Thomas Zipp
Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Germany
For his exhibition ‘The World’s Most Complete Congress of Strange People’ Thomas Zipp has blacked out the windows of Guido W. Baudach’s gallery in Berlin-Wedding and painted the ceiling black. Zipp, a professor at the city’s Universität der Künste, has an intimate relationship with his gallerist. In 2000, he co-ran the party space ‘dirt’ (an old driving school next door to Baudach’s former gallery in East Berlin) to raise money for exhibitions. In his fifth solo appearance, as if to stem any allegations of becoming part of the furniture, Zipp manages to make the gallery both part of the furniture of his work, and to exclude it.
The gallery’s central wall, torn down to make room for the installation, provides the material for its dominant feature, a mountainous sculpture of jagged black chipboard slabs, held together with canvas strips, and piled up toward the ceiling. The twin peaks open crocus-like, the gallery’s central pillars thrust down into them, as if the sculpture is swallowing the gallery. It’s tempting to read this as an in-joke: artist, work and gallery tied umbilically together in a violent three-way clinch, from which none can disengage.
Around this, Zipp has built a container suspended above the ground, swaying on slender, black stilts. It forms a distorted zoetrope with Zipp’s eight canvases – facing into its centre and slotted between aluminium panels – the frames of a hypothetical movie. Entry to the inner chamber is gained through a narrow cervix. The mountain sculpture is guarded by nine figures, four on either side of a narrow pass cut through the middle, and one loitering at the wall. These ‘Harlequins’ have shiny black bodies, and wear rubber gloves on their long wooden arms.
If the inspiration for Zipp’s architecture is early cinematic technology, his technical calibrations owe something to cinema’s early magicians. The room seems to belong to one of Jean Cocteau’s Orphic films, particularly Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930) and Orphée (Orpheus, 1950), in which the protagonist swims through a mirrored world populated by drawings that move and allegories of narcissism. Translated into real space, the eye of the viewer behaves like Cocteau’s camera: scrambled landscapes mirrored and refracted by the ravaged aluminium panels open up and dissolve under the gaze. The panels, alternately convex and concave, are covered in dents, delivered from inside and out, as if the scene of a shoot-out. The staging is borrowed from Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1946): in its the final scene, in the ‘Magic Mirror Maze’ of a fairground, a husband and wife fire rounds into the mirrors, shattering one after another.
It’s easy to get lost in Zipp’s maze. The artist, helpfully, provides a couple of maps. The first, the exhibition flyer – a photograph of Karlheinz Stockhausen with thumbtacks stuck in his eyes – provides the soundtrack for Zipp’s work. Like Alice and Bill Harford setting the giddily lurching theme of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite (1938), the work of the musical mathematician fixes the agenda of Zipp’s congress, and the problem of politics at large: how to impose form and structure on wild impulses and strange events. And what if the order is no less strange and wild than what it attempts to suppress?
It begins with sex, generated here by the sculpture – the brain of Zipp’s social laboratory – and expressed in the canvases at its edges. Neatly painted in a cold key of greasy browns, greys and dirty whites, the mountain motif forms a frame, and the artist conducts experiments in plugging the space in between. Small, black speech bubbles mark out a face in Balloons (all works 2009). In Faces, a triangle stands for a nose. Spirals with little crosses form the eyes, and sausage-like ears are framed by a pubic rug of black hair. In Brick, a simple, white rectangle is lodged like a contraceptive device in a brownish, uterine gorge. Zipp’s strongest images though are more abstract, as in PPT, a flesh-coloured chimney floating on a black background and puffing out the letters of the title. Zipp adorns his paintings with markings – arrows and numerical values, plus and minus signs. The bullet wounds in the aluminium are stamped with letters and digits: violence coded and charted in a kind of scatter diagram. Here’s where the second map comes in. Located on the gallery’s front desk, it works by flattening the structure into a plan, titles of the canvases and panels making out a graphic poem like those of Kurt Schwitters or Marinetti, whose Marcia Futurista (1916) provides the title of Zipp’s largest canvas, TUMB TUMB.
Zipp’s position is elusive: is he presenting the strangeness of society, stripped to reveal structures behind its closely guarded political edifice, or an assemblage of diagrams and design notes for its production? Or is this a model of the political summit, whose closeted diplomacy is attended always by violent confrontations between street protesters and police outside? Or are abstractions merely a well-intentioned deception, an attempt to grace human actions with a logic they do not possess? A lot of questions; not a lot of answers. But, as shown by the recent UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the congress isn’t always designed to produce answers.
Sam Williams
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