Micha Zweifel

What.

Upon entering the room you encounter a tall fragile looking sculpture which is made up from three poled metal structure hold together by thin bars at irregular intervals and a small flat monitor mounted at head-height directly onto the top bar. The video shows an abysmal light source, different colors radiating from it. From time to time other video sequences are slid in between the hypnotic (light)source/sun and the eye of the viewer. They are short clips of a camera following the backs of people in a shopping mall. Sharply edited together with the video there is a audio track of footsteps in a room. Walking further into the space you meet another two sculptures both have as well such a metal construction as a carrier but the different objects suspended from them. The one on the right hand carries a half-round and wobbly wooden shape which at one side end into a hand and at the other in an ill-definded cone. The shape has been spray-painted before carving in green, blue and latte-white. In the same sculpture a speaker is attached with its own wire. From time to time a distorted voice speaking about a distant scenery as well as of rules to apply to ornaments. The third sculpture is composed only from a the metal structure and a intestiny complex wooden shape carefully balancing in between the metal bars. This shape has been painted in yellow, red, blue and the off-white.

How

Upon working on something to present at the interim show I started with recomposing elements that I have used previously. My motivation for building the metal structures was to house elements that previously made up a space-encompassing installation in a more self contained way. In my practice I often mould older works into new ones and use what comes out of this process in order to produce new elements. Being dissatisfied and bored with ‘just’ finding a new way of presenting an older work led me to reconsider the structures as figures or fragmented bodies. I used the concept of Fridolin, a saint often depicted with a bone-man, to test or make tentative attempt towards an idea of a psycho-somatic space (on the relation between psyche and body).

Why

For the ‘why-part’ I want to apply a fragment I have written about a previous work in which I contrast vaguely related texts to talk about my own motivation:

‘The poet can counter a syntactic limit with an acoustic and metrical limit. This limit is not only a pause; it is a noncoincidence, a disjunction between sound and meaning. This is what Paul Valery meant in his very beautiful definition of the poem: "the poem, a prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning." This is also why Hölderlin could say that by stopping the rhythmic unfolding of words and representations, the caesura causes the word and the representation to appear as such. To bring the word to a stop is to pull it out of the flux of meaning, to exhibit it as such.’

A presentation is a rupture of working, an amputation: Accepting the abstract totality of the material one is working with as body, making art then becomes stuttering, again and again. When the body is taken by stage-fright its focus shifts from what it wanted to express to the medium of expression. It becomes self-conscious and its hands, actions or voice appear as themselves, become disembodied. The body curiously gazes at the amputated. This is also when a tool becomes an object. This shift of status I think forms an ongoing negotiation. Therefor I don’t see the rupture of presentation as an exclusive (although more radical) state but as pulse. 

Thinking about body, the topic of the GC dialogue at one point turned towards a greek torso without extremities or head. How much do we know and how do we apply our urge for completion? Where do we position ourselves or different, how can we negotiate from within rather then taking a detour via a fictive whole demanding stable placement? I guess in the working period towards the GC what I tried to avoid was exactly this: To not align material with idea. This is not necessarily a new method to me but it requires trust and the giving up of a presumed prerogative of interpretation over my own work. The experience of the GC in that matter has been really rewarding and opened up, to call it something, possibility of resistance. When I say resistance what I mean is quite physical, it is resistance against smooth integration. In that sense, the stuttering body, exuberant ornaments and hesitation between sound and meaning are all sites and surfaces for resistance.

‘Deleuze once said of cinema that every act of creation is also an act of resistance. What does it mean to resist? Above all it means de-creating what exists, de-creating the real, being stronger than the fact in front of you. Every act of creation is also an act of thought, and an act of thought is a creative act, because it is defined above all by its capacity to de-create the real.‘

What could be a potential material practice/method that pushes the de-creation of the real. I am speaking of material because I want to emphasize the value of an idea of cooperating or maybe even collaboration between skills/ideas/aspirations on one side and texture/gravity/quality/history on the other. Moulding, projecting and distorting are all transformative actions, undergoing different forms. Through the material working of those processes they inscribe their specific logic into what is produced. A sort of genealogical history inscribes itself into the shapes and mutterings of the object. Needless to say that transformation is never pure and is always crippled through irresolvable discrepancy. It might be exactly this crippled uttering (stuttering or sputtering) that might have the potential for de-creating the real. With its lack (like the torso) or distortion it opens up a gap a pause that for a moment allows for something else to appear then what the ‘flawless’ (or accepted flaw-ful-ness) mediates. It could hint towards that maybe alarming is not so much what is mediated but that mediation is circular and all-encompassing. 

