When the figure dissolves, space and time
unravel to fill its void. The rupture it creates can displace
memory and restructure evidence of past existence. In absence
of the figure, the formal properties of color, composition and
form gather strength to illustrate Abstraction’s drive to
disembody. As onlookers of the transition, we lend personal
history to the newly cast forms in an attempt to fuse a
dismembered past to the present.
Visual artists Richard
Aldrich, Mark Grotjahn, Sergej Jensen, Thomas Kiesewetter, Gedi
Sibony and Katja Strunz fold time and space in exciting new
ways. They represent a rising group of art makers who work
outside the shadow of the figure. Bearing casual resemblance to
Russian Constructivism and Modernist mark-making, the surface
of their work carries the patina of abandon, locating its point
of creation in an unfixed time and place.
Melancholy befits the muse
of an object suspended in time, and though signs of an
uncertain decay gild much of their work, these artists enact a
modern alchemy of aesthetic and temporal transformation.
In peeling back the layers of recent art history they
reveal new directions in art making. Through a variety of
mediums and
techniques, their unique brand of gorilla
formalism recasts the discarded matter of Modernism’s
past and propels it into the contemplative now.
—Michael Clifton
Stalker Trish Goff by Richard Kern
Thomas Hobbes asserted that memory was
little more than the gradual degradation of the experiential,
the slow transformation of the moment from physical truth to
psychic necrosis. The spatial swell that inevitably rests
between the now and the future, between you and me, will act as
a force of annihilation; it will swallow, brutalize, bury,
dissolve, dismember. As sensation flees the body and denies the
evidence of contact, our cognitive centers fight for
reconstruction by suturing together the fragile, threadbare
remnants of fact. The ‘Frankensteinian’ product
that results, what we collectively refer to as
“memory,” is little more than a dream constructed
of disparate parts reconstituted to bear witness, to testify
that love and childhood and trauma and death are, in fact,
real, and not simply beautifully executed sleights of hand.
There are, however, those
apparatuses that facilitate the transmogrification of moment
into object, apparatuses that work toward a denial of the
violence endemic to temporal progression. The Shroud of Turin,
for example, is said by believers to bear the transposed image
of a crucified Jesus; it stands as evidence, for some, of the
physical world’s potentiality to stall the moment, to
trap time within space. Faith and vision are here united across
a shred of rotting fabric, and love and the promises of
eternity are finally held hostage by the material world.
I have a roll of film full
of photographs from the first night we met, and although I have
considered developing the images, I will instead keep them
safely locked inside their plastic tube, protected both from
the devastation of light and the failure of my memory. What I
mean to say is that as the impact of your body is gradually
absorbed deeper by my own until it inevitably slips from my
senses, I will let my image of you fade, the contours of your
face dissolve, and the color of your eyes weaken without
resistance; I will let you go, but only for the moment.
Distance contracts even as it expands, and every movement away
brings you back closer to the beginning, closer to me. I let
you disappear only so that I can have you new once more, and I
forget you for the unfathomable pleasure of remembering, once
our circles cross again.
SERGEJ JENSEN
The Shivering Man, 2003
Acrylic on linen
140 x 140 cm
Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York and
Galerie Neu, Berlin
Delete/ How to Make a Perfect Ghost
When my brother was in sixth grade, he
told me that our neighbor put on nine pairs of sunglasses and
looked into the blackness of a full solar eclipse not realizing
that the plastic that shielded him from the invisible light was
insufficient, and that his retinas would be seared, his vision
permanently damaged. I imagine that when he closed his eyes
after staring into the sky that he could see the phantom
outline of a gradually disappearing sun, a slow black plate
moving in over the afternoon like it was finally the end of the
world. I bet that picture still lives, imprinted on the inside
of his eyelids in electric shadow when it’s dark and
he’s alone, and I bet he knows better than anyone
how easy it is to make a perfect ghost.
The drive to deny death
essentially descends from an irreconcilable narcissistic
impulse, and the anxiety related to the premature burial was
symptomatic of the fear that the individual can be much too
easily erased, replaced, or forgotten beneath the weight of the
earth. The inaccessibility of the buried body functions
precisely as the source of its desirability, and this is doubly
so when experienced in tandem with questionable mortality. One
might still locate warning bells resting atop graves old enough
to remember a time when death was an uncertain event; these
objects remain emblematic of the drive to recuperate, to
rediscover, and to rescue that which lies behind the opacity of
the screen. They remind us that the deleted body retains its
potential for action, that the depth of the grave is not vast
enough to deny the peal of a desperate call for exhumation, and
that love, above all, has an inestimable capacity to
trigger the spectral return.
