Kippenberger and the Virtual Surface

kippenberger heavy guy

heavy guy tate

heavy guy tate trashbin

Kippenberger, Taschen catalog, 1991, where the top image was scanned from:

Untitled, 1989/90...On page 140-141...18 out of a total of 51 color photographs of paintings which one of Kippenberger's assistants painted after reproductions in catalogs. The paintings are destroyed and put into three containers designed by Kippenberger. The original works consist finally of two prints and three containers.

Tate Modern website (where the bottom two photos came from--note unfortunate cropping of middle image):

Heavy Burschi [Heavy Guy], 1991, brings together many of the defining themes of Kippenberger’s practice, both in terms of media and its process of production. Kippenberger asked an assistant to make paintings based on images from all his catalogues, but he was unsatisfied with the finished canvases. He ordered all fifty-one paintings to be destroyed, but first had each photographed, reprinted to its original size and framed, exhibiting them together, with the remnants of the paintings in a skip, as a single installation.

Kippenberger plays with the idea that an artist is an isolated individual who makes autonomous objects. He frequently used assistants, but his decision to destroy these paintings throws the question of authorship into sharp relief. Even though the canvases were only produced on his instructions, they were still the result of someone else’s labour, making their destruction a vivid demonstration of the relations between employer and employee.

Kippenberger’s actions echo the heroic gestures of destruction and renewal that run throughout Modernism, particularly in the work of post-war German artists such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. With his familiar barbed irony, however, Kippenberger’s gesture is anything but an affirmation of the redemptive power of the artist. Heavy Burschi exposes the violence inherent in acts of destruction, emptying the gesture of its heroic connotations of cultural, political and spiritual rebirth. Instead of destroying the present to create a new future, Kippenberger creates a feedback loop. He destroys the paintings only to show copies of them, which then become yet another series of unique works, transforming the pictures, in his own description, 'into a kind of double kitsch.'

Note how the Tate curators dramatize and embellish the tale of the destroyed paintings compared to the matter-of-fact description in the Taschen catalog. Writers just love their little stories. Imagine encountering this work without a curator salivating to tell you what it means. There are paintings in frames. Whoops, closer inspection shows they're not paintings, but photos of paintings. Did Kippenberger paint them? It looks like his style, but they're a bit "off" from his usual lunacy--almost like an illustrator imitating Kippenberger. Well, what's this in the bin? Woah, ripped up paintings. Are these the same--? Looks like they are. Hmmm, now these photos are tantalizing me with something I know no longer exists. I study them more closely. Do they depict "good" (ie complex, tasty) paint surfaces? Impossible to tell, but they look OK. The idea of a tasty painting exists in my mind. Isn't that as good as an actual tasty painting? These kinds of questions and considerations are surely much more interesting than Kippenberger's relationship to "heroic gestures of destruction and renewal." Or the possibly invented story of the master tearing up the apprentice's canvases, which the Tate gives us as some kind of class struggle allegory. Curators: you can't live with them, you can't kill them.

Just ponder that sentence: "Heavy Burschi exposes the violence inherent in acts of destruction, emptying the gesture of its heroic connotations of cultural, political and spiritual rebirth."

Automatic Update Update

Recommended reading: Paddy Johnson's review of the "Automatic Update" show at the Museum of Modern Art.
Part One
Part Two
I was happy that 8-BIT the movie got included in the film roster, not just because I'm a talking head in it but because it represented something fairly fresh in the usually dreary world of "computer shows." Including Pi and Crash made no sense to me either (b. also questions those choices in the comments to Johnson's review, Part Two)
MOMA attempted to give the show some Web 2.0, social bookmarking juice with what Johnson calls the "inactive del.icio.us page."
Oh, well.
It's refreshing to see a blogger doing her homework and actually calling the curator and asking for explanations of some of the weird choices, even though the answers were evasive generalities. Johnson is asking for accountability, unfortunately in an era when there's been no accountability from public institutions for things like wars and murkily conceived exhibitions.

Jerry Hunt

Good article about Texas avant composer/performer Jerry Hunt by Michael Schell here. Didn't realize he'd died (suicide) in '93. Saw Hunt perform several times and he was always a trip. Here's a classic Hunt description of one of his pieces:

Birome (ZONE): Cube is devised as a reflex memory cabinet with transactional core: the mechanism used is item-element invariant and system transparent; the cube zone is a body-memory exerciser and operates as a continuous "other": a sexual surface trance derivative emulator. The interior surfaces of the cabinet serve as source skrying planes through access points using a system derived from the angelic tablets of John Dee; the core is a composite mannequin arrangement (homunculus) provided with interactive signature translators derived from a serialized variant of Rosicrucian chess (sigil) and is sensitive to participant skrying action. The participant/cabinet/core interaction is arranged in such a way as to cause the core assembly to generate response signatures translated as context codes along a binary interleaved multiplex transsexual spiral: the spiral contains embedded narrative whorls: each whorl generates a string of sound-image derivatives. Deep whorls (cores) use spatial reposition; continuant whorls (narratives) use temporal reposition. Sound and image sequences and stills are parallel threaded into the multiplex spirals.

The system uses an audio/video retrieval mechanism in the surfaces (monitors), sequence and stream interactive with the accumulative history of the participant/cabinet/core exercise. The mannequin artifact assembly was designed with the assistance of sculptor David McManaway.

Upcoming Performance at Galapagos

Hard on the heels of "Digital Political Time Lapse," a second Aron Namenwirth-curated event is coming up Oct. 14--an evening of videos and performance at Galapagos in Brooklyn titled "Abstract Horror." Spent some time this weekend thinking about/working on my 15 minute performance. The current plan is to DJ several of my tunes from the laptop, while an accompanying DVD of looping animated GIFs (converted to video) pulses on a projector in stately, hypnotic, obnoxious fashion. Much potential material has appeared on my hard drive since my last event so I'm in the process of culling that--right now I'm figuring thirteen GIFs at about a minute per, edited so each is broken into shorter segments playing at unpredictable intervals. Some of these look dramatic blown up to 740 x 480. Trying to pick songs and images that will read clearly and work reasonably well on any gear or sound system. But I've never "played" at Galapagos before so I don't know how this will look/sound. Feeling much better about this project than I did a week ago.