calendario eventi  :: 

X

24/9/2003

Heimo Zobernig

Nicolas Krupp, Basel

Helmut Draxler
Constructivism as Allegory
Sculptural Discourse, Methodology, and Aesthetic Praxis in the Work of Heimo Zobernig

Zobernig's praxis lets itself be best understood by examining the catalogues. Here we recognize not only the various accents in the works and groups of works, but also the respective relationship between texts, institutional guidelines, and working methods. The first catalogues from the mid-1980s were small booklets that either presented individual images or objects page after page or applied the design principle of the works to the pages of the catalogue, for instance playing out a range of possible variations for red circles on a black background (illus. 133).5 Then between 1989 and 1990 booklets followed in DIN A4 format; while the inside of these booklets was still similar to the earlier small catalogues, now each already had a text on the back and a specific cover design: a list of the names of the artist, gallery, text author, and photographer in bold Helvetica print (illus. 228)6 But the publication accompanying the exhibition in the Villa Arson in Nice, 1991, a booklet only made up of photocopies, represented a new model for the catalogue (illus. 226);7 strongly text-based, it now included more detail views and a map of the installation. The subsequent institutional catalogues from the 1990s, Salzburg-Graz 1993 (illus. 330), Chicago 1996, Esslingen 1997, and Bonn-Leipzig-Munich 19998 developed this principle further, whereby these catalogues were increasingly dominated not only by views of the space, but also details, video stills, posters etc. The texts and interviews are less manifesto-like than those in the earlier catalogues; they provide a broad historical and conceptual frame of reference for the work. While in the earlier brochures, there had still been one for painting and one for the objects and sculptures, the DIN A4 booklets were already conceived in a much more conceptual manner; they thematise the framework more of the exhibition conditions than the concrete works: the collaboration with the photographers, gallerists, and authors. In the institutional catalogues, the various disciplines or media as such can still be recognized, but now more as part of a complex situational arrangement in which discourse productions and the development of the oeuvre increasingly seem to increasingly intersect with one another. When now the first true museum retrospective appears with an extensive overview of this oeuvre and the authors are asked to concentrate on individual aspects of the work - for example, the painterly or, in my case, the sculptural - there is the danger of falling into a classifying logic. As far as sculpture is concerned, a large part of Zobernig's work can be classified in this category, at least if one considers sculpture more in a discursive sense than as a traditional artistic craft. Nevertheless, the various media used - objects, sculptures, spaces, paintings, texts and conferences, music, videos and performance - constantly refer to one another and can only be separated in a quite arbitrary fashion. Although the boundaries in this oeuvre are not truly abolished, they are treated very flexibly and are constantly being worked on; indeed, their positioning should be seen as the specific theme of the work. How should we understand this treatment of borders? Surely not in the sense of a logic of transgression or pushing the limits, as has repeatedly been attempted for the historical avant-garde. Zobernig never lands beyond the limits of painting or sculpture; everything remains within the boundaries, oriented less towards separation than reference. The borders within and between the disciplines can be understood as sites in which a certain exchange or transfer is negotiated. Instead of transgression, at issue is a displacement or transposition of relations in light of the historical options and potentials of the respective discipline, a kind of 'boundary management'.9 When painting on the one hand points to the history of mono-chromaticism, and on the other hand functions as a blue box for the video production, or that sculpture can appear entirely monumental and still seem to disappear in an almost functional sense as text, stage, or partition, then it becomes clear that there are commensurate aspects in specific traditions and potentials of a discipline that can mutually determine and influence each other. In the following, I will thus not remove the sculptures as an individual group of works from the total complex 'Zobernig'. Instead, using the example of sculptural discourse, I will attempt to approach the methodological premises that make up his aesthetic praxis.

In the open field between object and sign character, use and exchange value, quite contradictory accents are set over and over again. Most of the sculptures are sellable objects without any inner value; they can be easily reconstructed. The immediate display of materials, as is typical for almost all shows during the 1990s, allows the multiplicity in codings and references to stand out. In addition, the apparently totally smooth functioning within the art world, as expressed in the numerous 'furniture jobs' assigned to Zobernig, it is precisely not design that is at issue, but rather demonstrating art's lack of a social function as uncompromisingly as possible. Therefore, instead of choosing between autonomous claims of substance and avant-gardistic re-functionalisation (constructivism), Zobernig is concerned with a specific dialectic between functionalisaiton and desubstantialisation. In question are the subtle intermediate spaces in which the borders and links to what despite all reservations can be termed art in general or 'art as a proper name'10 are sounded out and negotiated. The issue here is how this general condition can be related to the specificity of the disciplines and traditions and hold its own in 'interdisciplinary' exchange with architecture and design on the one hand and commodity fetishes from popular culture on the other.

opening: thursday 25 september 2003 at 6 pm

open thursday, friday and saturday from 2 - 6 pm
and by appointment until 15 november 2003

nicolas krupp
contemporary art gallery
erlenstrasse 15 ch-4058 basel
fon +41 61 683 32 65
fax +41 61 683 32 66

stampa

permanent link