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26/11/2008

Two exhibitions

Spruth Magers, Berlin

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to announce the exhibition of Karen Kilimnik’s video ‘Heathers’, produced in 1994. Presented in an austere and sepulchral physical environment, the video work is based on the cult American satire Heathers (1989), directed by Michael Lehmann and starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater who were at the time idols to a generation of angst-ridden youth.

The original motion picture is a dark and humorous story of teenage conformity and rebellion in picket-fence America. The title refers to three girls of the same name who, with their friend Veronica (Ryder), are at the pinnacle of the high school hierarchy. Just as Veronica begins to question the wisdom of her association with the Heathers she encounters and becomes lovers with a deterministically named juvenile delinquent called J.D. (Slater), whose anarchic and irreverent attitude to responsibility and authority results in a trail of bloodshed, starting with two of the Heathers.

As an acid dramatization of the social and sexual confusions of adolescence and young adulthood, the original ‘Heathers’ chimes with Karen Kilimnik’s fascination with the uncanny nature of white American mainstream society, trash culture and the emotional, fragile world of teenagers. Kilimnik’s artistic remix of the original is directly filmed off a television monitor, and extends the original three hours long thriller into a six hours tour-de-force artwork by slowing down, freeze framing, fast forwarding, rewinding and repeating individual scenes, sometimes ad nauseam.

Like Kilimnik’s painting practice, ‘Heathers’ reveals an ambiguous attitude towards the clichéd woman of American mass media, an attitude that sits intriguingly between fetishisation and critique. By breaking up the narrative structure of the film into separate scenes, Kilimnik shifts the viewer’s attention away from the storyline towards a non-linear constellation of key moments, including the opening scene and its famous quote, “What’s your damage, Heather?“ The fragmentation of narrative also places more focus on the female stars, invoking a critical tradition which identifies the representation of female sexuality in classical Hollywood film as constructed around the still image, the pause or pose, which invites the spectator to contemplate woman as a visual spectacle.

‘Heathers’ locates Kilimnik not only in a particular kind of feminist tradition, but also within a specific generation of artists’ film and video makers. Kilimnik, like other mid-1990s artists, was fascinated by the advent of digital technology and the way it exposed the limits and the unique qualities of celluloid film and its aesthetics. For Kilimnik, DVD and video technology are based on and encourage a fetish of spectatorship, because they offer the possibility of scene selection, freeze frame, slow motion and other tools which push the spectator out of the ‘passive’ cinema seat into a position of play and control. By extracting short film sequences from the linear narrative of the film, and by repeating them over and over again, Kilimnik exemplifies the concept of the so-called ‘possessive spectator’ of the digital age, whose desire to interrogate, possess and hold the elusive image generates a new form of compulsive repetition.

‘Heathers’ is viewed in a chapel-like room, a context which deliberately alludes to the funeral scene in the film. The sacred and reverential atmosphere of the installation environment, with screen as altar, also subtly and humorously points towards the worship of the Hollywood idol that so fascinates Kilimnik. This sense of kitsch morbidity and awe typifies Kilimnik’s use of exaggeration and irony, which have long been central to her artistic practice.

Karen Kilimnik (1955) was born in Philadelphia where she lives and works. Her film work includes ‘Emma Peel’, 1991, ‘Remington Steel’, 1995, ‘Kate Moss’, 1996 and ‘The Bluebird in the Forest’, 2005. Her main body of work involves painting and drawing, in which she combines old master painting style with images from popular culture and mass media. Since the late 1980s Kilimnik has created a series of installation environments made from everyday objects. Recent retrospective exhibitions include Karen Kilimnik at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and Chicago 2007/08. In 2007 her work was presented in a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which travelled to the Serpentine Gallery in 2007.

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Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present an exhibition of a new work by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. ‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’ is a gallery-scale presentation of a project which originated in book form as a commission by the Swiss media conglomerate Ringier AG, to customise their annual report and turn it into a work of art.

The 2007 Ringier annual report consists of 40 pages of business data, and 800 pages of adverts. The adverts have been carefully selected and scanned by the artists from hundreds of newspapers and magazines that could be found at any newsstand in any part of the globalised marketplace. The adverts cover the whole spectrum of the lifestyle of the contemporary consumer, ranging from sport to travel and from fashion to family life. The adverts are carefully grouped and each image is positioned opposite a purposefully chosen companion image, so that each double-page spread forms a kind of diptych, revealing through association or juxtaposition an aspect of our mass culture of consumption.

‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’ has the effect of a kind of visual encyclopaedia of late capitalism, a typology of the present which exists between sociological research and an aesthetic analysis of the everyday. The specific ordering of the adverts within the report, and their arrangement into instructive and often ambiguous tableaux, amounts to an impressivel testament to the power of the modern economic system and the ways in which goods and services define the modern self. ‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’ resists becoming a straightforward critique of consumerism; however, as Beatrix Ruf, curator of the Kunsthaus Zurich, notes: “Fischli and Weiss paired up 800 different ads and put them in an order that allows many interpretations – but tells no story.“

For the new gallery manifestation of ‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’ at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers Berlin, the adverts are arranged as offset prints on white paper, displayed on neutral, white painted tables and in the same order as in the catalogue. The experience of exploring ‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’ through the gallery space rather than in published form reveals different kinds of linearity to the visual story of modern life that is being told, and emphasises the encyclopaedic nature of the project. The work encompasses in 800 images something approaching the entirety of contemporary human experience; the title ‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’, meaning ‘Sun, Moon and Stars’, refers to a nursery rhyme and is concerned with the naming of things, and the process of identifying as well as classifying each object and experience in existence.

This fascination with comprehending the everyday has been a continuous motif in the work of Fischli and Weiss. Their work ‘Sichtbare Welt’ (1987-2000), a vast archive of nearly 3,000 photographs of the everyday and commonly observed, similarly revealed a concern to re-evaluate our assumptions about the world around us and was also presented in a variety of ways, including an artist’s book, a video installation and an installation of images on fifteen light tables. Each manifestation of Fischli and Weiss’s monumental documentary artworks offers different ways of accessing and experiencing the images collated. The gallery experience of ‘Sonne, Mond und Sterne’ presents a specifically powerful and unique opportunity to identify suggestive connections and relationships between the assembled adverts by physically navigating the work and constructing shifting maps of meaning through it.

Image: Karen Kilimnik

Private View: November 27th 2008, 6 - 9pm

Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers
Oranienburger Str. 18 - Berlin
Opening Hours: Tue - Sat, 11am - 6pm
Free admission

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