THE SOCIALITIES OF THINGS JORELLA ANDREWS s. 16-17 BRIEF AN D. OONA LOCHNER s. 18-23 EIN GEDICHT FÜR 5 KLEINE KONISCHE OBJEKTE BARBARA KAPUSTA s. 24-25 BIOGRAFIEN / BIOGRAPHIES Inhalt / Content Dinge und Dialoge

Dinge und Dialoge 02 03 s. 04-09 THINGS AND DIALOGUES CONVERSATION BETWEEN: BARBARA KAPUSTA, ROCCO PAGEL AND JENNI TISCHER s. 10-15 THE SOCIALITIES OF THINGS JORELLA ANDREWS s. 16-17 BRIEF AN D. OONA LOCHNER s. 18-23 EIN GEDICHT FÜR 5 KLEINE KONISCHE OBJEKTE BARBARA KAPUSTA s. 24-25 BIOGRAFIEN / BIOGRAPHIES Inhalt / Content 04 05 THINGS AND DIALOGUES CONVERSATION BETWEEN: BARBARA KAPUSTA ROCCO PAGEL JENNI TISCHER Vienna / Berlin, Fall 2015 J. T.: I’m pleased we could bring Things and Dialogues into Achim Lengerer’s space Scriptings after the project has been in development for a long time. The three of us have come together and the exhibition has emerged out of questions of our own artistic practices: questions concerning the points of contact between bodies and things, the representative functions of materials that are inscribed with specific meanings by the nature of their use and production, as well as how they then become legible. In my opinion, questions arise here about the differences of forms, the different surfaces that are provided, the interaction between form and function in everyday and art objects. When these can no longer be clearly distinguished from one another—alongside their similarities and differences—their status remains productively in limbo. One question that I would like to preface our conversation with is: How do we categorize things that speak for themselves and that provide an insight, for instance, into their production and origin, and those indirectly functional things that have the tendency to obscure our vision. B. K.: The ability to recognize the differences between things, or to recognize a thing as something, also depends on the viewer and user. It depends on their ability to see and comprehend as well as on the ability to put things into relation. How do we deal with the everyday objects that surround us— Dinge und Dialoge 1 Joan Didion, “Holy Water” (1977), in: The White Album, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979; quoted here from http://www. pbs.org/pov/thirst/ special_holywater.php [2015-11-18]. 2 See Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016. with technical objects—but also with the art objects we’d like to speak of here? A short text by Joan Didion comes to mind. In “Holy Water,”1 she writes about California’s water supply: “Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day. ‘Indirectly’ is not quite enough for most people I know.” This occurred to me because it exposes the processes and mechanisms of the water supply’s workings at the same time as describing the political and economic relations. Objects don’t simply appear, they are not suddenly just what they are. The technical object creates an associative milieu for itself. And the milieu could be the characteristics of the materials but it could also be the users. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon writes about mature and immature users. Whereas the mature mode presupposes an awareness of the functional schemata, the immature mode is suitable for the familiarity with a tool or instrument.2 There are then two sides—the objects that either obscure or clarify and our vision that either sees or doesn’t. How do we perceive the milieu that generates things and their evolution and not just their function? R. P.: It often seems to me in my everyday life in Berlin that as the vehicles of communication develop further and further, everyone—in a strangely formless universality—only encounters her/himself. I sometimes have the impression that hardly any immediate experiences of unfamiliarity, any unpredictable experiences of someone else are made today. But, in the end, a real dialogue is only possible between different/diverse persons and in the best case between persons who are conscious of this distinctness. Something manipulative, self-concealing might stem from a kind of intermediate level here. Contemporary technologies are clearly predestined for this. They filter some specific generality out of an even greater generality and then reflect this condensed version back at me, whereby they never allow me or someone else to have a say in things. The things that really touch me are precisely those that are addressed to me by someone else! A gesture sent in my direction (maybe I just happen to stand in its way) that decodes itself and possibly formulates and shows for me an experience, a thought, that it was carrying within it and elicits. On that point, I’d like to quote Franz Rosenzweig twice here: 3 “In a real conversation something happens; I don’t know before what the other person is going to say to me, because I myself don’t even know what I’m going to say; indeed, I don’t even know that I will say something; it could be that the other begins.” 4 “To have a worldview is good form. One would think that it would be the most natural and self-evident thing to get to see the world. But in reality one encounters parts of the world at most—things, people, events.” These lines of Franz Rosenzweig are fairly concrete. In his texts from the 1920s, he describes a real conversation as a completely open situation that is created only through the actions, that is through speaking, but also potentially through silence, not speaking or listening. It can not be predicted where it will go. In contrast to the idea of a “thing in itself” (the thing, the world, etc.), he writes that there are always certain parts of a whole that are not even remotely comprehensible, things that someone very specific directly meets in reality and that this individual can only react to them in his or her very specific way, maybe they are touched by it or passed over it carelessly. The being-directed-at-someone—of a picture, a text, an object, an action—doesn’t necessarily presuppose that someone has to physically see them. Many of the things that surround us and that we come upon originate from people who probably didn’t have a clear idea of us when they created them. We probably also use some things in a different way than what was intended and as such create a new meaning in this misunderstanding. The question to you, Jenni and Barbara is: When an artwork is used, viewed, touched, read or carried around in everyday life, it remains an artwork as an everyday thing, right? J. T.: Yes, I think that it can always be both and some of the objects in the exhibition make exactly this their subject in that they switch between commodities and art objects—like, for instance, Ulrike Müller’s Miniatures that can be worn as a necklace. But I also feel with the necklaces that their status remains openly communicable in contrast to many other commodities. I understand the concept of “milieu” from Gilbert Simondon such that one can only understand technological things in their wholeness: how form has developed in relation to its function or how the design envelopes the functional form so that other attributes can be communicated. For instance: “I’m not only helpful but I also feel good when you touch me and that makes you happy!” Everything belongs together and perhaps the legibility of the individual elements thereby becomes increasingly difficult or unnecessary (spoken from the position of the logic of the market). “Why does anyone have to know, where and how the device was made, what the conditions were in which it was made, and why it looks like it does?” But I would like to contradict one point and claim the contrary: Whoever 3 Franz Rosenzweig, “Das neue Denken” (1925), in: Mein Ich entsteht im Du. Ausgewählte Texte zu Sprache, Dialog und Übersetzung, Freiburg, Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013, p. 109. [All translations by SA unless otherwise noted] 4 Franz Rosenzweig, „Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand“ (1921), in: Mein Ich entsteht im Du, loc. cit, p. 47 f. Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel, Jenni Tischer 06 07 Dinge und Dialoge knows how to use the right tools, that is, who understands how something functions, is also mature. The digital surfaces whose function is predetermined and which hardly offer the possibility to perform outside of their programmed logic could also be understood as an intermediate level that so to speak hides the milieu. In my opinion this eliminates the difference of all contents since they are equated in their outer (“surface”) and inner forms (0/1), they can’t take on any other. The sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina5 understands computers and computer programs as “things-to-be-used” and “things-in-a-process-of-transformation,” since a continuous process of developments and investigations runs parallel and the machines are understood as being in permanent change through updates and versions. They are thus twofold: present (ready to use) and absent (objects of further study). Things are therefore not to be understood as solitary, isolated things-in-themselves but only as existing in the entanglement of people/thing/act. In its interplay of language, the object’s haptic nature and the viewer, Barbara’s reading performance addresses these everyday processes that are otherwise unconsciously taking place. B. K.: I like Rocco’s question: “It remains an artwork as an everyday thing, right?” For me it certainly does. But I wonder whether it’s naïve or productive to purposefully ignore this difference. I like things, objects that move back and forth between these ascriptions. They exist in a kind of hybrid condition. My own works are concerned with the possibility of being able to be touched — handled, shifted—and thus enter a dialogue with others, the public. That is a very simplified version of dialogue but again it includes the fascination with everyday life. With the things that surround us and with which we enter an exchange through their surfaces, textures and functions. The formation of things interests me. How they were created, what they are made of, and the history of their materials. These everyday objects, objects of daily usage, jewelry, carpets, which always existed in a relationship with craft and cultural manual labor. Kathi Hofer’s work, her Christmas decorations, refers to objects that come from the practical, everyday realm. Out of the traditions, custom and folklore, but especially from craft. The works refer to the human body—this I can wear, this feels good in my hands. I also see such physical relationships in some of your works, Jenni. Not only in the proximity of work that we do with our hands, like sewing or weaving, but there is also a sensation when looking at some things that leave an impression on my body. I remember the physical sensation I had from some of your objects in the exhibition Pin in mumok:6 I remember that I would have very much liked to touch the large and small pins, the heaviness that emanates from a cushion fully covered with needles or the movement of the ring that held a yellow ribbon. Ulrike Müller’s Miniatures can be worn as jewelry. The photos of these Miniatures also often include the wearers, sections of private environments. When looking at her carpets, which I recently saw at mumok,7 I thought: I could walk on that and if my feet were bare, then I could feel the fibers with the soles of my feet. From the enamel surfaces of Ulrike Müller’s Miniatures, I then come to the surfaces of Rocco’s paintings: I get closer and move away to understand their structure. The position of my body and my eyes in facing your works, Rocco, is always important. I bend and stretch and turn and see. What do you see? J. T.: What I see changes depending on the position I take and also on how much time I spend in front of the painting. What I see in Rocco’s paintings only develops with the duration of viewing, which is in diametrical opposition to the usually quick reception of images. In fact, there is no illusory foreand background through a representation of perspective in Rocco’s paintings. The experience of depth is much more that of time, which is due to the duration of the origin of the paintings. What I then perceive beyond its motives is that it is important what 5 Cf. Karin Knorr Cetina, „Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies“, in: Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 14, No. 4 (November 1997), p. 1–30. 6 Jenni Tischer. Pin, Baloise Art Prize 2013, mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Foundation Ludwig Vienna, October 18, 2014 until February 1, 2015. position I take—and I mean that in the figurative sense as well. For me, the viewing of the works thus also means a stretching, bending and turning in the spirit, a calibration of the inner eye. Katrin Mayer’s installation grants us a view as if with a microscope into the inner structure of quasicrystals, which, contrary to all mathematical logic, are not periodically synthesized, and she sets them then in a quasi-dialogue with the antiquated technique of lace-making. Through the attempted convergence of lace-making and Penrose tiling,8 there appear mistakes or rather spots in which this convergence fails. This Letter therefore can only be fully deciphered with a specific knowledge about traditional craftsmanship. The view into the insides of things manifests itself in the deviations that become particularly visible where the logic of a manual activity meets the logic of a mathematical formula and the logic of a molecular structure. In contrast, the perspective I take when viewing Daniel Heinrich’s Polaroids is one that is further away, more distanced and only through this distance can I perceive what he actually photographed. By that I mean the particular section, the exact construction of the picture, which actually formulates a contradiction: A Polaroid is in the first place a trial run, a quick way of capturing a planned picture. But Daniel’s pictures are exactly the opposite, they use the strict quadratic frame and the instantaneous possibility of examination as a challenge to make another image from its everyday situation. They are poetic miniatures that help the arrangements of things that make up a city—curbs, scaffolding, garbage bags, tree trunks lying about, a tray, tables—to speak. R. P.: I suggest that we now look into 7 Ulrike Müller. The old expressions are with us always and there are always others, mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Foundation Ludwig Vienna, October 10, 2015 until January 31, 2016. 