Synopsis of the text: The work of art in the age of digital recombination by Jos de Mul

The author clarifies his usage of the term Media, simply, as a means for presenting information. He continues that media structure imagination as well as the perception. His point of departure is Walter Benjamin’s ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. Based on the structural setup of this historic text, Jos de Mul puts forward his thesis, that the database constitute the ontological model of the work of art and secondly, ‘that (...) in this transformation the exhibition value is being replaced by (...) manipulation value.’ In the following paragraphs deMul is giving a brief overview on the benjaminian terms, cult value vs. exhibition value and the aura. Summarizing the change from the a static auratic object to the reproduction that doesn’t have a place and time of its own. ‘Anachronistically’ as de Mul calls it himself, he applies the notion of a ‘interface between the sensible and supersensible’ to the (auratic) artwork. That is how he hinges his idea of manipulation value to the auratic work, which he apparently tries to reinforce, rather than abandon, by stating that the artwork rooted in databases points out this connection between that immediately visible (sensible) and its potentially infinite recombination (supersensible).What in de Mul’s eyes separates the use of database in art to the one of daily activities (like googling) is its reflective attitude towards the medium. (How does a work reflect upon something?)

Synopsis of the text ‘Remixing and Remixabiltiy’ by Lev Manovich

Manovich’s text starts out with an analogy of water with water. He compares the increasing amount of water and the numerous paths it creates with that of information: When there is more Information it will create new paths which will widen and connect to each other: ‘These paths stimulate people to draw information from all kinds of sources into their own spacce, remix and make it available to others. With ‘remixing’ manovich seems to mean diverse things from quoting and re-appropriating fashions of the past, the collage art of Schwitters to deejaying. He wonders whether this practice will, that already happens in music, will take over all fields of cultural production. He assumes that there is a division between ‘libraries of samples’ and authentic cultural works, whose blurring might be a desirable project. (?) Manovich disapproves of the argument that, using modular systems the number of objects that can be created is limited. In his view: ‘If pre-computer modularity leads to repetition and reduction, post-computer modularity can produce unlimited diversity. He advocates a cultural science fiction’ where, instead of placing ‘the present of in the context of the past, we can look at it in the logically possible future’. The tendency, his science fiction, is the process of increasing modularity and remixabilty. The aim therefor is: ‘helping cultural bits move faster’. Althought at an other point in his text, Manovich mentions the ‘... grim consequences of living in a standardized modular world,’ he concludes that sentence with ‘for now it is much easier just to go ahead apply the 20th century logic.’

Synopsis of a conversation between Robert Filliou and Diter Rot

Filliou interviews Rot for his book project on teaching and learning as performing arts and kicks off the conversation by talking about animals.

‘What do we ask the pigs?’

Rot continues to talk about how people try to convince each other instead of just stating what they want:

‘And I told some of them, that they think, democracy is, where everybody has the right to speak. (...) But then has everybody the right to convince other people? (...) No, this is not democracy’

What is wisdom? Comparing animals, plants and stones, Rot concludes:

‘The wisest are the stones. In any case they get what they want. They don’t even die.’

And what could be teached:

‘...getting an insight and ideas about what field is free for their wishes (...) how to formulate their wishes...’

Rot has this conviction because he observed that:

‘They wanted to do something which they would be able to call, and other people would call art, whatever that was at that time and place’

This is important because:

‘(doing) what you want could make you calm and or happy, (...)’

Therfore you got to

‘find out the ways to do it.’

Icons & B/W, 2011

Together with four people I walked towards the art space. Each of us carried a bright yellow formwork panel of 30x40 centimeters. The walk from the train station to the space took half an hour and we were late for the opening. It was a bright sunny day but the space, situated on the shadowy side of the valley and under a car road leading out of the city, was rather cold. We arrived with four panels, one was already installed, on the opposite side of the valley. I installed three more panels, leaning them against one wall each. The fourth side of the space is open, facing the valley and the platform leading to the space. Time passed. I shook two spray cans, black and white. Standing at the edge of the platform, I sprayed them simultaneously towards the bright panel shining in the far distance. We left.

For Alice, 2011

The architectural situation of the exhibition space was both, starting point as well as material of the work: It was a large space, a former depot, that was intersected by rows of columns supporting the ceiling. I used the columns as part of my work. Further on I brought some simple metal stools, made in China, and a stack of photocopies. Some stools were leaning on a column and two, stapled on top of each other, served as plinth for the stack. The stack bore the trace of spray paint which was applied in the shape of a smile. The photocopies included texts and image material that I collected preparing the work: Texts about notions of the primary directions, vertical and horizontal; texts about signs in urban landscape; pages on pillars in greek antiquity, Texts on the sculpture of Brancusi, Giacommeti to Morris; and Texts about other related subjects.

Untitled (cheshire horse), 2012

A friend of mine, Raphael, called me last april whether I wanted to do a show in St. Gallen together with him in june. It was evening and I was working in the alps at the time. A couple of weeks later it appeared that the people running the gallery did not want us showing simultaneously. I was out of work and spent my first free weeks in Brussels where I made a drawing that combined the motive of the cheshire cat with that of the trojan horse, scanned it and sent it to Raphael. I asked him to execute my drawing on the gallery walls. He was free to interpret my work in any way he wanted. Raphael chose to paint it with acrylic onto the wall in a corner of the gallery. later on I have seen a video-recording of him drawing the cheshire horse very carefully.