Rapport nr. 3+4 2010-straight.indd - Norske Grafikere

Fig. 4 R.M. Installation View White on White,
multiple screenprints, 87 x 380 cm, 2003,
Galerie Zement, Frankfurt
repetitions of autographic marks. The hallucinatory
and kinaesthetic effect achieved
through this repetition seeks to mirror the
function of spectacular commodity fetishism
at the same time as calling into play
the haptic qualities traditionally associated
with the facture, the painted or drawn
mark, of traditional aesthetics.
I now turn to a discussion of the installation
of my exhibition. How do the discursive
and the factual/material intersect
at the level of the work, the space and the
viewer? What cultural modes of signification
are cited or performatively enacted?
Fig. 5 R.M. Installation View Grey on Grey, multiple screenprints,
overall dimensions ca. 261x304 cm, 2003, Galerie Zement,
Frankfurt
My chosen exhibition space was the Galerie
Zement in Frankfurt. A former industrial
print workshop, this space is now
used as a studio by a painter and an animator
who also both organize and curate
the exhibitions. The space is on these occasions
turned into a gallery. Unlike in their
earlier phase in the 1970s, when artist-run
spaces constituted a crucial element in the
institutional critique and commodification
of art, they now have to function in
a more competitive, enterprise-oriented
environment for artists. Today – despite
their differences – such spaces continue to
provide a semi-institutional framework,
especially for younger artists, to establish a
‘position’, to gain the necessary experience
and to win potential critical notice for further
‘career opportunities’. As an institutional
and architectural formation, some
such spaces exist as a hybrid between the
studio/workshop and the conventional
modernist gallery, or ‘white cube’, a term
which will be discussed in more detail
later. In light of the ambiguous and temporary
character of such artist-run spaces,
the notion of performativity seems especially
apt.
As already indicated, every work of art can
be considered performative – what Davey,
in reference to Heidegger, calls its ‘eventual’
character. But performativity understood
in a more narrow sense is an inbuilt
feature of my work. Prints function potentially
as conventional ‘pictures’, hung in
frames on the wall. Mine are mainly conceived
as multiples or as a series specifically
designed to derive their appearance
from the chosen site. Since minimalism,
installation refers to ‘a four-fold relational
dynamic between objects, their surrounding
space, its architectural frame, and the
body of the viewer, in which architectural
form [is] a given parameter of the exercise
(even when violated)’. 7
The ‘site specificity’ of installation to which
Peter Osborne refers in the quote above is
applicable to the gallery/workshop of the
Galerie Zement with its particular architectural
features and discursivity. This is
a narrower reading of the term as is often
currently the case. Instead of site specificity
as pertaining to a specific physical location,
it now more usually implies work
that occupies a broadly cultural space,
such as a shopping mall or other public
location (Kwon, 1997, pp.85-110).
Fig. 6 R.M. Grey on Grey, detail, transference effect Fig. 7 R.M. Grey on Grey, detail, front view Fig. 8 R.M. Virtual 9, detail, screenprint on nine perspex panels,
overall dimensions ca. 71 x 71 x 240 cm, 2003
In the case of the Galerie Zement, sitespecificity
entailed the successful negotiation
between the workshop aspects and
the gallery elements to ‘stage’ a semblance
of the codings of the white cube. Brian
O’Doherty’s term for the modernist gallery
space, has, especially since the publication
of his essays on ‘The Ideology of
the Gallery Space’ in 1986, stood as a critical
shorthand to denote the reactionary
exclusivity of art in its pristine confines
(O’Doherty, 2000). While it promises
transcendence from the outside world, the
white cube as gallery space ultimately disguises
its commercial nature. As indicated
previously, other forms of ‘accreditation’
have supplemented and, in some respects,
replaced the gallery space, but the white
cube – notwithstanding its many variations
– remains. O’Doherty’s erstwhile critique
has been subsequently revised. Daniel
Birnbaum, director of the Städelschule
and Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt, stated
in 2001 that the white cube ‘can be seen
as a structure of inclusion’ rather than exclusion
(Birnbaum, 2001, pp.187-93). This
seems wholly apposite, as the assumption
of the exclusivity of the gallery space and
the work therein appears to be based on a
falsely modernist assumption that art can
ever be ‘exclusive’ of cultural context.