8 A family of so-called aperiodic tile patterns, which allows for a plane to be covered without any gaps and without periodically repeating a basic pattern, discovered by Roger Penrose and Robert Ammann in 1973, published in 1974. the differences of surfaces. What about, for example, the surface of a lake (without goggles and an oxygen mask I must content myself with what can be perceived without aid)? This surface, welled up by the wind, shined on by the sun and the moon, reflecting its light and its overcast darkness, letting mist rise, churned by raindrops, is, so to speak, in dialogue with the sky. In the mountains it has a different color than in the plains, it has different dimensions and depths, which also determine the tones of the surface. In winter, the lake’s water is frozen, it’s frozen over, very smooth or ossified in waves. If it has heavily snowed and the snow evenly covers the banks and the ice, hiding land and water, then it might no longer be seen. Is the lake in spring, when the outlines of its surface reappear, a different one than in winter? Or is this “always different” precisely what constitutes the surface of the lake? In my eyes, what I’ve tried to describe with my consideration of the lake, the changing textures of its surface during the seasons, may be clarifying here. It makes a difference whether I’m standing on the bank or looking at a photograph or film shot of it. The photo and film shot are naturally both real views of the lake. When the waves curl on the surface in a film projection, it isn’t the lake that moves but rather the film images, and the glittering ice formations on the banks of a photograph will never thaw. B. K.: The procedure of examining, looking, being looked at or being spoken to is also something that happens everyday. It is a theme of photography, like in Daniel Heinrich’s Polaroids. In his work, I notice a more concrete view of the everyday. It’s poetic. “Dedicated to a lake” is the dedication he used at the beginning of a text about photography9 that you showed me Rocco. The small things are addressed, segments of 9 Cf. Daniel Heinrich, Photography in its Relation to Human Memory and Experience of Time, Department of Fine Art Photography, Glasgow School of Art, 1998. Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel, Jenni Tischer 08 09 our surroundings, interiors and nature. We looked at numerous pictures by Daniel and every selection that we made—and the one shown here is only one of many—demonstrates this view and this address. It’s about the relationship between the viewing and the thing, the dialogue between the viewer and what’s being viewed which again is looking back. I, no, we, assume that the things look back—not because they possibly have souls (they either do or they don’t) but rather because there is the possibility that they see. And because seeing is light impinging upon our retina. Light, which the things reflect. Ulrike Köppinger might suggest that we’re in dialogue with the things because we’re all made of the same thing: from the spirit that is underlying all things. In a conversation about her work, she says: R. P.: Daniel’s Polaroids are similar to 10 “I am indeed interested in who we are as bearer of our own history—our origins are inscribed upon us. [...] My focus has shifted to an exploration of the secret life of things.” […] “We are the stone.” drawings. You can see this quite clearly, for instance, in this beautiful Polaroid with the trees in front of a house façade in Glasgow that we are showing in our exhibition. It seems to be related to Carl Blechen, his sepia drawings Bäume und Häuser [Trees and Houses] in an Amalfi sketchbook.11 There, the subjects have become detached from the motifs and pan out in light and rhythm. But everything remains recognizable, the things Dinge und Dialoge 10 Ulrike Köppinger in conversation with Melissa Lumbroso; published on the occasion of the exhibition Ulrike Köppinger. I remember / Erinnerung, Sandra and Avram Berkson Collection, November 2015. 11 See the catalog Rosa von der Schulenburg (Ed.): Carl Blechen. Mit Licht gezeichnet. Das Amalfi-Skizzenbuch, aus der Kunstsammlung der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2010. and the places can be labeled through or with the aid of the things that were drawn and their formal relationships to each other. I see something similar in the Polaroids. I could very well say what things are visible there but they still cannot necessarily be ascribed to some concrete naturalism. They show something through the light, the moment (like a blinking of an eye, or here the shutter of the camera), through the selected section, frame (field of view). I see the drawings by Ulrike Köppinger very differently. She pauses in front of the object to be drawn just like the object itself, which she has taken from some other place, remains motionless. The rock she portrays is taken like a subject, a face in a classic portrait sitting. That can be seen in the drawing, i.e. the stone can be seen like the visage of a person. That there, opposite, doesn’t have to speak, it mustn’t answer any questions about ‘from where’ and ‘where to.’ The viewing and drawing of surfaces, their textures, is then a conversation, even if the rock decides to remain silent. I find the thought of a sign’s objecthood interesting in the jewelry and enamel works of Ulrike Müller, which I’ve not yet seen in the original. Not necessarily the promotional signs of the turn of the century, where these old decoration techniques were used to make it weather-resistant and durable. I’m thinking more about signs, shields, that are used for protection, defense, perhaps like an amulet. These emblematic signs could also be understood—like the noble coat of arms on shields in the middle ages—as an indication and identification of the affiliation of the wearer, and be used as such. The Christmas decorations made by Kathi Hofer could be a kind of votive offering. Time and space, for which the ornamental objects were made and determined, are fixed. The material and the design themselves would then be the formal articulation, the desire, that’s formulated in this manner. By reference to this work, one can also think about where the separation of the everyday and other days originates. This time structure originates in the Old Testament. The differentiation between work and feast days comes from this, which is why even different things were used on such days and had special arrangements (objects, rooms, clothes, jewelry). You save what was special for the feast day. Today this distinction seems to have been merged into a single indistinguis- hable