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18/6/2009

Ease and Eagerness

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg

Duncan Campbell, Marcel van Eeden, Friederike Feldmann, Sabine Hornig, Julian Rosefeldt, Tatiana Trouvé, Sascha Weidner

With the exhibition Ease and Eagerness. Modernism Today, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg proposes an optimistic view of contemporary art, building on its fifteen-year history of mounting large-scale surveys of current art practice with a new presentation of seven artistic positions. This optimism stems from the belief that even amid the global economic crisis, art remains a vital life force and source of insight, and is supported by the introduction of two intellectual-historical concepts from what initially seems like the distant past of early modernism: ease and eagerness. Duncan Campbell, Marcel van Eeden, Friederike Feldmann, Sabine Hornig, Julian Rosefeldt, Tatiana Trouvé and Sascha Weidner, who were all born between 1962 and 1976, examine the traditional artistic disciplines of painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and video in terms of their historicity, and also seek to expand their boundaries. Referencing and at the same time emancipating themselves from conventional art- historical genres, each of these artists seeks an area of unclaimed territory in which to locate his or her individual creations.

In this context, ‘ease’ relates, for example, to the fact that the process of art production is not the central focus of these artists’ work. Technical skills are not demonstrated as such, nor are they negated or delegated; instead they are employed to create new effects. Artistic practice can also involve the imitation of creative techniques: in the case of Friederike Feldmann’s paintings, for instance, the finished work suggests one kind of production process, when in fact it was created in a quite different way. Feldmann is primarily interested in »painting and drawing itself, the process of creating images« and ultimately in the very act of seeing.
Contemplative vision is also required in order to fully appreciate the slowness of Julian Rosefeldt’s filmic narratives, which tell stories from the realm of a modern-day Sisyphus. His work deals among other things with the deconstruction of a fixed plan, whereby overly fastidious attention to details of preparation and control ultimately prevents a goal from being reached. In The Shift (2008), the compelling juxtaposition of human protagonists and an impressive array of control equipment symbolizes the futility of man’s attempts to dominate nature. The artists featured here are not content with revisiting themes they have already identified and elaborated, but instead continually push the boundaries of their own practice. Marcel van Eeden’s work is a good example of this approach: having gained success and acclaim with his series of drawings in the space of just a few years, the Dutch artist recently turned his attention to painting. The starting point for his images are real people, who are incorporated into a variety of different contexts related to a particular point in time, in what could be described as a fictional rewriting of history.

This interest in methods of altering or clouding perception, in the exposure of memory as a vehicle of deception, is shared by the young Irish filmmaker Duncan Campbell. The title of his film o Joan, no ..., (2006) is itself an allusion to Samuel Beckett’s teleplay Eh Joe. However the radicality of Campbell’s gesture lies not only in responding to Beckett with a piece based on black space, imagelessness and human sounds, but also in abandoning the assumption of a correspondence between image and sound.
Tatiana Trouvé’s installations are concerned with the superimposition of multiple levels of time, the idea of sculpture as ‘drawing in space’, the apparent suspension of physical laws, the enchantment of commonplace items and the element of danger. Trouvé describes her spatially specific constructions, which are comprised of everyday objects, Plexiglas, metal or wood accompanied by drawings, as »mental architectures«. Sabine Hornig’s artistic interventions transform existing spaces through the isolation, reduction and simplification of architectural fragments. Hornig removes these fragments from their normal surroundings, creating works that rely upon memory and recognition – and the gap that exists between the two.
For Sascha Weidner, photography is the medium with which he opens himself up to life. The camera captures moments of beauty, fear or pain, evoking memories that are impossible to escape, which demand to be endured or celebrated. The drama and stillness in Weidner’s images occur in peripheral locations that reflect longing, desire, happiness or destruction: motorway service stations, landscapes of rumpled bedsheets or enchanted forest clearings and lakes.

All of these artists share a sense of eagerness; they are enthusiasts in the best sense of the word. While in the sixteenth century, the term ‘enthusiasm’ implied inspiration or divine possession, in the eighteenth century it lost its religious connotation as a result of the Enlightenment, and is now used to mean a strong, passionate interest in a subject or cause.
Ease and enthusiasm cannot be achieved without a sense of curiosity, however. Curiosity is also a form of doubt: it continually tries to look beyond the surface and it presupposes intelligent viewing – a way of seeing that makes it necessary to adopt a stance, both mentally and physically. In the context of our exhibition it is also important to acknowledge those artists who opened doors for their younger colleagues to explore contemporary reality: pioneering figures such as Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Arnout Mik, Wolfgang Tillmans or Nan Goldin, to name just a few. Our seven featured artists have passed through these doors with confidence and a sense of curiosity.
Now, with ease und eagerness, they use their own art to question reality – often presenting it as a construction or fiction – and to set traps for perception, employing literary, sociological and theatrical narratives in addition to conceptual ones. They adapt the pathos formulae of modernism by reconstructing and deconstructing its gestures: time, architecture and space, imagelessness and placelessness, history and fiction, recollection and falsification. In this way they sharpen our view of the world and reveal some new truths.

Image: Sabine Hornig, Large Cube in Forest, 2004

Press contact:
Nicole Schutze T. +49 (0)5361 266969, F. +49 (0)5361 266966, email nschuetze@kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de

Opening: Friday, 19. June 2009 at 7 pm

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1 - Wolfsburg
opening hours
Wednesday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Tuesday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Monday closed

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