Unlike most galleries, the physical characteristics
of the workshop at Zement
collided with the subtlety of the prints
themselves. The work, therefore, could be
said to demand the features and rhetoric
of the white cube. All the elements, such
as heavy electronic surface wiring, rough
and dirty stonework, and two rows of
striking heating pipes, conspired to create
a form of visual noise. Instead of treating
this visual noise merely as a disturbance,
a performative hitch, the major interruptions
were eliminated. Gaps in the stonework
were filled in and/or painted over
and so on. The prints were then displayed
in such a way as to articulate certain ‘noise’
factors. For example, the horizontal line of
surface wiring on the upper part of a wall,
ending two-thirds along the wall, was used
as the reference point for the format of the
work White on White. (Figure 4)
This series of single sheets consisted of a
particular set of multiple repetitions of
the ‘original’ marks that form the basis
of all my work. The particular pattern of
White on White was, as the title suggests,
printed in subtle white and off-white
tones, arranged in a vertical, continuous
row. The sheets were hung flush with the
wall, following its line to floor level and
then extended in a rectangular angle out
onto the floor into the space. The uppermost
horizontal edge of the sheets paralleled
the wiring above it. Its right-hand
top corner was aligned with the wiring
where the cable disappeared into the wall.
The disturbance of the wiring was integrated,
yet it also conflicted with the work.
Similarly, two rows of strikingly shaped
grey heating pipes – in the form of discs
around a central pipe – both accentuated
and disturbed the display of Grey on Grey.
This large wall piece (with a surface area
of 261 cm in width and 304 cm in length)
consisted of twelve repeat sheets and was
printed with a similar yet different pattern
from White on White. Aligned at its upper
boundary with a pipe running below the
ceiling, the sheets adhered to the wall and
then loosely curved around the back of the
pipes to emerge underneath them into the
floor space. (Figure 5)
Noise as excess of information – in the more
general sense – is commented upon by Mark
C. Taylor (2000) in his book The Moment
of Complexity, Emerging Network Culture:
‘Noise, it is instructive to note, derives from
the Latin word ‘nausea’, which originally
meant seasickness. When information becomes
the noise that engenders nausea, differences
and oppositions that once seemed
to fix the world and make it secure become
unstable. Lines of separation become permeable
membranes where transgression
is not only possible but unavoidable.… As
these polarities (between order – disorder,
organization – disorganization, form –
chaos) slip and slide, they eventually reverse
themselves to disclose the spectre of dynamics
that appear to be fluid’ (Taylor, 2000,
pp.100-101).
In the exhibition space at the Galerie Zement
the two architectural and spatial
codings – or polarities – ‘slip and slide’.
The workspace with its affiliated connotations
of honesty, reality and workmanship
conflicted with the supposedly neutral
white cube with its affinity with the spectacle.
One could argue that the citational
articulation of these codings through the
work only re-enacts or performs ‘capitalism’s
destabilizing, destructive dynamic
of dispersal and dissolution’ (Potts, 2001,
p.16). Yet, I would counter this assessment
with the argument that it is precisely the
task of art to make such operations visible.
The codings of the white cube which differentiate
the gallery space from ordinary
architecture then become the key to mark
this citation as a citation. Alex Potts in his
study on the historical continuities between
sculpture and installation has said:
Fig. 9 R.M. Virtual 9, installation view, screenprint
on nine perspex panels
‘[…] if installation is architecture, it is another
kind of architecture from the one we
experience on a day-to-day basis … . Installation
isolates and condenses particular
architectonic shapings of space and then artificially
stages these so one attends to them
in a qualitatively different way from the architectural
interiors one normally inhabits
…’ (Potts, 2001, p.17).8
How does the citational quality, the placing
and character of the work, affect the
viewer? The citational character of the
work holds true to the root of its Latin origin
‘to cite’ which comes from citare, ‘to set
in motion’, ‘to call’ or ‘to summon’. Hence
citation and interpellation, the summoning
of the subject, are closely connected. 9
Althusser’s term of ‘interpellation’ drew attention
to the ideological nature of subject
formation and the emergence of identity
through language and discourse.
‘I shall [then] suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or
‘functions’ in such a way that it “recruits”
subjects among the individuals … or “transforms”
the individuals into subjects … by
that very precise operation which I have
called interpellation or hailing, and which
can be imagined along the lines of the most
commonplace everyday police (or other)
hailing: “Hey, you there!”’ (Althusser, 1969,
in Du Gay, ed. 2000, pp.31-38)
The citational quality of interpellation is
obvious in this much-quoted passage of
Althusser’s definition of his concept.
What particular quality did this ‘hailing’
assume in my installation? The exhibition
at Zement had aspects that are already
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