Michaela Eichwald
Vilma Gold, London, UK
An insect trapped in amber is an event. The slow death of a prehistoric bloodsucker frozen in place millions of years ago can’t help but evoke speculation as to what prompted it to land on the ancient tree’s sap, or what landscape once surrounded it. Fast-forward several millennia, and Michaela Eichwald has dropped a piece of tomato, two curls of cheese, bacon rind with a whiskey glass and some rubber bands into a bag full of plastic resin and topped it off with a silver, cone-shaped trophy. PSB 1978 (all works 2009) could be some sort of hastily assembled award for hard-up breakfasts everywhere, but, like the other odds and ends captured in the Cologne-based resin sculptures at Vilma Gold, the history and previous use of these objects is strangely irrelevant; each work evokes only the precise moment of its creation.
There was an amniotic sense of possibility in Eichwald’s exhibition, ‘The Classical’, the hardened liquid of the sculptures perched on plinths of varying heights among splotched and smeared canvases on which enamel and wood preserver were dripped. No discernible figure looks out from Portrait, just blobs of orange and green which are doodled over with lines of red and jelly-like enamel. Eichwald’s paintings revel in deliberate murkiness, like a po-faced child playing in mud, dragging in whatever happens to be at hand. In Geschlechtsreife (Sexual Maturity), a white stain spreads across the canvas browned with wood preserver to form an embryo-like shape, though its gestation is halted or frozen. Each of these paintings and sculptures attempts to attain the status of an ironic, fossilized time capsule, but manage only to be snapshots of careless flightiness.
Eichwald repeatedly drops hints as to a narrative behind these preserved moments. For example, in Nennschwelle (Given Threshold), a photograph pasted onto the canvas is covered in grey paint, allowing a glimpse of a stage curtain tucked into the railings of a gymnasium corner. Stuck to the canvas below the photo, as well as on another painting titled Wisdom, were several imitation books, the hollow kind designed to bulk out library shelves. But these, and the second-hand items frozen in resin, were deliberate distractions – more like arbitrary items than clues, made blandly anonymous through this pseudo-cryogenic process. A rubber glove provided the hand-shaped mould for Alchemie, an android-like appendage in which a plaster and a silver eggcup are suspended. In each fingertip is an eraser, as if this absurd creation had clawed its way across the show, erasing any evidence of life pre-Eichwald.
A writer and co-conspirator of the early ‘90s Cologne scene alongside Kai Althoff and Jutta Koether, Eichwald’s recent forays into gallery installation seem to be carefully thought-out steps into visual terrain – albeit bleak, visually acerbic and without any conceptual or narrative hold. Eichwald herself kept a calculated distance, deliberately leaving the work emotionally dry. All that remained was a pared-back kind of theatricality, a stage on which Eichwald played the role of a faux-naive artist miming an apocalypse of artistic junk-store games. The only action of this figure is self-preservation, halted in the process of crystallization.
A long drip of paint hangs from the cover one of the ersatz books in Nennschwelle. This initially looked like a delicate remnant of the lashing of grey paint that clouds the canvas, though a closer inspection revealed the drip to be hanging at an odd angle – apparently fixed onto the book. Turning on the house lights, as it were, Eichwald’s crystals are more the fixed re-staging of a supposedly spontaneous event though how ironic her re-enactments are is ambiguous. Eichwald’s performance could, on the one hand, be a highly effective and self-reflexive parody of the role of the artist and what meaning we might find in their every gesture; or, on the other, a position of posturing indifference, an affected insincerity that smacks of a false faux-naïveté.
Chris Fite-Wassilak
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