the men are completely at odds with one another – the women, however, are able to compromise.
Another picture is called 700 Milliarden Dollar oder der Kopf des Imperiums (700 Billion Dollars or the Head of the Imperium): the head of the Statue of Liberty is lying on the ground next to that of Charles Bronson and a fat Wall Street type is about to throw another one on the pile. A couple of pictures, in other words, that veer toward caricature, mocking the state of things. A large picture featuring dinosaurs with the heads of politicians, trying to grab hold of each other with their little arms, and a picture of a human being/astronaut/migrant, who is being repelled by a horde of aliens who won’t let him into space.
There will be a picture on climate change (a mirror ball with a wig surrounded by quotes from newspaper articles); and there is supposed to be another one with young leftists protesting in Davos by mooning the camera.
The Tripods: do you know this series from the 1980s, The Tripods. There will be two of them in the exhibition – they are made of steel, only some thin lines, an abstract form on three legs. The Tripods were animated machines, controlling humankind and incessantly stalking the land. The smaller sculpture has a height of 250 cm, the large one is to be 4 m high. The legs are scrawny and start vibrating when touched. The balloon is filled with helium, which keeps it at the ceiling. It is only half filled in order to hang there like a wet rag. The starting point was Joe Kittinger, who in August 1960 in a prequel project to NASA ascended to a height of 35 km into space in a helium balloon and then jumped back, fell back to earth. I am fascinated by this image. To this day Joe K. holds the record for free fall; he fell at almost sonic speed. To me the slowly ascending balloon symbolizes observing research, the fall back on earth human fate. I particularly did not know that there were serious space flight projects with balloons – the rockets (bigger, better, faster, stronger) whisked that out of sight (even though I am very fond of rockets too). Helium 3 is a substance suspected to occur on the moon in great quantities; hence the renewed interest in the moon.
The mobile is actually no real mobile, but rather a rotating, dangling object. With art history students from Linz I made some cardboard meteorites. And in a kind of equilibrium they are being rotated by a motor, pretty slowly. Some planets are covered with moss: the utopia of several inhabitable planets. When we break ours we will simply move on.
Black curtain: symbolizes to me the black matter and the black energy, in other words those 95% of the universe for which science has come up with words that seem to originate in the heavy metal scene, rather than being scientific terms. Our black background with its background radiation.
The video is a video clip of the song: No New Colonies, which I am doing together with Johanna Kirsch. I made two masks of rubber foam, a wolf, and an alien. The setting is a news broadcast. The wolf is the foreign correspondent and the alien is the journalist in the studio. The two are singing a song with rather cryptic lyrics. The video was made using blue boxing – with our masks we are situated in an animated world, very rudimentary; the background continually recomposes itself into ever new surroundings.
Rubber foam sculpture: an abstract form, slightly reminiscent of a mushroom cloud, rough yellow-white rubber foam. On the inside a mechanism in order for it to move and expand a little.
The objects such as balloon, mobile, Tripods, curtain, and rubber foam sculpture are not solid but rather flexible.
I am currently reading about Umberto Eco’s The Open Work and I like the idea that such a work of art is only completed through movement and through the spectator – or as well through the students making those meteorites. The idea is there and you can watch the object grow.
In the exhibition I also wanted to create the impression of forces struggling and pulling against each other. The upward striving helium and that which is suspended – gravitation and the rotation in whose grip we are ourselves.” (KP)
That’s how they are put, the conditions of her contemporary life, of her gaze.
Is there such a thing as a post-exchange situation? With paintings as proverbial props? Folk art elements? Building blocks for a psycho-physiological space, at whose borders KP is operating. I look into the rows of pictures and I see this voluntary softening not only of the unity of space but also of time units: 19 Million Years Ago, 16 Billion Years Ago, Ice Age, Dinosaur Politics, Zack, the picture of the UFO colliding with an antique column… That which defies shaping.
Culture addressing its own self-cannibalization.
Author addressing her own self-cannibalization.
What will you get? What will you get? Trash for life. Bullet Points. In Flames. Feed the Beast. Isolationists. Cerebral Fix. Fall the Bastards. Ruin with No End. Moral Dilemma. Hole in the Sky. New Doom. Days of Rage. Drowning. Blood Laughter. Dark Space. The Sound of Breaking Up. The Lamp of Thot. Rain Without End. Cradle of Filth. In Flames. Feed the Beast.
Transformation of text into zombie speak.
To expose oneself to one’s own un-groundedness.
And then:
Is the retina really spheroidal? Do the images need us?
Maybe the mural will give a better understanding. A mapping tending to dissolve the illustrative, the aesthetic realism. Possibly it will be a plan offering escape from exhibitions. In the spaceship of the Secession. And a papier-mâché meteorite will come down on us and will be taken on board. Conclusion? Meteorites fly and cannot be taken along for the ride!
(Metal Maniacs; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (Perspectives in Continental
Philosophy), Fordham University Press 2005; Daniel Berchenko, Value, Space, and Linear
Perspective: On Marx’s Critique of Bailey, New York: Sculpture Center, 2009)