PHD, 2018 in doch bitte aber; FABRIKULTURE, Hegenheim

The E for EVERYDAY as a defining and tuning moment strongly linked to and embedded in an identity-building process. A practice that takes place on the kitchen table, or that can be extended to the rear garden or the nearby woods is maybe better described as a pre-studio practice than one that is beyond the need of a studio.

If C for CURATING is actually understood as not taking care but as selecting artists or works then the artist obviously participates in this as well. Decisions and choices are made from the first moment. These decisions can be enforced or be elective, but they are nevertheless consequential to what is possible or simply not on the plate for the day.  Selection parameters need to articulated in order to decide which idea/intuition/research perspective should be granted further attention and followed up on. A certain level of reflection on your own practice is essential as the future product/object or concept needs to relate to and will be understood in the context of the overall production.  Understanding an existing context can be acknowledged as a contemporary moment, so can reproducing certain historic contexts. Which is relevant at a given moment?

The P for PUBLISHING very often does actually mean widening the audience through a more widely distributable platform or offering.  An idea is in its first moment be overseen by the person having it, but it’s usually through an instigated process of reflection that a thought reaches the level of being such. Picking up a hair band from the ground of a shopping mall is at maximum an impulse or just something you do out of pure curiosity. Only if this impulse is made into a routine— by deciding to pick all hair bands on the ground for years on end— does the initial moment eventually qualify as an idea. The next step strongly depends on a context where such an act can read in as a relevant concept, such as an art context.

In general a concept of COMMUNICATION demands a receiver that witnesses the act itself or who is confronted with a less immediate representation, a documenting image or just a displayed collection of hair bands. To differentiate the materiality as specific, the viewer needs to be able to make certain observations. The viewer needs to be a reader that understands grammatical moves in an aesthetic language. Or at least the impetus to want to get why is crucial for an aesthetic understanding. Agreeing on the encounter is the baseline for considering a work’s relevance. This is a contract between the person who prepares a defined materiality to be experienced, and a wide range of institutional, social, cultural, spatial, and temporal factors.

An artist’s E for ECONOMY 2 asks what are the actual means for production and distribution at a given moment. How much can be invested in and beyond prepared scenarios for supporting the making and presentation of work? How sustainable is a practice, not only financially, but symbolically, and just in terms of life energy? How much money do you really need to spend to create a set when there’s so much material that is ready to hand? Does an artist need to pay for a space or are their other forms of connection and other possibilities for exchange, other forms of valuing art?  Buying into a discourse and making yourself knowledgeable about relevant texts and surrounding positions is less pecuniary but it’s still an investment that needs to be paid in time.

CONSEQUENCE is relatively easy to understand in relation to form. A sculpture out of a toilet paper roll can represent a giraffe, but it will probably still keep some elements of its former fact of being a toilet paper roll (assuming it is not just mashed into pulp). But why would you pulp a toilet paper roll anyway? It is not newspaper!

S for a SELF or THE self: a very complicated term, particularly in reality. Already, finding a place for the self in the company is somehow troubling. Considering that many art students are in the best case just on their way to adulthood might make it difficult for them to understand the self, not only regarding themselves, but also in a more general sense. Simplification helps. They can use the example of artists with strong imaginative personae. They can just invent a character who takes care of their artistic production. Often this character may even replace the self as such. This NON-SELF can very much work as advertisement for the company’s creations. But beyond the storefront or shopping home page, the company’s culture can become smitten and influenced by that NON-SELF. The responsibilities of each floor can be outsourced to such an invention and the possible consequences may be happily applauded.

D for DUBBLE FLOORING: My understanding of this basic parameter of aesthetics goes back to an exhibition I saw in Kassel at the Museum Fridericianum in 1993. The group exhibition Nachtschattengewächse featured a major installation by Franz West. The work was both a studio setting but at the same time a presentation of other artist’s work that had us guessing in this scenario. West marked the studio or interior setting through furniture works. But at no point was he trying to represent actual studio. The couch and table were standing on a  a double floor, which made it remarkably clear where we are not. Art does not need the totalisation of suggested realities, nor does artistic research as one of its fundaments. They sketch out, signify certain elements, that in their addition become a certain sum that can be then read as a “Studio”.

The relative S for STABILITY of these kind of promises can be easily forgotten when a certain success allows the artist and its company to super-realize reality and operate as a theater of conviction. That’s when they forget that the essential point of an aesthetic contract is that the audience is still an elementary partner in the contract.