monotonous activity and almost completely disappeared. Is that which is special, the festive, today really only some kind of spectacle, a performance or an event etc.? What is the difference of the everyday from other days? J. T.: For me, the everyday is also distinguished by the things’ constant repetition of use. They only show their resistance when I perceive their weight, hurt myself with them, let them drop and break, feel their temperature, weight and texture. It’s as if we are connected to the objects—especially to those that we possess—with invisible bonds. I am conscious of the permanent physical relationship of the things that surround me. But in many ways the relationship between things and people has shifted as well as the movement and meeting between them. Away from a space in which the things are, where we interact with them, towards a flexible space that is defined by the presence of a device that can connect to the Internet. It isn’t things that communicate, that are passed on, but placeholders. I think it’s good to face up to things and not to negate all objects, because that would lead to an only seemingly immaterial life, whose digital processes consume enormous amounts of energy, materials and labor without producing something that repels me and which exists next to me as a physically present thing. For my work, the individual objects—like sewing needles, metal fabrics, certain nettings or pins and nails—signify an access to the hidden process of the making and the making visible of the connections between things and bodies. sadness and depression. Barbara’s stones are quite universal things. Brought into their present form over a long time, they could be tools, jewelry or toys. The usage is the determining factor. At the very beginning of Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (USA, 1998), there’s a sequence where stones play an important role. One sees how they are collected on the rocky beach of the South Pacific coast. Then a child comes into the picture, which uses one of the stones like a pestle to knock on something or to crush it. Briefly after this, a group of children squat together there, very attentively and concentrated in a circle. A stone is lying in front of every child. More stones are rhythmically passed in the circle from hand to hand. They are set on top of the stones lying in front of the children, which makes a dry sound, then they are picked up again and are simultaneously passed from right to left. Music and conversation, the highest concentration of the children for each other. They listen carefully to the rhythmic chord progression, look at the choreography of their arms and hands, make sure that their concert doesn’t end. R. P.: I understand your works, Jenni, in a similar context to that of Kathi Hofer’s work and the beautiful wall craftwork of Katrin Mayer in her mathematically based playfulness. You re-introduce something existing that is supposedly abstract (in-itself or invisible), call it back, knot/knit it, make it part of the world. The needles can really poke you, the strings can be knotted—for and to what is irrelevant. Whereas, the sometimes ornamentally gestural forms remind us of the possibilities of free forms that come together almost like lyrical fragments. With your work, there’s no diagram to be followed, or a diagram whose absence might cause Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel, Jenni Tischer 10 11 THE SOCIALITIES OF THINGS JORELLA ANDREWS In his book, The Sculptural Imagination,1 Alex Potts reflects on the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, notably his writing on art in the 1960 essay “Eye and Mind.”2 The essay’s broader philosophical context was Merleau-Ponty’s life-long concern to disrupt the still-enduring power of Cartesian dualism by presenting both thought and vision as embodied, that is, as embedded and expressive components of a multifaceted material world. For Merleau-Ponty, then, this is not a world understood in then- (and still-) conventional empirical or positivistic terms. Instead, as the “new physics” has been teaching us for over a century, it is akin, for instance, to contemporary political theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter.”3 In “Eye and Mind,” as in earlier texts, Merleau-Ponty presents exploratory, painterly modes of seeing and making as paradigmatic for philosophical work understood as an ongoing quest to open up previously ignored, abandoned or indeed not-yet-constituted territory. Repeatedly, it is from within this necessarily ambiguous, incompletely-graspable nexus that he seeks to discover new positions from which to address real-life social, cultural and political urgencies. Indeed, Potts notes that Merleau-Ponty concludes “Eye and Mind” “with an intriguing evocation of the world that might come into view were one immersed in that intensified awareness of the materiality and temporality elicited by visual art.”4 More recently, writing not of the perception of art per se but instead of the modes of attention Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: figurative, modernist, minimalist. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. 2 3 4 Dinge und Dialoge 1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, edited by James M. Edie, 159-190. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Potts, op cit., p. 234. 5 Bennett, op cit., p. 17. that, according to her, are crucial for a renewed, non-exploitative understanding of human-non-human relations, Bennett refers to practices of “lingering” in those moments during which we find ourselves “fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality” that we share with them. These are practices, she continues, that evoke a “sense of a strange and incomplete commonality…”5 Dinge und Dialoge (Things and Dialogues) may be described as an artistic and a philosophical venture that has taken the form of two interrelated but differently materialized gatherings of artworks by Daniel Heinrich, Kathi Hofer, Barbara Kapusta, Ulrike Köppinger, Katrin Mayer, Ulrike Müller, Rocco Pagel and Jenni Tischer. One of these was an exhibition held during the winter months of 2015-16 at Scriptings, the Berlin-based showroom and publishing house set up by Achim Lengerer. The other exists, in a more permanent state, in the pages of this publication, created to accompany and reflect on the exhibition. And so, as we move between these two sites, what kinds of intensified awarenesses and strange commonalities might be coming into view? Particularly with respect to the complexities implied by the “Dinge und Dialoge” theme? For, arguably— despite our exposure to arguments and experiences to the contrary—long-embedded histories and practices of being still predispose us to regard the elements in this juxtaposition as ontologically distinct: “Dinge” aligned with res extensa and “Dialoge” more ambiguously positioned with affinities to Descartes’ non-extended res cogitans. In fact, within this context, a drawing by Ulrike Köppinger that is included in the publication but not in the exhibition comes to mind. In Sticks and Stones, finely observed sharp-edged rocks seem to be loosely bound together with fragile red 6 From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969, p 126. Cited by Potts, op cit., p. 229. With thanks to Professor Potts for bringing this quotation to my attention. