Ahead, within, and under: ART.
More about the Augsburgian art
awarded at H2
Next event: 08th april 2008,
ARTIST TALK with Benjamin Appel and Kathrin Ahlt, at 7.00 pm (19.00
MEZ) at H2 - Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst / Center for
Contemporary Art. Find address below at the end of the text.
Art is...ahead of
the museum, in the museum, under the museum. The first of course, as
heaven-as-symbol and natural beauty, "in the museum" as an
exhibition or collection, and at last, as an repository. In
the context of the exhibition "Augsburger Kunstförderpreisträger
zu Gast im H2", the Augsburgian artists Frank
Mardaus, Hama Lohrmann, Achim Steinmann, Benjamin Appel und Kathrin
Ahlt have shown and are showing some cutting edges, that interchange
these funny sections of art-to-be. But we want categories: Lohrmann
and Ahlt care for the heaven's art, Mardaus acts as a depot trustee,
Appel the architect, and Steinmann the most offensive in the
showcase, trimming the machine.
Mardaus
was the first who turned the under in the upper rooms. A nearly
complete private photo archive, mostly black and white pictures of
one and the same personal living room, printed to different series on
transparent film, therefore like a blown up photographical negative
but without the swap into inversed black and white. The portraited
persons: the own family in the course of the years. The photographs
quality is offensively different. There are even some pictures not
made by the artist Mardaus. Others were done in the early years of
his career as photographer, actually in his childhood together with
his granddad, who inspired his deep interest in the medium. Some
photos show just overcrowed bookshelves, quite untidy but comfortable
armchairs and studiocouches, others the family at the dining table,
another group of pictures the room's outside, and at last some photos
a kind of posing for the archive, family members with a year's number
print in their hands standing in front of the camera. But all this,
at least partly chance dictated picking, was not exhibited by Mardaus
for its own sake but as a kind of huge sculpture of projection: the
filmfoils with the photos printed on in an about 3,5 inches distance
to the wall, collected together to large lines between metallic
frames, these with holes like a film perforation. Visitors got little
lamps to enlighten the foils - the whole exhibit in the H2's cabinet
was kept without light, nearly dark.
Thus,
just a small spotlighted section of the photos and an effigy on the
wall behind the photo-foil can be observed by the artsearching
visitor, who feels like a classical photographer him-/herself working
on the apparatus for developping paper-pics. Three rooms are then far
too many. A slight feeling of excessive demand tiptoes up, creating
awareness of the meaning archive and depots have: Not only fun
stations to pick art concepts or history together, but volumes nearly
nobody can really cope with.
But is this really
a source of fears? The elegant website www.mardaus.de with
photographs Mardaus has published in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung) give us the impression, that the accidentiality of
day-to-day shots with their nearly offensive casuality shows just the
opposite of an upcoming fear: Some fingersnaps will be enough to
"store" history and impressions of experienced social
reality, as far as such a thing can be kept up for descendants at
all.
Let yourself fall
down on the sand and just visit heaven - was what Hama Lohrmann told
us. The land artist, who presented ornaments of natural materials
like sand, wood and stone in installations and photographs,
demonstrated artistic handcraft in other media, sand instead of
colour, and painted thus ornaments in a different way. Although in
the exhibition and his new catalogue book presented in visual
opulence, his objects favourize to direct the visitor's awareness on
nature's physical qualities: effective heat capacity, surface's
friction, (dis)aggregation. These are, as Lohrmann's installations
show, aesthical qualities too, especially haptic, insofar as we feel
the temperature and aggregation state or weight, friction and
hardness.
Nevertheless,
on his homepage http://www.hama-lohrmann.de
the artist
declares not only to favor sense impressions and being alone in
nature, but too, that his ornaments with accidental objects in nature
shall create traces of human individuality and its impulse of order
in a chaotic nature. Furthermore, his - in a way - "lonesome"
art, shall remind the visitor on the ephemer character of every
being: "in a time of completely delimited materialism my art
offers the possibility to its spectator to bethink himself and to
take a back seat.
