William Engelen
Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Germany
Dutch artist William Engelen’s hand drawn, ink construction grids combine notation systems from areas as diverse as architecture, music, dance choreography and language. The graphic structures he creates resemble abstracted microchips, tempting the viewer to surf the currents that run between the different systems, each one a distinct representation of space. As cerebral investigations, they are reminiscent of Zaha Hadid’s illustrations of Utopian architectural forms, while typologically, they adhere to the deconstructivist tradition embodied by Peter Eisenman or Daniel Libeskind.
Engelen used to display his notational systems in plain black on white gallery walls. This time, printed on transparent plastic sheets suspended from the ceiling, they partitioned the gallery space into square units, in the middle of which were two translucent architectural models. Projected slides which showed the inhabitants of Berlin buildings leaning out of their windows or hanging out on their balconies and three video monitors showing his series about construction workers ‘Field Recording’ (1998) added to the dense, multi-layered audio visual structures which enveloped the viewer. Engelen managed to create an environment in which it was hard to make out whether one was standing inside the work or looking at it from a distance.
At first, any direct connection between the notational schemes and the projections seemed arbitrary. But a book published for the exhibition by the artist, Intermission No.3 (1999), suggested a different reading. Images behind semi-transparent sheets of paper on which the notation is drawn, made it apparent that they can be read as filters or as visualisations of an operating system clinching the planes of empirical reality: in other words either a metaphor or simply as a descriptive tool.
This raises the question of what’s more infantalising: being confronted with over-simplified or with overtly complex structures, and this is a problem with Engelen’s show. While his patterns do seem to render visible the hidden technological structures of our daily experience, they also confuse the horizon and disorientate the ‘user’. In short, they fail to decipher reality. On the contrary, they encode it even further. The notion of transparency established through Engelen’s deployment of see-through material is in no way the trace of a transparent outlook on urban life.
Yet to follow this line of argument would mean to step into the pitfalls of taking everything too literally. Despite his retrieval of specific formulas and recurring patterns of spatial representation, Engelen’s grids remain cryptic signs: art radically unabashed from accounts of an encounter with the bug-eyed other of Constructivist space. The irony, of course, is that the people in his photographs, dreaming into the day and stuck in moments of dysfunctional waiting and looking, are not aware of being photographed, let alone of the complex layers the artist implies.
Krystian Woznicki