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind.” op cit., p. 168. thread. They are presented in a circular formation reminiscent of so many traditional games played in school playgrounds—those age-old sites of bullying and coercion. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” so goes the children’s rhyme, “but words can never hurt me.” But in visual terms, the drawing also recalls Christ’s blood-dripping crown of thorns. And so, among the various things that this drawing may be doing, it is surely also testifying to the intractability and falsehood of the dualism of things and words and to our need finally to put it to death. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty put it, beautifully, in his unfinished book The Visible and the Invisible: […] language is not a mask over Being, but—if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and all its foliation—the most valuable witness of this Being, that it does not interrupt an immediation that would be perfect without it, that the vision itself, the thought itself, are, as has been said, ‘structured like a language,’ are articulation before the letter.6 There are, of course, other ways of expressing a non-oppositional understanding of “Dinge und Dialoge.” In what follows I will consider three proposals which, when brought into conversation with the artworks in the exhibition and in the publication, also seem to be crystalizing into a set of reflections on an additional, interrelated area of concern: the nature and vitality of work. Not only the work of making and of viewing— what Merleau-Ponty called “the labor of vision”7—but also the operations of the work of art itself. To recall Merleau-Ponty once again, these are all modes of articulation, a term whose etymology takes us beyond narrow conceptions of language into a more 8 “Articulation” is derived in part from the Latin articulus, diminutive of artus “a joint.” Associated meanings extend to “a small division” which may then be generalized to “item, thing.” 9 Kaja Silverman, World Spectators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 10 Silverman, ibid., p. 143. She is citing Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cezanne’s Doubt.” Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 9-24, p. 17. fundamental realm of formational/deformational activity: the craft of re-making reality by “bending” or otherwise redefining the “joints” [of being].8 Model One: Structures of Intercorporeality and Intentionality Remaining with Merleau-Ponty, the “Dinge und Dialoge” relationship may also be seen as an intercorporeal scenario in which non-human and human beings or agencies interact. Here, human participants may or may not experience themselves as centrally located. From a phenomenological perspective, this is a vivacious scenario structured by trajectories of intentionality that incline not only from humans to things but also from things to humans and from things to things. Within such intentional structures, viewers are not, properly speaking, in relations of imposition or control with respect to what shows itself. Instead, they have become “recipients of appearance” and “zones of openness”—I am now citing the last chapter of Kaja Silverman’s book World Spectators, entitled “The Language of Things.”9 The relationship, in other words, is a dialogical one. There is more. A particular kind of labor is now taking place, one that is made explicit, for Merleau-Ponty, in the work of such painters as Paul Cézanne. Silverman cites Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Cézanne’s heightened receptivity to the landscape that he habitually navigated with hand and eye, and paint and canvas, prompted him to say that it was “thinking itself in me.”10 Here, then, work is redefined so that it is not primarily about mastering or reshaping an environment that is envisaged as external to the worker in question. Nor are other quests for self-advancement or security at issue. Something altogether more intimate is in operation: A phenomenon that might be described as a “slow science” of bodily donation.11 In “Eye and Mind,” for instance, Merleau-Ponty describes painters as “lending” their bodies to the world, thus becoming specific, fleshy sites through which that world can find ways of articulating itself.12 As Silverman points out, such transactions may be experienced in terms of loss or divestiture; certainly they are encounters in which we cannot help but be changed. In Jorella Andrews 12 13 Dinge und Dialoge their traces may be found everywhere. For instance, we see them literally pressed and then fired into the materiality of Barbara Kapusta’s small, earth-hued ceramic objects (5 Small Cone-shaped Objects, 2015). Each piece, each surface, is unique as the fluidity and sheen of glaze—qualities repeated in Ulrike Müller’s tiny, enameled “wearable paintings” (Miniatures 2012 and 2014), albeit now in glowing color—encounter the porosity of fine, raw clay, marked here and there with the faintest of fingerprints. And yet, it is clear that the more resilient surfaces of tools have also helped shape these strange things whose sensible aspects keep transitioning between the realms of the handmade, the manufactured, and perhaps even the found, as if they were made long ago and have only recently come to light. Also of note are the ways in which Barbara Kapusta’s performances with these objects activate further, tender exchanges, as does the invitation to viewers of the exhibition to handle and thus connect with them. Dinge und Dialoge Bodily donations, moving between the handmade, the manufactured and the found within simple contexts of making, using, showing and sharing, are also evident in Kathi Hofer’s delicate mobiles (Christbaumschmuck 2012 and 2015). Here, natural and mass-produced seasonal objects and materials, like pine cones, pine needles and small red berries, Christmas tree baubles, metallic ribbon, and aluminum foil used in baking, have been gathered, remodeled and carefully composed by hand. Take, for instance, Christbaumschmuck, 2012, where foil that has 11 I discuss this topic at length in the final chapter of Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” op. cit., p. 162. 13 nated although diegetic sound may be allowed, and there is absolutely no editing. What these strategies bring to the fore, however, is an often overlooked capacity for openness that is inherent to the camera: a capacity— Lawson’s philosophical position has also taken visual expression in the medium of “video painting.” Video painting attempts to limit closure by eliminating all camera movement. Narrative is also elimi- been intricately pressed and twisted to form two mythical beasts—dragons?