Mark Grotjahn
Untitled (Yellow Butterfly Over Red), 2004
Oil on linen
48 x 38 inches
Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York
There is a photograph of my grandmother
that was taken in 1934, when she was sixteen. Though her charm
and beauty are obvious, immediate, the allure of the image
rests in the less visible qualities of a gaze that casts her as
shy, young, and clearly in love with an invisible photographer
who was almost certainly my grandfather. It is this image that
acts as the visual point of reference for my love of her, a
picture of a girl now much younger than me whom I never knew, a
girl whose face is slowly dissolving, disappearing into the
immateriality of a ghost-world, which somehow acts as a
surrogate for the woman I knew her to be. I know that this girl
was never my grandmother, just a heartbreaking stranger staring
into her lover’s eyes across space and time, but
it’s quite simple to find myself in her gaze, easy to
locate my own image reflected back through the paper.
My grandmother died in her
bedroom, and one day at some point in the following weeks, when
my mother began clearing out drawers and cupboards, sifting
through the endless layers of her parents’ past, an
undisturbed music box on the other side of the room began to
play. For a moment, this box became my grandmother—the
weight of the jewelry it held mirroring the useless weight of a
small, abandoned body—as though the simple union of
photograph and tangled wreckage of necklaces could result in a
reunified person, the marriage of ether and object. It is in
this way that the incidental aspects of one’s life become
the sign of that life, how a tire track on the highway becomes
a permanent site of grief, how one photographed moment or an
impossible knot of unimportant jewelry can become you for the
rest of time. You will be re-materialized through your secrets,
made whole again by vehicle of all of those things that you
never intended for anyone else to see, and from this there
is no escape. When you slip into silence, just remember that
only your breath goes with you; your echo, the transparent
double, remains.
Katja Strunz
Zitelose, 2005
steel
361 x 147 x 26 cm
Courtesy Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin/
Photo: Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin
team work Sam Bean (Iron & Wine) interviews Joey Burns
(Calexico) on music and their collaborative album
uncover Overview on Colorado based musician David Eugene
Edwards
tribute A style tribute to the Black Panthers
pass the buck Collaborative presentation of Andros Wekua by
Rita Ackermann
Once I heard that if there was ever an
earthquake in New York City, the subway tunnels would snap like
tubes of glass, just crack and collapse at some arbitrarily
unlucky point, everything on either side sliding, falling
toward a center of catastrophic gravity. I imagine how clear
and empty some parts of those cars would look, evacuated of
both material and purpose, clean and free until you reached the
point where everything collected in unrecognizable heaps of
black excess. These points would be monuments to how the
forward-bound trajectory is potentially subject to a
devastating, though rare, failure: time, although generally
interpreted as the ultimate aggressor of the material object,
can in fact crumble under the weight of space. Someone would
search the ruins with a flashlight, direct a stream of
concentrated light over surfaces that were alternately exploded
or compressed, violated by the impact, and sift through the
wreckage looking for hidden glimmerings: watches, wedding
rings, photographs, empty baby strollers, you know, any kind of
proof that something human lies beneath the vast annihilation
of the wasteland. Decay is a promise that I can make to you,
entropy is the most enduring gift of nature, but don’t
forget that destruction simply veils an endless collection of
moments, that damage is always
synonymous with existence.
GEDI SIBONY
Untitled, 2003
Hollow-core door, sandpaper, cardboard,
paint, aluminum tape
30 x 60 inches
Courtesy Canada Gallery, New York
insider art Exclusive interview with Berlin based artist
Jonathan Meese by Felix Ensslin and Sue de Beer
Jacques Lacan identifies the “mirror
stage” as the moment in which the individual is able to
integrate his psychic and corporeal realities, the second in
which self-location congeals through the illusion of a
reflected (and unrefracted) image of the seemingly
“whole” self. The phantasmic collision of
interiority and exteriority offers us a glimpse into the
impossible world of unification, triggering a desire to
identify the inaccessible reflection as a perfect replication
of the self. Love, as it turns out, is simply an extension of
this impossible and inconclusive circuit, and the drive to
locate our double in the remote other will ultimately prove to
be a futile, though compelling pursuit. Just as the space that
exists between the mirrored image and the subject, between the
copy and the original, evades absorption, there remains (by
necessity) an unsealable hole between the self and the object
of desire. In an attempt to re-create the perfect illusion of
wholeness generated by the mirror, we look to love, to the
other, not wanting to realize that we cannot be filled by that
which we cannot reach.
