The bed in the medium and as medium, as an architectural and iconographic object where vertical and horizontal regimes collide: production and reproduction, sexuality and exhaustion, activity and passivity, the (un)conscious and unconsciousness. Nowhere else is the subject both inside and outside of itself, on this side yet also beyond its perception. While images of people lying in bed challenge the idea of moving beyond desire, fatigue, sleep, and idleness, at the same time these very images serve to mobilize the technologies of its animation: Be it by embodying societal taboos as desires informed by cultures of commodities and the masses, as in the case of Félix González-Torres; or be it by fostering an essential aesthetics of vivification within the life sciences, as in the case of Mina Lunzer’s filmic experiment exploring neurobiological dream research. Iconographic changes are not only paralleled by new knowledge and media methods, but also by transformation within modern working society, as Jan Timme’s installation suggests. This is illustrated by blueprints of a bed, published in a 1968 issue of the magazine Brigitte, which can be read as a paradigmatic example of a feminized do-it-yourself culture, but also as a conceptual manual for DIY enthusiasts. However, the question traditionally arising through the Ready-made as to the guise of both utilization and aesthetic surplus value here represents a literal question of perceptual perspective. Subject to rhythmically shifting phases of light and dark, Timme’s installation corresponds to the cinematographic temporal mode of Lunzer’s work. In her case, the junctions between speculative-scientistic and perceptually aesthetic experiments are what allow the representations of sleeping and/or dreaming individuals to emerge as empirically unsupported fictions of life and death.

Sabeth Buchmann, 2014