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| [[File:JKotlaris_TOM2017.pdf]] | | [[File:JKotlaris_TOM2017.pdf]] |
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| '''The skin, however, does have holes, for letting in and out our souls'''
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| '''Introduction'''
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| In this text I will describe recent and past projects and try to clarify their relationship. From there, I will outline a few directions for the close future. The aim of this text is to lay bare the status quo of my practice in order to orientate myself between medium, material, production, attitude and methodology. I will do that with the help of a few others: the Minimalist, the Materialist, the Expert, the Multi-Instrumentalist, a Dog in the Mirror, the Dictator, the Hippy, the Backpacker and the Decision Taker. These characters are part of a methodology that helps me to find order between the different voices that accompany my practice.
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| '''Current practice'''
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| I will introduce the Backpacker with Dogs Horses Snakes And An Orbital Maneuver (2017). The work arose from my interest in the way the body is experienced through gravity and was an installation which comprised a video projection and dried leaves laid out on the floor. The Backpacker likes to respond to given circumstances, she doesn’t want to sit in the studio, nor behind the computer. She would rather travel to a place and find out once she is there, what it is that she searches. Through online research I came across a futuristically designed holiday apartment carved into the mountain, which served me as a location. The video was built through two parts alternating: moving and still images. The audio consisted of crackling sound produced by the viewers while entering the room, and my voice speaking fragments of memories and thoughts: non-narratively, rather chaotically, sometimes repetitively.
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| Slick Black Screen Dilemma, Silky Skin Joelene and Dipping Moisture ABC (2017) are three works produced for a duo show with Victor Santamarina at The Free Shop. As they were made within only two weeks, I had to call the Decision Taker into the game, she’s great and can get stuff done quickly. The audio pieces were delivered through headphones installed onto found objects: a palm tree flower, a lacquered bamboo stick, a pink ceramic cup stuck to the wall. The inspirational departure point for both the music and its texts was the idea of a sensual encounter. However, this is intended as a fusion with the world around us, the experience of the self as part of a continuum, rather than the encounter with another human body. I was interested in hybrid forms of body, object and space, while using my voice playfully to reinterpret these words.
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| Osmosis (2017) was an interactive installation comprising found objects, made objects and food. The floor was padded with foam mats, where a composition of rectangular surfaces served as low table formation surface for handmade plaster and ceramic containers: abstract or concrete representations of body parts and different types of foods. A slow and continuous change of the composition was induced through the process of the meal. The Multi-Instrumentalist that was at work here, was mostly interested in perishability, transformation and reimplementation of material and the body, a contemporary condition of the body, aesthetic composition, material production, time, and my mode as a subtle performer.
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| After having worked a lot with materials in the last few months I am now concentrating on immaterial works. For Vivian Sky Rehberg’s seminar project I am collecting and editing archived conversations from my time as an art model. These negotiations often revolve around the value of my work as a performing body (i.e. money) and the amount of skin and body parts that I allow on depictions. I want to use this project for both: a reflection on the use of my body in my work and as a practical exercise in performance attitude in order to face the Dog in the Mirror. In other words: how can I deal with the way I appear to others?
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| In collaboration with Collette Rayner I am also working on a text that intends to become an audio guide. It will probably include elements of instruction and rhythmic dialogue, which all set around the formation and the de- and re-composition of matter.
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| '''Relation to previous practice'''
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| In fall 2016 I produced The Human Soul Is Outside for a duo exhibition in Switzerland. The work consisted of a group of big photographic sculptures and a performance. This was the first time that I installed objects in a space so dominantly, and also the first time, that half-way through the exhibition I decided that my sound piece was going to be a performance. I like to understand that change of mind as an exercise in attitude. It also felt very natural and satisfying to use a big amount of space, but the unwieldiness of the objects triggered my Minimalist, unamused about the la-di-da of production, transportation and storage issues. This was also the first time I met the earlier mentioned Dog in the Mirror: “I had no idea that this is what you all see”. Much of what had happened informed my later work: from some of the text the first of my a cappella song series (Slick Black Screen Dilemma, Silky Skin Joelene and Dipping Moisture ABC) arose, I realized my desire to work with my hands, I understood that performing is difficult, and I felt allowed to use space.