Should the drive to reach
the other overwhelm our understanding of desire, there is one
option that presents itself. Becoming the other, though not
typically recommended, is one means of rupturing the divide
that excludes us from full contact. Should you choose to take
this route, you will become the shadow, the replication of the
object of desire, and as such, you must be appropriately
prepared to watch who you were disappear forever; you must
dissolve in both space and time. If you assume your role as the
dark phantasm, the unreal mirrored image, it is our suggestion
that you annihilate all evidence of your former self that
retains the potential to deny your new selflessness. This is
the only way to ever ensure full contact.
Richard Aldrich
Untitled, 2003
Oil and wax on panel
11 x 13 inches
Courtesy Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery, New York
… watch the numbers fall farther and
farther away from me until it feels like I was never even there
in the first place, but that’s the trick about distance,
I guess. You just disappear into it. There are ways to save
yourself, though, ways that will keep you from dissolving in
space or vaporizing in time, ways to make sure that you have
some armor so that people will know that you’re real, and
ways to adjust your internal odometer so that it rolls backward
toward the start, instead of forward toward the end.
That’s what’s always scary—knowing that
progression isn’t really bringing you anywhere except
farther away from the place where you started.I used to have
these complicated fantasies about making a time capsule and
burying it in the backyard, loading some perfect metal box with
fake information about myself so that I could impress someone
who hadn’t even been born yet. The point of it was that I
was looking for a way to be safer, to guard myself against the
moment when the miles shifted to an uncomfortable number that I
couldn’t turn away from, and I knew that the only way
I’d ever be able to stall time was by sealing it up and
hiding it in the ground. What’s weird is that even though
I never did it, once in a while I have this vague feeling that
some kid living in my old neighborhood is about to find it, and
it makes me nervous because I feel it’s not time
yet—I haven’t gotten deep enough into my numbers
for that second I saved to be dug up and resuscitated. What I
really hope is that the time capsule I never buried stays
hidden forever, that no one ever finds it by accident when
they’re ripping down the house or putting in a swimming
pool. I just want it to stay where it is, the biggest secret I
ever kept hidden inside its metal box, safe until my numbers
return to a perfect line of zeros.
Thomas Kiesewetter
Untitled (green), 2004
Steel, paint and wood
85 x 56 x 63 inches
Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles
connection A conversation between film makers Gaspar
Noé (Irreversible) and Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s
Nightmare)
Michael Clifton
New York based, occasional curator/writer
whose recent exhibitions include ‘Culturecounter’
at Gavin Brown Enterprise and the gothic inflected
‘Scream: 10 artists x 10 writers x 10 scary movies’
which traveled from Anton Kern Gallery to the Moore Space in
Miami. As a co-conspirator of Maurizio Cattelan’s
The Wrong Gallery, he has organized projects with artists Gedi
Sibony, Cameron Jamie and Philippe Perrot among others. Along
with Jamie, he has conducted interviews with artists Torbjorn
Vejvi, Yoshua Okon and Monika Sosnowska for the supplemental
Wrong Times publication. Over the next month, Clifton can be
found buried under back issues of Artforum, Frieze and Artnet
as he prepares to write the ‘Art and Art
Exhibitions’ compendium for the 2005 edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Alissa Bennett
Writer, has contributed texts to
publications such as “Frozen Tears,” and has
written critical texts for numerous shows and exhibitions. Her
work can likewise be found in video artist Sue de Beer’s
pieces Hans Und Grete and Disappear Here. Miss Bennett
continues to contemplate the implications of completing a novel
(tentatively entitled And Distance Shifts) and allowing it to
remain a ghost by avoiding the process of publication. Bennett
lives and works in Brooklyn.
perspective Interview with Imitation of Christ’s Tara
Subkoff, followed by fashion images by Richard Kern
Andros Wekua inspired collages by Rita
Ackermann
