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2002
drawing:installation
wooden construction, straw, tarpaper, copies, paint, mirrors
2.5 x 12 m
Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, AT
The preceding works had pursued an analytical and self-reflective approach. Not only are pictures integrated into installational ensembles, rendering the supports, the structures of hanging, the material limits of the corpus of the picture used as a building block explicit. The synthetic unity particular to the image, the coherency of the imaginative space, is broken up; the constitutive means to the illusion are displayed as such. These means are inevitably materials that exist in the real world. Duchamp called them readymades, such as the industrially manufactured paints from tubes the products of the painters have consisted of since the nineteenth century. As the unity of the genres is fractured and works transgress the boundaries of the medium of painting, the spectrum of these materials that constitute a work opens up toward the vast reservoir of everything that already exists. This includes other pictures, sites, all sorts of usable and unusable objects; it includes quotable conventions and solidified forms of thinking and of the production of something like ‘art.’ wir wussten schon bescheid directly confronts the function of such a totality of already existing materials for the production of the work, which must stand out from it as something ‘new.’
The relationship between this new and the archive of the given is here not articulated as the boundary between the illusionary, nonexistent space of the image and the materials that constitute it. The archive is presented as an ensemble of basement compartments. As is customary in larger residential buildings, these compartments are formed by plank constructions and have lockable doors, but one can peer inside them. The rooms are filled in a variety of ways. The room on the far left is locked; a sheet of roofing cardboard blocks the view inside. Another room is filled with sheaves of dry reeds. The next rooms present photocopies of the artist’s own drawings and works by William Blake, neon lighting, and a reproduction of Holbein’s Ambassadors. In another compartment, the light-and-shadow relief of an open gestural brushstroke is realized on two wooden panels painted white; the traces of trickling paint, more distinctly reminiscent of rain than in other works, run toward the angle formed by the two panels. Set down in a very narrow compartment is a large-format picture by Richard Hamilton, the well-known depiction of a hotel lobby, which had been realized as a photograph for an installation at the Vienna Academy and then discarded after the exhibition. The basement compartments are here quoted as places of storage and safekeeping, as the site of a potentiality that becomes actual in the present form of the work. This form is not placed in an imaginary pictorial space; it is the form of the installation, existing in real space. The artificiality of this installation, however, contrasts with the fetishization of the authentic, of the remainder and the document that has become prevalent in the archival art of the past decade; it integrates the materials, which have already lost their aura in processes of copying and reproduction, into a scenic image that strips them of their real age and displaces them to the oscillating border between what is always already given and the aesthetic presence of the work.