EIN BILD ROMAN STÜCKEN A Pictorial Novel In Pieces - Captain ...

Jürgen Kisch recounts the slow demise of a frog caught
in a preserving jar in eight different shots (Mme Camargo
#1-8, 2010)—a dramaturgic series that resolves the action
into a sequence of jump cuts. Stephan Dillemuth’s
three-part series on paper Gazelle als Braten #1–3 (Gazelle
as Roast #1–3, 2010) moves in a similar direction. In this
case, however, the story of a fairly cruel death—a monkey’s
malice lands the turtle Gazelle on a barbecue—is
heightened by the transformation of color into black and
white, of figuration into abstraction. The poor animal’s
life is quite literally snuffed out, until it is finally no more
than a dark and shapeless lump.
Laconically drastic depictions can be found all over the
exhibition. Captain Pamphile is full of the sly humor of
scoundrels and spectacular visual productions, including
violent scenarios with a high body count. Animals are
court-martialed and shot, plucked, starved, and grilled,
people are thrown into the sea, stabbed to death, or die
as victims of the colonial age’s greed for profit; there is
no escape from the logic of the commodity. But the exhibition
repeatedly also breaks free of the limitations of
the narrative—by connecting it to contemporary social
and political issues (state violence and police terror in
Ulrich Emmert’s work, Dubai in Thomas Ravens’s) or to
everyday life, as in Christina Morhardt’s Affe und Kakadu
(Monkey and Cockatoo, 2010). This collage of writings
and black-and-white copies of the artist’s own drawings
performs a Sex Pistols-style appropriation of a sentence
from Dumas’ novel (“God save our gracious king”) as
a punk slogan, spinning it into a subjective and freely
associating piece of ‘gut-spilling writing’—the textual
material has been taken from a website that solicits
anonymous rants. Other works explicitly acknowledge
their literary connections. In Andreas Selzer’s ink drawing
Gazelle, Jacques I. und die Karotte (Gazelle, Jacques I,
and the Carrot, 2010), the original text is a separate and
yet integral component of a teeming and highly detailed
all-over, whereas Stefan Thater reduces the writing to
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Esther Buss – Pictures don´t sleep
an archaic remainder. In his sketch-like work, which invokes
the abstract vocabulary of modernism, only the
wavy lines scratched into the picture, which also limn
the sails of the Roxelane, are left to suggest a distant relation
to the novelistic source. Yet text and its graphical
presentation not only occupies a distinct position
in several works, it also functions as an equally visual
and dramaturgic element within the exhibition. The verbatim
quotes from the novel affixed to the walls look
like intertitles fading in and out of the visual narrative.
These poster-like guideposts appear now in pale, vintage-like
designs, now elaborately applied to run around
corners, as though to defy their instrumental function
as informational copy spelling out an overarching narrative.
They lend a steady rhythm to a walk through the
show, otherwise an experience balancing on the edge
of chaos, and connect the individual works into a sort of
expansive tissue.
With its sprawling urge to expand, with its references to
genres, visual styles, and narrative techniques, to history,
politics, and everyday culture, Captain Pamphile transcends
the bounds of the customary group painting show. This
pictorial novel in pieces instead takes shape as a network
strung through three-dimensional space that is growing
in the most different directions, branching out, generating
new interconnections, and becoming ever more
fine-meshed as the authorial ‘collective’ grows. Captain
Pamphile is a ‘movable’ pop-up pictorial novel whose
story has not been told to the end by a long shot, featuring
countless footnotes, links, and hypertexts—a seavoyage
of gleeful buccaneers, a cruise stretching to the
limits of oversteering.