Antic Measures
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin, Germany
It might once have seemed to matter, in some broader sense than that of personal taste or idle fancy, whether and how a triangle was placed next to a square on a bit of canvas. Now, such moves, except perhaps within a few esoteric practices, will probably be a cue to meditate on the arbitrariness of formal decision-making. Accordingly, ‘Antic Measures’, a group exhibition at Galerija Gregor Podnar in Berlin curated by Chris Sharp, considers the ways art acknowledges the futility of its own strategies. The show distils a particular tone – often histrionic, usually theatrical – in which necessity is reasserted on the other side of this acknowledgment, and purpose, subjectivity, even dignity, are reclaimed out of solipsistic freefall.
B. Wurtz’s The Secret of the Pyramids (1987) is a scattering of the pyramidal packaging from a china tea set across the gallery floor. Wurtz sidesteps the lumpen materiality of the cardboard by offering retrospection (are these ridiculously abject models of the ancient pyramids, as the title, handwritten on one of the objects, suggests?) and imaginative projection (or, alternatively, are they fragments of mysterious debris, fallen from outer space?). Looming in the background, Manfred Pernice’s Aufbau (2010) dispenses with such ambiguities, amounting to no more than its formal and material ingredients: four stacked polyhedrons pierced by a vertical steel rod. The ascension to provisional architecture out of basic carpentry is as pointless as it is purposeful. Details of its construction – bare staples, painting abandoned in mid-stroke, a handle on a facet which offers no pull – generate a language out of a disregard for niceties of finish, in fact making it contingent upon that disregard. And yet there is a perverse tenacity, even desperation, in Pernice’s conversion of formal conjunctions into material construction, the abstraction of a triangle becoming a sheet of bevelled plywood. The transformation recalls Wurtz’s self-imposed rules for assimilating found objects as sculptural components: they should ‘have to do with clothes, food or shelter’. Wurtz’s inverted carrier bags, hung on steel wires (Untitled, 2007), do resemble cartoon ghosts, or pockets emptied of necessary change. There is an echo of Joseph Beuys’s symbolism here – conflating the material and the moral – but Wurtz applies his rules to whimsical configurations that would have fallen well outside Beuys’s functional remit.
The show’s various architectural conceits, all clearly going nowhere as they strive upwards, suggest that sculpture is a temerity that ought to be countered by a measure of its own absurdity. The tapering tower of Wurtz’s Untitled (1993) – plinth to wooden block to tin can to white sock – becomes more abject with each step from minimalism towards the bodily. The gallery is dominated by Ian Kiaer’s Endnote, Pink (Inflatable) (2010), which, like the sock and the plastic bags, is a displacement of space without the fortifying dimension of mass. A balloon made of polythene sheets, roughly taped together and attached to the floor by lengths of sticky tape, is kept inflated by a cheap electric fan heater. The ceiling’s concrete joist squashes down its swelling form. The piece is primitive, like sculpture reinvented from scratch in a parallel universe, as well as a sophisticated take on painting. With one half composed of a slightly browner shade of plastic, the shell suggests an inflating into sculptural form of a Rothko-esque abstraction.
But as wishy-washy aesthetics are firmed up by being shown to derive from materialistic imperatives, so formalism serves up an anthropomorphic symbolism, which, in turn, designates the show’s various architectural metaphors as default modes – another means of implying a figure. Like Michael Andrews’s ‘Lights’ paintings – which adopt the image of a hot air balloon as an emblem of floating subjectivity – Kiaer’s balloon, its fragile skin a tremulous meniscus held in place by air pressure within and without, is rich with psychological suggestiveness. On the wall behind, each of ten A4-sized black and white photographs in Jochen Lempert’s Stadtstrukturen (2004) shows two grounded pigeons against an urban backdrop. This is another humanistic conceit, and a romantic one at that. The prints, fraying a little at the edges, formally reflect what they picture: the faded aspirations of 1960s’ city planning, along with the relinquished flight of the shabby pigeons.
The inclusion of Esther Kläs’s lino prints (3 Solitäre, 2011) – gestural doodles on tall paper hangings – is perhaps intended to add another facet to the theme of formally manifested subjectivity. But Kläs’s effusive handwriting, even as it is once removed of objectivity by the printing process, registers as callow self-affirmation in the context of a show which otherwise manages to transmute such energy into a fiction of itself, or embody it, vicariously, within various unreliable stand-ins. For example, a bendy rubber horse that would fit in the palm of your hand – the protagonist of Lou Hubbard’s video Hack (2006). Attached to a length of string, it is squeezed through loops, or dragged along a ruler that measures its progress, notch by notch. The operatic aria on the soundtrack melodramatizes this Sisyphean narrative, yet Hubbard gets beyond irony to evoke the futility of human striving in general, and of art-making in particular. The various manoeuvrings of the toy are heavy with the sense of art emerging from the other side of extreme boredom, as T.S. Eliot claimed it does. Like the pigeons glimpsed through Kiaer’s sepia-tinged polythene, it seems the horse could really overcome its submission to the string and run, if only through the boozy green lens of a gin bottle through which its image is fitfully refracted. Or are such illusions a sign that the art has maintained its integrity by forcing the viewer to compensate by projecting onto it the purpose it lacks?
Mark Prince
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