—precariously balanced in an abbreviated winter landscape. As such, these works embody the easily overlooked but often exceptionally inventive decorative gestures with which, individually and collectively, all of us punctuate time and celebrate transition in our everyday lives. Model Two: Hilary Lawson’s Openness and Closure Also resonating with the works in Dinge und Dialoge is a further, non-dualistic, dialogical understanding of human and nonhuman interactions found in the British philosopher Hilary Lawson’s 2001 book Closure: A Story of Everything.13 Lawson describes his ideas as a response to the chaos and confusion of a postmodern condition in which belief in neutrality and objectivity has been abandoned: “A sea of stories that cannot be fathomed nor anchor found.”14 Accepting this confusion, he takes as his philosophical starting point an undifferentiated condition that he calls “openness.” By way of closest analogy, he provides the example of “a random pattern of dots on a page.”15 He then introduces his concept of “closure:” Closure does not propose to return to the false certainties of the past. Instead, it offers a framework that accepts the limitations of the stories that we tell about the world and ourselves, but at the same time offers us a map when we thought no map was possible. In order to fill this map, we have to embark on a journey away from the familiar categories of our current thinking […] we have to find a different way of holding the world together. So, “instead of seeing the world as a thing, a universe whose truths we might unless disturbed—to remain in place, to keep “looking ahead” calmly, absorbing whatever passes in front of it. This also, of course, re-presents cinematic and indeed photographic seeing not as objectifying, for instance, but as receptive, patient and resilient. Examples of video painting are archived online at the Open Gallery http://www.opengallery. co.uk/. uncover through, for example, the procedures of science,” his book “proposes that we regard the world as open and it is we who close it with our stories.”16 Again Lawson refers his readers to the random pattern of dots on a page. Through the closures of our own ways of seeing, viewers activate our own images from this realm of unlimited potential. According to Lawson, these are not pre-existent images, discovered in the flux of dots, but are newly formed. So, for Lawson, things, including images—and not only things but also language and perception—are the outcome of closure. As such, he presents us with an enlarged and enriched understanding of what counts as material. Included are: “Sensations, the perception of physical objects […] shapes and colors, the sounds, smells, and tastes that provide the sensory elements of experience [as well as] the individual physical things that we identify, and the world in which they are placed.” “Then again,” he continues, “in the context of the closures of language, any unit of meaning, associated with a word or combination of words is material in this context.”17 Clearly, conventional dualistic tendencies have been evaded. “Dinge” and “Dialoge” are on the same side. For Lawson, modes, types, layers and intersections of closure are multiple and presumably infinite. But far from progressively limiting the range and scope of openness the opposite phenomenon occurs. “Material,” he writes, “is an enclosure that on the one hand takes place in openness, but which at the same time contains openness in the form of texture.”18 Thus openness can never be eradicated but instead remains “active”19 and becomes ever more extensive. And what of art? If, for Lawson, perception and language and thus also art-making are the outcome of closure, he nonetheless refers to art-making as a counter-normative 14 Hilary Lawson, Closure: A Story of Everything. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. ix. 15 Ibid, p. 05. 16 Ibid, p. x. 17 Ibid, p. 09. 18 Ibid, p. 08. practice that tends towards openness. Indeed, its orientations and temporalities are akin to what the nineteenth-century English poet Matthew Arnold called “quiet work:” One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee, One lesson which in every wind is blown, One lesson of two duties kept at one Though the loud world proclaim their enmity. Of toil unsever’d from tranquillity. Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose, Too great for haste, too high for rivalry […] Returning to Dinge und Dialoge, such sensibilities of openness and quietude, or something like them, seem to be at play in Daniel Heinrich’s somewhat faded and often blurred photographs of street-scene and domestic-interior fragments (in the exhibition, Déja Vu, Interior Space and two dark, untitled works, all 1999) and in Rocco Pagel’s almost monochromatic paintings Seestück (Seascape) and Fichten am Semmering (Spruce Trees in Semmering) both 2015. For despite their differences in terms of medium and facture, in each case there is, for the viewer, a sense of encountering apparitions that are developing slowly, as if of their own accord, within “fields” or supports that are the consequences of somewhat outmoded technologies: Polaroids in the case of Heinrich and, in Pagel’s works, layers of egg tempera, resin and then oil paint. In Fichten am Semmering, for instance, this juxtaposition of materials seems to be calling forth a spreading, stain-like entity that is only gradually resolving itself, at the top and bottom of the canvas, into the form of two schematic trees. Model Three: “Sacred Conversations” Finally, a third model is worth considering, 19 “In this sense, all material can be said to generate activity” (Ibid, 22). Jorella Andrews 14 15 Dinge und Dialoge which brings with it a shift of focus from the word “dialogue” to what would appear to be its synonym: “conversation.” Here, two factors are significant with respect to our explorations. Firstly, from an etymological standpoint the word “conversation” is not immediately or necessarily linked with speech. Instead, its origins may be traced to a late Middle English word meaning to “live among” and “be familiar with,” which is in turn derived from the Old French converser and from the Latin conversari to “keep company (with).” Indeed, the sociality at issue here is probably best exemplified in paintings originating in the early Renaissance: So-called “sacred conversations” (sacra conversazioni) in which saints—usually martyrs—are portrayed, gathered around a Madonna and Child. Examples include Pietro Lorenzetti’s early fourteenth-century fresco Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and John the Evangelist and Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria Altarpiece of 1505. A significant feature of these works are their modes of silent communication in which, as the scholar Rona Goffen has written, the “bond among the figures is not aural, but established by purely visual and psychological means, by their common spatial and emotional environment, by light, color, scale, by gesture and glance.”20 Significantly too, these works depict heterogeneous communities, indeed, impossible ones