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Conceptualize ! |
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For more than a dozen of years french philosophical theory has invaded into german art and created some little Tsunamis.The last documenta exhibitions in Kassel (Germany) showed examples of conceptual art as documentation, for example Fareed Armaly und Rashid Masharawi or, just in the same time like the documenta but not belonging to the exhibition, with a kind of art office and art as new reality, Thomas Hirschhorn. |
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The documenta offers, what has formed and transformed consciousness before in more hidden places of temporary life, in small cities, small art halls and one-month-galleries.One of these nearly invisible kernels of consciousness - transformation could be detected in Münster (Germany) as the "Rhizom" - Büro für Kunstvermittlung (office for art and its understanding). The name "Rhizom" offers the concept clearly: To grow invisible and change the essentials. But "Rhizom" isn't played by aggressive, acid-tongued guys, biting like cancer-cells. Its head is Oliver Breitenstein, who studied art at the academy of arts in Enschede and philosophy at the university of Bochum for some years, to become a free lancer now, making his city Münster happy and nervous with different happenings and his offer "Ich schaue Kunst auch für Sie" (I'll look at art for you, too). He proclaims himself to be an art-communicator, teacher, consultant. Explicitly in natural language words, and with complete series of photographies, paintings and installations: Kopfkino (2005), Labor (2005), "Ich schaue Kunst auch für Sie" (2006) "Aristoteles muss chillen" (2007, photographies by Ralf Emmerich). |
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The Rhizom website has a lot of articles about little contemporary art exhibitions and Rhizom events. The office itself changes locations and projects, because empty office-rooms are used for it. It is the longtradition of happenings, not dead and not forgotten.
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Find more reviews about Breitenstein performances here: |
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And this it Pascal Unbehaun.... |
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Pascal Unbehaun stands for concept art at its best, too. Unbehaun has quite a list of exhibitions and exhibition participations in his portfolio, but never talks about this. He even makes paintings or colourful installations like "Minimal TV". At the moment, he applies at Saatchis Stuart for a TV-report. As such - is he a traditionalist? Well,...he's not. It's just a frame. |
For example, in one of his projects he discussed the documentation art of the documenta exhibitions in Kassel. Unbehaun judges these artworks as not only difficult to decide from reality but sometimes as reality as such, in this way, a provocing way of art to approach the real. |
In his opinion, Hirschhorn throws art away with changing the roles completely, because he substitutes or constructs objects really as simple, as functional or bad as the ones of daily life. Unbehaun himself offered 2006 two different projects, that can be read as a kind of more or less conscious response to some of these artworks in and around the documenta.
The first is "Vertical City", an installation and performance. The second is "The Sublime and Postmodernity", a workshop at Rhizom - Büro für Kunstvermittlung in Münster (Germany).
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"Vertical City" shows a dozen of plates with fragments of text in the reduced tones of black and white.
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They are placed on the walls with some irregularities, like musical notes in a notational frame, sometimes continuing on a lower or higher level. |
Like changing the perspective and thoughts while reading or trying to read it, the kind of givenness and aesthetical formation of the text changes. The plates force us to remember Joseph Beuys's slates - creating a kind of atmosphere of preformed buildings of thought. Later this effect of transfiguration became subject in another artwork of Unbehaun. But in "Vertical City" the text is not the only thing to look at. The second part of the installation is a room that offers some books the artist had read beforehand, a table and some chairs the visitors were supposed to sit on to read, and discuss his approach to art. Its interesting that the people actually did, as Unbehaun shows in his documentation.
His installation is, such, not overcrowded by art. It puts thoughts about art into the art-scene, showing art discussing itself. And it presents thoughts - of the artist or the visitors - to be realized symbolically. Although an "artefact", as critics like to put the finger on art-objects to be taken home by their readers, text and parts of the installations aren't "untouchabilities" but have a sublime result: enlightening moments of thoughts and ideas.
In consequence, the next project was a pure workshop. The workshop consisted of two parts: At first the workshop was held in Rhizom - Büro für Kunstvermittlung Münster and was filmed. Secondly, an exhibition was organized. A Video-Installation showed the workshop material, notes, flipcharts and polaroids helped to construct and reconstruct the happening.
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The workshop's main idea was to experience something not to happen not, but just to be at the very special moment. That's it: The uncountable moment offering a very brief situation. It seems quite natural when thinking about the thought & thinking experiences of Vertical City, and obviously it is interesting philosophy-art that graps the point of thought-observations in sense impressions (the experience of reading and talking) - the artist himself speaks of "transfiguring thoughts" - , like in a good old phenomenalistical reconstruction of reality (the pre-aesthetical Goodman of "structure of reality", for instance). |
As such, a modern sublime again.
A kind of implicit self-critical discourse and another reflection on art approaching reality is the "artefact" (as it was called by a journalist) Unbehaun offered in the exhibiton "Pflanzendialoge". He presented two posters with computer simulations of natural growth processes and a text (written by computer specialists) which Unbehaun shows as art. Their project tries to approach reality from artificial systems in a completely different, technical way. They try to implement dialogical structures and chance to simulate a natural environment for a genetic and organic basis of automated actions. Presented as art, the text and its project should become transfigured into something quite dramatic, although in itself just a short cutting of the well known information science for neuro-biology.
Well, if it is compared with art and art's reconstruction of reality, you may judge the original scientific work as simply "better": more concentrated on its aim, technically sophisticated, highly knowledge based. They build almost real beings, while art searches for nothing. But - art has had this job some hundred years before. And like the transfigurational aspect shows, a perfect simulation is a simulation is a simulation.... Even if useful, it's just a secondary information to understand the real better. You'll still have to look at the very concrete being standing in front of you. This is, what just art evokes, not computational science, even if both sometimes account for each other.
Find more about
Pascal Unbehaun on http://www.d498.de
Oliver Breitenstein on http://www.büro-für-kunstvermittlung.de
Report: Dr. Ulrike Ritter
(c) Pictures by the artists