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| Reimplementation and reutilization seem somehow important now and in the past: in Sunrise–Sunset (2016), Possibly Meaningful (2014) but also Osmosis and the a cappella song series. Sunrise–Sunset consisted of custom made Nike sneakers walking in the shape of an irregular circle. Each shoe tongue contained a word where usually the Nike logo is placed. My Minimalist had decided that producing wearable work just to later store it away was a barbarity. The 18 shoes have so found activation and implementation into my everyday life, resulting into a continuous performative piece. Possibly Meaningful on the other hand, was a photographic series that documented playful and intuitively produced constructions, drawings, installations, sculptures and self-portraits. None of the constructions in the photographs still exists that way: every object has found its place somewhere back in the world. Even if this work seems quite old, it still importance for me and in many ways it has informed my approach this year. The Dictator had to face the Hippy: Instead of working according to rules and regulations I trusted my bowels.
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| Osmosis seems surprisingly connected to Sparkling Sado (2015) as well. In Sparkling Sado I hosted a 25 minute long Japanese tea ceremony adaptation where the traditional Japanese props were exchanged with western luxury hotel industry objects. Back then, I was more interested in the commodification and exoticization of cultures, whereas the emphasis has now shifted onto the process and time oriented work, the idea of being a host (a subtle way of performing), and the perishability of the artwork.
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| '''Where is this going?'''
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| The works I have done (and I am doing) this year, were all born through different types of urgencies. I try to work intuitively, allowing myself to switch between medias and methods. My Multi-Instrumentalist, is interested in a more bastardized format, that allows each work to contain fragments of different medias. Then again, the Expert wishes for works to be cleaner, clearer, able to interconnect on another level. Secretly, I was hoping to find a medium or a method that will cure my production dilemmas. But it seems, as if my commitment issues are real. This has, however, also helped me to understand that ways of making, production strings and interest clouds can reach into each other without effort, that allowing multiplicity is ok.
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| As I have decided to let the Dictator chill for a while, here are some loose ideas for my near future, without making any promises:
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| After just finishing Osmosis I feel the urge to concentrate on size-wise smaller and production-wise faster pieces (hang out with the Decision Taker). I imagine this as an exercise in speed-sculpture. I sense that this could allow me to give bigger projects more space and peace to unfold.
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| I would also like to test the format of performance more. I really want to get to know that Dog in the Mirror, or other relevant animals that might appear in that process.
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| And finally the Expert gets his well deserved attention: The three a cappella songs feel like a start of a bigger series that I want to take further. The same applies for Dogs Horses Snakes and an Orbital Maneuver, which at the moment I see as a first sketch of a more elaborate follow up.
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| '''Who’s my neighborhood?'''
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| Signature, humor, hybrid bodies, bastards, a sculpture that invents itself, made and found, perishability, temporality, porosity, the continuum, postmodern materialism, the pre-human, the alter-human, a never finished present, the pelvic bowl, a non hierarchical thinking, ghost in a shell, the boundary of the body, the fusion of the body, a contemporary corporality, the certainty of being that is not understood by the brain alone, the intertwining of self and matter, science-fiction, fantasy (writing and reading), body-mind psychotherapy, and more, totally unfinished.
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| Ursula K. Le Guin, Yvonne Rainer, Clarice Lispector, Lygia Clark, Carolee Schneeman, Tracy Emin (maybe), Cindy Sherman, Lawrence Weiner, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Mike Kelley, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Giorgio Agamben, Erich Fromm, Martin Siems, Albert Einstein, Carl Gustav Jung, Anna Halprin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Amie Siegel, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, Pamela Rosenkranz, Walter Benjamin, Aldous Huxley, Peter Kruse and more, totally unfinished.
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