You'll only catch
a glance of already passed things, things volatized, traces. You'll
have to give up the opinion to have to see, to experience, to
conserve everything, and accept a world, that exists with its laws of
perishability and unrulability next to the artificiality of museums
and their suspended history." That so - I personally would like
to forget the lifted trigger finger and to prefer this sensibility
for material and quite *primitive*, haptical qualities and their
inner, fundamental laws of physicalistic materialism. It seems to be
thus exactly the desire to experience this kind of material nature,
that Lohrmann finds in landart. This is a kind of tradition of
artists looking up to heaven, from Yves Klein to one of the founders
of "land art" as "against market and museums-art",
Michael Heizer, and event- and packaging land-artists like the
Christos.
Herman Prigann is
with his objects of wood and other fugative natural materials quite
similar to Lohrmann. The idea to resist artmarket mechanisms with a
consequent denial of photographic documentation that could be sold,
has in this newer land-art been given up. Some artists actually need
photographical documents to show the natural changes of their nature
like sculptures. In Lohrmann's photographical documents, artificial
changes can be observed, like wood collected for a fire and the then
burned. These are examples that show a new, although very traditional
element in his art, the idea of artificiality and human construction
in nature as its very ideal, that has in germany been overtaken from
england as land-art, but not in about 1960 but two centuries before,
in the "time of sensibility" and its aesthetics and
poetrical romance of gardening (as art, of course). And like the
count or earl in these earlier times, today the museum not only
functions as archive that devitalizes art but as pleasureground of
land-art and other temporarily installations, like especially the
series of Augsburgian award exhibitions are showing once and again.
Like
Lohrmann, Ahlt has an affinity to nature. Her photographs of foreign
and bavarian landscapes reduce typical views of such in itself
attractive things like the Alpes and nice meadows to their
impressionisic qualities. She represents a quite traditional approach
to photography, that explores the possibilities of this technology to
be like a painting, in german "malerisch". Details about
this strategy are described by Rudolf Scheutle in the catalogue book
publisheb by Th. Elsen as Head of the Neuen Galerie im Höhmannhaus,
where Kathrin Ahlt showed her work in autumn 2007 (Read our report).
This works as
interesting estrangement effect in photos of foreign cities, that are
not such well known as landscapes of the Alpes to the southern german
viewer, in her photos of the latter , the reduction and softening of
such motives functions more as an iconization: While postcards of
mountain villages try to identify their place as something individual
and special, Ahlt's landscape sections glorify their mountains and
meadows as such and hyperbolically.
Kathrin
Ahlt, who had been master student by Thomas Ruff in Düsseldorf
while studying at the academy, is represented by Marion Scharmann in
cologne www.marion-scharmann.com
in
a nice, young portfolio of photographers, keeping thus a foot in
every region. This might be inspiring, because, in comparison with
the city-shots, the Alpes -as- icons loose. Although we are of course
far away of giving advices to the artists :) , Düsseldorf or
Berlin would perhaps be the higher mountain.....
Even
two years younger, born in 1978, is Benjamin Appel, who got the
Augsburgian Art Award 2006 together with Kathrin Ahlt. Although his
little sculptures and environmental objects he shows in accompanyment
with Ahlts photographies at H2 until the 14th of april let conclude
to an architectural educated artist, he studied at first goldsmith.
Nevertheless, already as a student of Thomas Zipp in Karlsruhe, he
developed his paintings, that play around and explore the linear
structures of spatial illusionism in paintings. At H2, this
architectural surfaces have become little constructional systems,
still in some aspects similars to their anchestors in flatness:
especially the raw material wood and concrete, that are presented in
a kind of "natural" state. But in Appel's concrete art
(like in an architect's building) groups and moments of content fly
around, to give or disturb with poetical hints: Graphit lines on the
wall that let the simple blocks and bridges look like elements of a
circuit diagram, rectangles that look not only like bridges but like
guardrails, blocks become seats near them, the exhibition room a
playground (If we had have some of Lohrmann's sand....), or, at
least, a pleasureground for racy improvement. Games of a quite young
artists ? Well, these small chips of depiction do the concrete art no
harm...