if taken from a natural perspective, since all the participants derive from different times and places. Nonetheless, they are shown sharing, indeed gently animating and enriching, a unified space. The “sacred conversation,” then, presents dynamics akin to those described by Jenni Tischer in conversation with Barbara Kapusta and Rocco Pagel. Discussing the perceptual shifts that occur as she stands before Rocco Pagel’s paintings, she refers to occurrences of durational seeing which not only contradict the high-speed perceptions that the conventional, contemporary image-world continuously pulls from us, but also open up for us experiences of depth that are, above all, temporal.21 But there is a further etymological dimension to the word “conversation.” For, it is comprised of both con (“with”) and versare, which is a frequentative of vertere “to turn.” This conjures up hinges, loops, reversals, choreographies and conversions, that is, (re)articulations and thus possibilities for change—should we notice them, and should we regard it as fittingly intriguing or productively risky to embed ourselves in their movements and perhaps be taken up by them. In Dinge und Dialoge, invitations of this kind abound, operating within and between things that have been worked in cloth and cord and yarn and paint and pencil and clay and glass and light. Take, for instance, Ulrike Köppinger’s drawings (Federn/Feathers, 2015) of once-attached, then air-born feathers which appear having circled gently downwards to their final resting place or Barbara Kapusta’s weightier objects, held, turned in the hand and then, potentially, scattered. Take Ulrike Müller’s pendants (her Miniatures). In the publication, one of them in shown singly, in photographic form, looped around a neck and almost buried under bright, ethnically-styled clothing. In the exhibition, three of them function collectively, threaded around nails hammered into the gallery wall, to create a new singularity in the form of a simple geometric fretwork. And then there are the dialogues of difference not only between the coagulated as compared to the swooping circuits of matter and line in Jenni Tischer’s constructions Making Code III (in the publication) and Making Code V and VI (in the exhibition) but also, in the exhibition, between the precision, sheen and illusion of speed evoked by Jenni Tischer’s pieces and the instability of Kathi Hofer’s mobiles with, as noted, their juxtapositions of handicraft and seasonal, kitsch mass production. And yet not only do these works share a profound delicacy and attention to detail, in Jenni Tischer’s pieces the practice of handicraft is again a central theme. Indeed, both Making Code V and VI are assembled around and within circular structures whose form and scale recall the wooden embroidery hoops that are used to keep fabric taut while stitching. In Making Code VI there are further material and structural allusions to textile-generating machines: a spinning wheel 20 Rona Goffen, “Nostra Conversatio in Caelis Est”. The Art Bulletin, 61:2 (June 1979) 198 – 222, p. 201. Cited in Andrews, op. cit., p. 154. and a circular loom. Then there are the intricacies of Katrin Mayer’s Forbidden Symmetries Letter01/II (2015) in which—yet again alluding to craft and cloth—a thickly interwoven and greatly enlarged portion of hand-constructed lace is layered over a backdrop of Penrose tiling. At first sight the lace appears merely to follow the forms outlined by the tiling, “join-thedots” fashion. But a reversal occurs when the impact of its robust materiality is felt, and the long history of this complex lace-making tradition is considered. Suddenly we see that it is in fact presented as a prefiguration; as an uncontestable embodiment of complex code made by comprehending hands. And so we return again to the collective insistence in Dinge und Dialoge on the status, intricacy, intimacy, and intelligence of craft in its varied forms, so long dismissed—as mere “woman’s work,” for instance. As such, the art works at issue here connect with a recently reinvigorated set of cultural and philosophical debates, present and past, centered on the new perceptions and possibilities that may be realized when the intercorporeal productions of handcraft, the technical, and the physical environment are attended to. 21 This publication, Things and Dialogues. Conversation between Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel und Jenni Tischer, p.06. and Dinge und Dialoge. Gespräch zwischen Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel und Jenni Tischer, p.05. Jorella Andrews 16 17 Lieber D., ich bin die letzten Wochen mit Deinen Bildern im Kopf durch die Stadt gelaufen. Vieles ist noch da: die Baustellen und die dunkel verfärbten Pissecken in den U-Bahnhöfen und, seltener, der abgeplatzte Putz unsanierter Häuser. Ich habe an Dich gedacht, wenn ich jeden Tag unter rosa Grundwasserrohren hindurchgefahren bin oder wenn sich im Vorbeigehen Bauzäune und Gerüste zu geometrischen Strukturen verbunden haben. Ich bin die Kurven von Zäunen und Bordsteinkanten abgegangen und habe mich in Bodenplattenformationen versenkt. Ein bisschen obsessiv vielleicht – irgendwann ordneten sich die Dinge wie von selbst in Deine quadratischen Rahmen. Wenn der Rahmen die Gestalt der Dinge zerschneidet oder sie mit benachbarten Formen verschmilzt, treten viele Muster, Reihungen und Anordnungen erst zutage, und die Aufmerksamkeit verschiebt sich von der Tiefe in die Fläche. Irritierend nur, wie schnell mein Wissen um die Dinge sich davon verunsichern lässt. Wie Du mag ich es, wenn in der Stadt das Stabile, Geplante und Geordnete auf das Wuchernde oder Zufällige, auf Auslassungen oder Rückstände trifft. Gestrüpp hinter strammstehenden Zaunreihen, Kaugummiflecken auf dem Beton, überquellende Mülltonnen. Ich glaube, deshalb gefallen mir Deine Grünflächenbilder so. Die Pflanzen, die in der Stadt eine strukturierende und gestaltende Funktion zugewiesen bekommen – Parkanlagen, Fußballrasen, Verkehrsinseln –, mögen häufig ebenso trostlos aussehen wie der Beton, den sie beleben sollen, und trotzdem tragen sie das Potenzial in sich, Ordnungen zu überwuchern und eigene herzustellen. Man muss nur das Grün als geometrische Fläche und die Blütenblätterbäusche auf dem Asphalt als Muster sehen. Oder den Blick in eine Baumkrone heben, damit sich vor dem Himmel Linien abzeichnen, die sich knäulen und wieder auseinanderstreben. Gegenlicht und Unschärfe, sie blenden Oberflächen aus und ziehen räumliche Dimensionen in Zweifel. Abstände zwischen den Dingen und zwischen dem Ding und mir verschwimmen, und der Raum zieht sich zum Ornament zusammen. Die reduzierte Sicht unterbricht meine alltäglichen Annahmen und Erfahrungen. Wenn man das Ding vor der Linse mal nicht ganz scharf stellt, gerät plötzlich etwas anderes in den Fokus: die Beziehung, die es mit seiner Umgebung unterhält, zum Beispiel; oder meine eigene Art zu sehen; oder die Dinghaftigkeit des Bildes. Und des Polaroids. Auch wenn es in der Ausstellung gerahmt und ins Passepartout eingepasst wird, will es doch eigentlich