Monuments with a Horizon Line II
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany
'Monuments with a Horizon Line II', installation view (2009). Foreground: Markus Miessen and Bettina Pousttchi, Closed Waters (2009). Background: Zaha Hadid, Central Business Center in Bejing (2008)
‘Whenever art finds itself growing grim about the mouth,’ wrote Herman Melville, ‘whenever it is a damp, drizzly February in its soul, it is high time for it to get to sea as soon as it can.’ Andre Buchmann’s new group show, ‘Monuments with a Horizon Line II’, takes this dictum to heart, unfolding a maritime exercise in tossing curatorial waves, as the snow falls outside on Charlottenstrasse.
The sea has laws, and the first order of business is apparently to introduce them. Architecture critic and editor Markus Miessen and artist Bettina Pousttchi open the show with a short wall-mounted text about the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The text notes that the United States is the only world power yet to ratify the treaty; a copy of the convention itself is provided nearby, bound in blue cloth and impressed with the title ‘Closed Waters’. This is actually the collective title for Miessen and Pousttchi’s general contribution to the show, which also includes a plastic model ship placed in the middle of the gallery floor, surrounded by expanding white lines, marked with paint. These grid the seabed into a series of boundaries. The labels read: ‘Continental shelf, maximum 250 nautical miles from the baseline’; ‘Exclusive economic zone 200 nautical miles from baseline.’
Jorinde Voigt, 27 Positonen, Deklination Blickwinkel, Auskustische Raumabtastung, Strom (2009)
Jorinde Voigt explores a related theme with 27 Positonen, Deklination Blickwinkel, Auskustische Raumabtastung, Strom (2009). The work comprises a wall chart, which looks very similar to Mark Lombardi’s global networks, though on closer inspection it appears to simply mark shipping positions. On another wall, Lawrence Weiner supplies a green caption, in both German and English, which reads: BOILED FOR THREE MINUTES AT THE LEVEL OF THE SEA/GEKOCHT FÜR 3 MIN AUF DEM MEERESPIEGEL. ‘Sea-level’ in German literally means ‘sea-mirror’.
Mirrors turn up in Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s video work The Autonomous Object (2009), which, projected onto a gallery wall, shows a series of people holding up mirrors to the camera from a series of locations – a beach, a bench, a photographer’s studio. Other works include Zaha Hadid’s two architectural paintings (Central Business District in Beijing and Central Business District in Beijing (detail), both 2008), both are both nicely rendered. Amongst the other paintings, Clare Woods supplies Fantastic Zoology V (2008), an oily green and brown abstract on aluminium, and, in the second room, Sean Dawson has Amphimix (2008), a well-composed brighter work of primary colours. Pousttchi’s art historical synthesis Double Monument for V. Tatlin and D. Flavin (2009) is the other piece in the second room: a white sculpture resembling the Monument to the Third International, though constructed from metal crowd barriers with a single neon light running through it. (Oddly, this piece is one of two Flavin/Tatlin crossbreeds currently on show in Berlin, the other being at Helen Cho’s solo show ‘Together in Fateful Collision’ at the Christian Nagel gallery in Mitte.)
Joel Sternfeld, Spaceshuttle Columbia, Texas (1979)
‘Monuments with a Horizon Line II’ appears more then the sum of its parts, making singling out individual works hard. But the single most striking piece on display is undoubtedly the photographer Joel Sternfeld’s witty digital C-print Spaceshuttle Columbia, Texas (1979). The work cites Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer Above the Mists, 1818) by employing the same trick of perspective: a solo traveller with his back turned, facing the sublime. But both the sublime and the hero seem to have altered in the intervening 200 years: the man is balding and portly, while his view is now the scarred chassis of the Space Shuttle Columbia, mounted on a NASA refuelling jet, as crowds mill around on the tarmac.
The presence of Hadid in this show, along with Miessen, testifies to the exhibition’s heavy architectural bent. Given the long relationship between architecture and waterways, this connection is natural and seems generally fathomable. But then again Le Corbusier drowned in the Mediterranean - it shouldn’t be forgotten that the sea also means Ahab, madness, the Titanic. In light of this vastness, ‘Monuments with a Horizontal Line II’ remains a little landlocked, harbouring plenty of economy but not enough poetry. I feel dirty saying this, but it could have done with some circling sharks.
Daniel Miller
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