...and they create
a wonderful slide into the art of Achim Stiermann.
This guy, full of
great humorous power, has studied art in Vienna, where he was
obviously really within the in-scene. In H2 the exhibition room's
were filled up with kinetical objects of strange materials, with some
rare qualities like being cheap, fragile and/or weak in storage life:
spaghetti, drinking straws, real old gramophones for vinyls, a
synthetical umbrella, an alienated metal rack, some simple
electronics. What is created with cooking all these things together
in the big jar of energized art making, is a slide-like machine, that
lifts up little balls that are looking like eggs, kicks them over its
peak , let them roll down the slide and jump on a table, and at last,
into the turned over umbrella, then again, they are put in motion and
on the way to the lift. Thus, Stiermann managed to symbolize all the
aspects of art that could have been seen and even the forthcomings
(like the pleasuregrounded circuit diagrams of Appel): up to heaven
and down on the archive's table, into the recycler and on the art
lift again....
Well, but to mind
read art just as comment on itself, this machine might also be judged
as a metaphor of ovulation, especially as it was presented around the
easter days at the H2.
Stiermann's art is
sometimes in this way very sexy. At the artist talk some films were
shown he has made with friends in Vienna, for example, a porno
persiflage, that managed to create really convincing pictures with
little lego figures and smart apparatusses that had been operated on
by the film team before. Of course, as always, a very authentic sound
stream cared for continuing amusement, too. To speak with the film:
"That was great".
What
was deposited was a "scratch-machine", in a way sculptural
chance - art, that carried caps on its players. While running, the
caps, made of drinking straws, changed speed and thus mood and tone
of the already in its original form disgusting music. Thus, the
record player a kind of drunken musician, very lively. In a way like
the stage artist Robert Wilson, Steinmann interchanges elements of
livelyness between humans and machines, that the latter really
approximate.
This happens in
another group created video called "dotter" (=yolk), too,
when an egg's yolk is handled like a squash-ball and bursts when
thrown against the wall. This film with an actress, inspired by
political frustration as the artist told ARTS On, intermingles
natural soft and artificial hard forms to create an atmosphere of
action-disability. How this fine art traces feed themselves from the
unconsious and get thus consistency or at least density, show
elements like the selection of a yolk and a female Dotter (it's the
family name of the film's protagonist), what sounds like "daughter"
- in comparison to "sun", what sounds like "son",
for artist, at least very different yellows, in this film, symbolized
by closed rooms like a miserable and crepuscular flat and a closed up
squash-room. Political frustration as symbolic castration?
A little collage
of Stiermann showing a "Stiermann wurst" (Stiermann
sausage), works the other way round, decomposing a person into
sausage slides and putting it together to a grinning face on a little
mountain of fleshy blood and fat. Even in a harmless combination of
bicycle saddle and handlebar with some catlight as eyes, that looks
like a mixture of a bull and a man's (in reminiscence to the artist
name "Stiermann") bust, a minotaurus or at least the pet of
Picasso's demoiselles d'Avignon, again very lively and appealing.
Thus, a cult object for freudian skilled art watchers and powerful
enough to climb up the art machine. Stiermann on the
web:www.stiermann.org
Next event to
take neccessarily part in is: ARTIST-TALK with Benjamin Appel and
Kathrin Ahlt at H2 *
Tuesday 08th april
2008 *
19.00 pm (07.00
pm) *
H2 –
Zentrum für
Gegenwartskunst im Glaspalast
Beim Glaspalast 1
86153 Augsburg
T 0821-324 4155
F 0821-324 4105
Kunstsammlungen.stadt@augsburg.de
Opening hours:
Di 10-20
Uhr
Mi-So 10-17 Uhr
Guidance tours: Di 18 Uhr, So 11 Uhr