About the semantic level of white „Clôtures“.

Wolfgang Schenk staged under the Augsburg series "Augsburger art award winners in the H2" a dadaistic installation.

To get attention at an exhibition opening, is not actually a problem - especially not if you have a work of art - better yet - THE issued artwork. The one or the other object of conceptual art - sometimes there were, at least in the 70s, only small flyers on the wall - has been established by Information withdrawal as a conspicious counter-argument to this allegation. A current, ad hoc installation of the Augsburg-Munich sculptor Wolfgang Schenk under the surprisingly surprising exhibition series "Augsburger art award winners staying in H2“- linked abnormal behavior of an installation with targeted information withdrawal, which recognizes conceptual art as such. But with some only momentary, sudden, loud, quite clearly sexually motivated groaning of a man, loud howling of a woman, and finally the typical cries of a small child - with these sounds the installation left the restrained gesture of conceptual art and gave successfully sensual effects and laughs. But finding out who or what and why moans, cries or howls, remained to the guests of the exhibition and strictly failed. The art remained in the White Finished cube, which is known as the typical ambient space of Modern Art. In Schenks exhibition, however, the elegant white architecture acts not as functional envelope of modern art but as a backdrop of a kind of "public institution“ for a bodily need. LHooQ On those doors are not just the typical symbols for men and women, under the door handle not only the unfriendly red for "occupied", but also a scratch, which was commissioned by the artist, but not by written by himself on the door: the well-known characters of Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa alienation: LHooQ

The artist interview a week after the opening showed different approaches, all hardly be described as complete. What the artists would think abhout elements not fitting into the interpretation of the artwork to be criticized, he would not seriously let himself be asked. The "possible" interpretations ranged from modern expression by reducing acoustic effects and withdrawal information to art as a social experiment, or joking about oneself. Artist Schenk agreed to everything and nothing, as it is expected of a conceptual sculptor expected.

(Foto: „Abstract Semiotics“, 2008, U.R.)

Significantly, however, was, that the installation and Schenk's art seemed generally not undemanding yet neither uninterpretable. Rather the catalogues called "Cortex" of a 2004 double exhibition at the gallery in the foyer in Munich and the Castle District Ansbach Oberbayern (Foreword: Dr. Thomas Elsen), and "miserere" 2002 in the Neue Galerie in Höhmannhaus (Foreword: Dr. Thomas Elsen) with a multiple sculpture called "guilty" (2004) and reference images from the time of Dada and Surrealism led in the direction of sexual murder (see "Cortex V", 2004) and social behaviour. The Dadaism is as a reference object clearly not necessarily semantically simple - Kurt Schwitters was also Dadaist and up on the "Auguste Bolte" largely uncritical without objecttual references [or * abstract * :)].

Again in the cataloged opinions is given evidence of ongoing, substantive subjects such as physicality. The important facets of the human body through the intestines as a design object to the ambivalent attitude towards physical needs, the opening speaker Georg Wiest saw in the installation, is the highlighted spectrum. Otherwise, in the exhibition "Cortex", the physical aspect of lust murder by knife was kept straight out - only respectable bases with a classic, sharp knive were in the installation "guilty" in multiple repeatedly ranked together, and in "Cortex V" rested a gently edged knife sewn into the hollow of a mattress (The language game is close to a certain sexism, and also "lust supper", that shows a classical woman's head made out of bread and breaking into pieces, is very close to the fantasies of young boys, who do not any longer like to watch their mother at lunch).

In the new installation at the exhibition H2 gather with groaning, howling and baby screams at least three types of noise, which relative involuntaryness can not be denied. That the groaning as a quasi unvoluntary, but allowed behaviour in men, howling as equal for women and screaming for Babies is presented, depends, in this case, perhaps less on a conservative attitude of the artist as rather - in a first important step – points to social constraints: men, which, as at least parents of boys will know, are often enough water spilled – but this form of social behaviour will cease tp be typical. What in public is thought about women groaning, was visible in the infamous press campaigns against the tennis player Monica Seles, who was constantly criticized because of relatively harmless acoustic reactions to physical stress. Die ebenfalls jammernden Schreilaute eines Kleinkindes sind ebenfalls insbesondere bzw. eigentlich nur diesem erlaubt. The howling screams of a small child are in particular also only allowed to small children.

So physicality in the "Clô [-] ture" - a term of Husserl, which, read in German, also fits very good to Schenks language games with "Look" or "Elle a chaud au cul" - the social corset (Klosetts a.s.o. ...).

In short. You can recognize a motive in the installation that refers along the abstract notion of physicality to social orders and injunctions, and the installation fits so more and more clearly in the George Grosz'sche costume of Pissoirscratching, in which aggressive, anti-inhibitional and authentic elements are clearly shown (to present it as bourgeois as possible). Thus, the groaning man and the wailing women, the crying child, point under a dadaistic and critical perspective, to the petty bodily and sexual conditions after a birth, and their misfortune: The marriage is almost "fu...sh ...".

This of course Schenk has "said" or unexplicitly – semiotically and in his installation given. The author, single and in some sense an innocent angel, wraps itself in the post-critical social silence.

U. Ritter

(Fotos: „Abstraction“ et al., U. R.)

Next date: Tuesday, 29nd January 2008, 19.00 Uhr. Art Talk with Karen Irmer, prize winner 2002. H2.

Info and address information:

http://www2.augsburg.de/index.php?id=1139

Artist talk on 15.01.2008, second from left Dr. Thomas Elsen (head of the H2), third from right in the picture: Wolfgang Schenk, exhibiting artists.