Katinka Bock
La Synagogue de Delme, Delme, France
Locked in a windowless cell by his fellow Carmelite brothers for disobedience, 16th-century monk San Juan de la Cruz composed spiritual canticles like ‘Song between the Soul and the Beloved’ celebrating the soul’s enchantment with the absolute: ‘the silent music, the sonorous solitude, the supper that recreates and enamours’. In the border region of Alsace-Lorraine, artist Katinka Bock stages a cabalistic banquet at Delme’s deconsecrated synagogue where objects gather in a similar ‘sonorous solitude’. Ja (2008), an installation of white PVC tubes and metal support rods, runs across the main sanctuary from a groundwater well, once the source of a women’s ritual bath. The occasional drip-drop of water from the pipes seems an ironic attempt to synchronize the inaudible internal chants of Bock’s quiescent congregation with the arrhythmic time of its inconstant beat.
Entitled ‘Kanon’, German for a musical passage sung or played by various performers at fixed intervals of pitch and time, Bock’s exhibition is a canticle in its own right, whose barely perceptible vibrations gently urge the invisible into the sphere of the material. In Aussicht zu zweit (Two Views, 2008), a small mirror in the synagogue’s upper balconies hangs in a corner away from the viewer to face a Moresque window. However, in seeking out the comforting image of its own reflection, the mirror draws the exposed outside into the sheltered sanctum. In Blue Corner (2008), a block of wood is dressed in a leather cover that slides down on one side to reveal a cut corner. The block recalls the RGB colour cube while the absent volume corresponds to the first synthetic colour, Prussian Blue; if combined, the hues remaining after Prussian Blue’s subtraction result in the same fleshy colour as the cube’s enveloping suede skin. Interior unfolds to exterior, colour becomes form and the phenomenological lived body transcends to the sublime.
In Kompass (2008) sheets of cardboard nailed to the wall at their centres are left to tilt at their own will. The minimal drawings are like homemade devices that serve to orient a psychological space in which two places can be perceived and navigated simultaneously: the present is but a fold in time that unites the past and the present. In Je te tiens (I’ve Got You, 2008), an old chair tempts the viewer to sit down and disrupt the fragile equilibrium achieved by panes of glass propped against the seat back and separated from each other by bent sewing needles. In Strange Fruits (2008), forms sculpted in wet clay and dropped from a scaffolding in Bock’s studio have the voluptuous curves of Hans Arp’s biomorphic marble sculptures - rounded bodies caught in what Arp called ‘concretion’, the process of taking shape.
At the exhibition’s opening, locals played Eric Satie’s rarely performed Vexations (1893), on their home pianos at staggered intervals. ‘To play this motif 840 times in succession,’ wrote Satie at the top of the single-page score, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.’ In ‘Kanon’, Bock’s works gather, transfixed, performing the motionless dance of inertia to silent music: their slight bodies push and pull against each other, endeavouring to find that tense stillness of being where the absolute resides.
Emily Verla Bovino
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