angefasst und benutzt werden. Der Papiersteg zum Festhalten, Wedeln, Beschriften, Herumreichen. Die knisternde Rückseite. Mehr Ding ist das Bild selten. Und gleichzeitig macht es mehr als andere Medien sichtbar, dass die festgehaltenen Dinge erst werden, sich entwickeln – und irgendwann auch wieder verblassen. So simuliert die Unschärfe Deiner Fotos eigentlich den Polaroideffekt: Nur ganz langsam heben sich die Formen aus dem Bild heraus, gewinnen an Kontur, je länger man sie betrachtet, aber werden nie zu endgültig umrissenen Dingen. Hab vielen Dank für die Bilder. Dinge und Dialoge O. Oona Lochner 18 19 Eins 2 3 4 5 Eines der Dinge liegt in meiner Hand – dunkel und schwer. Gegen meine Haut seine Oberfläche. Gedrückt, gelegt, gehalten, ich gegen es. Oh! [o ] wie in roh [Ro ] Ich spreche, und ihr könnt mir folgen. Ihr folgt meiner Stimme. Ihr versteht meine Sprache. Die Worte, die Sätze, den Sinn. Ein Trick Magie Zauberei Zwischen der Grenze der Körper meine Sprache, mein Sprechen. Meine Stimme Mein Aaaaaa Mein A Mein M Mmmmmmm Sssss Sch T Meine Stimme, tief und dunkel. Mein Atem, langsam und laut. Mein Sprechen … richte ich … An euch gerichtet ist meine Sprache, sind meine Gesten. An euch, an dich. Du, sage ich, und deine Haut trifft meine. Der Atem, den wir jetzt tauschen, ist warm, feucht, ah! Aaaahhhhhh (Hauchen) Hauch Dein Mund, deine Wange, dein Puls. Der Atem tauscht sich. Die Haut tauscht sich. Ich nehme deines gegen meines. Dinge und Dialoge Meine Zunge berührt meinen Gaumen. Die Lippen, gerundet. Ein halb geschlossener Kiefer. Lange Laute – Dein Blick gegen meine Haut. Barbara Kapusta 20 21 Meine Stimme, mein Atem, mein Kehlkopf, meine Lungenflügel. Mich bewegte, legte mich an sich. Um den Hals. Um den Nacken. Um einen Finger. Augen geschlossen, kreise ich um dich, du kreist um mich. Meinen Körper. Mein Gegenüber. Du siehst mich, ich sehe dich. Du siehst meine Oberfläche, ich sehe deine. Licht geht von deiner Haut zu meiner. Fingerglied, Armgelenk, Haut. Weich. Feucht. Du berührst uns, und wir berühren dich. Greif nach uns und stelle fest: Du bist weich und warm. Wir sind kalt und rau. Streiche über Glattes Streiche über Raues. Eins 2 3 4 5 Ich erinnere mich: Sie zogen mich zu sich. Meinen Arm, meine Finger. Meine Schulter. Langsam hob sich mein Ellenbogen, die ganze Hand griff dann nach einem von ihnen. Ich, ich selbst. Ich bin ein Körper. Wasser, Kohlenstoff, Stickstoff, ein organisches Ganzes, eine definierte Gestalt. Haut, Haar, Gelenke. Beweglich. Bewegt. Dinge und Dialoge Eines würde sagen: Ich erinnere mich, dass etwas über mich strich, sanft und langsam. Warm und feucht. Barbara Kapusta 22 23 Im Innersten der Dinge sind die kleinsten unserer Teile in Bewegung. Wusstest du das? Wusstest du, woraus ihr gemacht seid? Gefertigt, geformt. Grau, dunkel, braun schimmern, golden an Stellen, Sprenkel. Ich erinnere mich, dass ich ein Stück Ton formte, weich und feucht, mit meinen Händen. Es brannte und glänzend überzog. Ich gab es dir im Tausch. Musste lachen. Ich erinnere mich an deine Worte: „Dein Geschenk – ich nehme es an.“ Aus Stein, aus Ton, Schamott, modelliert, gebrannt, glasiert. Gemacht mit Händen, mit Werkzeug. Als Handwerk. Eines ist Talisman, eines trage ich, eines benutze ich. Dinge – gefunden, geformt, geschenkt. Dinge und Dialoge Ihr wart vermisst, verloren Seid erdacht und erträumt. Barbara Kapusta 24 25 JORELLA ANDREWS ist Dozentin am Institut für Visual Cultures am Goldsmiths College in London. Zu ihren Publikationen gehören unter anderen das Essay „Critical Materialities“ (2006) sowie die Bücher Visual Cultures as Objects and Affects (2013) und Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image (2014). In ihrer akademischen Tätigkeit beschäftigt sie sich mit den Zusammenhängen von philosophischen Fragen, Bild-Welt und Kunstpraxis mit Schwerpunkt auf Phänomenologie (insbesondere mit Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Andrews engagiert sich in den aktuellen Debatten im Bereich der Material Culture. OONA LOCHNER Dinge und Dialoge hat Kunstgeschichte und Cultural Studies in Wien studiert. Derzeit arbeitet sie an ihrer Dissertation über feministische Kunstkritik in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren. In diesem Zusammenhang beschäftigt sie sich unter anderem mit dem kritischen Potenzial kollaborativer Arbeitsweisen und mit den Überschneidungen von ästhetischer und politischer Kritik. Daneben schreibt sie Katalogtexte und Kunstkritiken, etwa für Texte zur Kunst und frieze d/e. JORELLA ANDREWS is a lecturer in the department of visual cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her publications include ‘Critical Materialities’ (2006), Visual Cultures as Objects and Affects (2013) and Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image (2014). In her academic work, she focuses on the relations between philosophical inquiry, the image-world and art practice with a particular emphasis on phenomenology (notably the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Andrews is also engaged with current debates in the area of material culture. OONA LOCHNER studied art history and cultural studies in Vienna. Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis on Feminist Art Criticism in the 1960s and 70s. She is interested in the critical potential of collaborative work modes and in the overlaps between aesthetic and political critique. She has written catalog texts and art criticism for Texte zur Kunst and frieze d/e and elsewhere. Biografien / Biographies 26 27 DINGE UND DIALOGE Dank an / Thanks to: Daniel Heinrich, Kathi Hofer, Barbara Kapusta, Ulrike Köppinger, Katrin Mayer, Ulrike Müller, Rocco Pagel, Jenni Tischer Friedrich Weltzien und / and Marcel René Marburger für ihren Beitrag zu / for their contribution to „Über Dinge und Undinge von Vilém Flusser“ in der Ausstellung / in the exhibition Dinge und Dialoge, 2016-01-21; Herausgegeben von / Edited by: Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel und Jenni Tischer Gastgeber / Hosted by: Scriptings Berlin / Achim Lengerer Gestaltung / Design: studio VIE Anouk Rehorek, Christian Schlager, Sagara Hirsch Lektorat deutsch / Copy-Editing German: Martin Gastl Jorella Andrews, Martin Beck und / and Katrin Mayer für das Gespräch und den Vortrag im Rahmen der Abschlussveranstaltung zur Ausstellung / for the conversation and the lecture in the context of the exhibition Dinge und Dialoge, 2016-01-31; Elisabeth Lamb, Callicoon Fine Arts, New York; und an die Künstler_innen der Ausstellung / and to the artists of the exhibition: Nachlass / Estate: Daniel Heinrich, Kathi Hofer, Ulrike Köppinger, Katrin Mayer, Ulrike Müller. Übersetzung / Translation: Shane Anderson Druck / Printed by: Remaprint Litteradruck Papier / Paper: Multicolor Mirabell, 350 g Chromolux 700, 100 g Munken Polar Rough, 90 g Munken Polar Rough, 150 g Cyclus Offset, 80g Auflage / Edition: 300 Unterstützt von / Supported by: Dinge und Dialoge © Barbara Kapusta, Rocco Pagel, Jenni Tischer, Wien / Vienna – Berlin 2015/16 Alle Rechte vorbehalten / All rights reserved Impressum / Imprint