Edited, for publication in Germaine Koh Works. (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2005)
-----------------------
Feigned Casualness
Gerrit Gohlke
A few questions can still be asked of contemporary art, such as: What is
it good for? Does it really mean what it says? How much patience should we have
with it? And how can one escape it?
For as much as one would like to distance oneself from art-haters of all
eras, one still cannot shake some fundamental doubts about the disproportion
between input and effect in exhibition events that are increasingly staged as
entertainment. The more installations and videos have to be presented for mass
effect in order to increase audience size, the more artists, who have to
satisfy the public’s greed for novelty in an ever-more-volatile art market, are
also tempted to theatricality. But the theatricality of staging turns the
sobering complexity of art into a comfortably consumable amusement-offer. At
the risk of increasing the ever-widening gap between a confusingly fragmented
technological society and a pathos-addicted art system, artists therefore
provide ever-more-digestible forms that sacrifice the problems and awareness of
the rest of life to a suggestive punchline. Art risks the fate of providing
simple truisms to compensate the public for the ungraspable character of the
world. Under these circumstances, the abstract consumability of the Minimalism
of the 1960s, the reduction of form to a purified geometric clarity, has
changed into a minimalism of instantaneous effect. This immediacy clears a path
for impatient perception, but isolates art from the realities of action and
decision in the environment from which it originates. Art is endangered by the
banality of glamorous façades with half-baked content. Instead of the theatricality
of rapid effect, it should reflect upon itself and cultivate the delaying
contradiction. The minimalism of ready immediacy might then be curable through
the minimalism of the well-considered interruption. Precisely this is Germaine
Koh’s program.
At a time when visual artists are responding to the lack of meaning in
museum-like amusement sites by embarking on an exodus into the urban
environment, Koh is conspicuous precisely not
for the transience of her interventions or the simplicity of her objects, but
for the re-dedication of the conventional theatricality that she transports
from the exhibition system into public space. There, for example with Homemaking, she leaves behind spider
webs of string fully as large as the viewers’ bodies and turns passers-by into
extras of a horror fairytale that not so much celebrates the beauty of the
choice of ephemeral material as it stages unnoticed niches in the cityscape.
They thus become a guide to undefined interstices, half playing with threat,
half symbols of impermanent housing, whose narrative significance is left up to
the public to decide – and the public’s understanding of the theatrical
offering always remains individual. Passers-by may fulfill an art-historical
duty by classifying the spider webs within the iconology of transience or feel
their social consciousness shaken by homeless ways of living. Whatever the
viewer projects into Koh’s precise stage setting is the calculated effect of
this art. It quickly leaves recognizable indicators, whose identification,
however, explains nothing, but stubbornly demands interpretations without
pre-determining them.
The appeal to the viewer thus addresses not his aesthetic educational
background, but his banal desire for plausibility. It is curiosity that has tempted
some newspaper subscribers to read the absolutely private diary notes appearing
since 1995 in the classified ads. Just as in the exhibition version of 2003,
where the short notes could be read on the boards of an advertising trailer
parked beside a street, the audience of this Journal is completely unpredictable. It is confronted with literary
fragments without knowing whether it has become voyeur of a newspaper’s
technical error or witness to a relationship drama gone out of control. It can
classify this aesthetic game of communication and privacy neither calmly as
art, nor merely as a public nuisance. As so often in Germaine Koh’s
installations, the observer finds himself in a situation that provides scant
orientation. Like the eavesdropping neighbour who finds no peace until he can
make sense of the snatches of conversation he picks up from the next table, he
demands an explanation for the fragmentary facts whose acquaintance he has
made. Here, art begins with becoming aware not of materiality or method, but of
observation itself. If the observer becomes conscious of himself while
observing, the completion of his perceptual habits is already delayed and
deflected. The theatre has taken possession of the audience. The absurdity of
daily life voices itself in the absurdity of the invisible staging.
The artist may seem to be absent in this series of anonymized offerings,
but she is definitely part of the reflection. As the not-quite-voluntary but
ultimately resolutely interested observer may ask, who is responsible for
creating such signals? Is there an intention behind the boxing match played out
on May 13, 2004, as if in a sports ring, on the ground-level concrete cover of
a ventilation shaft in Toronto’s business district? For fifteen minutes, two female
boxers in jerseys and headgear fight; white-collar employees quickly passing by
observe them confusedly and occasionally offer athletic advice. The iron chain
separating the concrete cover from the surrounding lawn marks the bounds of the
boxing ring. With her warning bell, a cyclist signals the ends of the rounds
until, after the third round, the contestants leave in different directions and
HIGH NOON, a noonday battle in a zone
of business competition and hierarchical infighting, is over. The mostly silent
audience, which, often only out of the corners of its eyes, observes something
that cannot be clearly categorized as an allegory or a sporting event, spins
its mental wheels in imaginary motivational research. Without the anchor of an
interpretive correction – as the art system usually offers through catalogues
and other helpful tokens – passers-by try to extract, from sparse information,
indications of the conceivable intentions behind the activity. The artist is as
diligent in making the intervention distinguishable from the norms of the given
environment as she is concerned with making the staging adequately blend in.
The action’s deviance and integration, absurdity and plausibility are so
systematically controlled that the play of image and language presented can,
with effort, be referred back to daily life. Could the boxers be eccentric
participants in business life? Then what made them step so far out of their
roles? A bet? A joke? A background conflict? As long as none of the
explanations seems persuasive and no motivation seems too far-fetched, Germaine
Koh’s minimal stage play opens an extremely activated theatre of explanation in
its observers. She creates art precisely at the limit of its system-theoretical
recognizability. One could even use the analogy of transferring the theatrical
mechanisms of typical, quickly
consumable art into an experimental, uncertain realm – and thus see persuasive
proof that conceptualism is closely akin to comedy.
The means that Koh’s art uses to make its precise gestures is a kind of
comedy that becomes an instrument of dramaturgical design. The observer of Fair-weather forces: wind speed actually
becomes the viewer of a pictorial joke, an object-like punchline that wins the
audience’s undivided favour through the experience of successful deciphering.
Specifically, a motor drives the metre-high metal turnstile in direct relation
to the wind speed measured by an anemometer on the roof of the exhibiting
institution. If the wind increases, the turnstile turns frantically; if the
breeze dies down, the speed is reduced to the point of meditation. “Getting”
the mechanism is already an enticement to collaboration. The artwork releases a
situational comedy that removes it from the limits of its operating system. The
comedy of absurd confrontation, which can be read as a pointed joke about art’s
claim to aesthetic autonomy, appears as the self-irony of the object itself,
toward which the viewer, playing with the senselessness of his observation,
stands no less self-ironically. It seems as if Koh’s extension of communication
to undefined hints, actions, and objects could even be transferred to the art
system itself, as long as the narrative interpretation, the attribution of
messages and intentions to the object, is left up to the viewer. The staged
reduction with which the artist becomes a display-window figure in Watch (2000), or of the fog machine
broadcasting a computer’s keystrokes out of the building as Morse code in Prayers (1999), lends the theatricality
of the artistic staging a process-echo that contributes more than an infinite
number of subjective thoughts and reflecting cross-connections. The staging
also exposes the art to a competition of diverse, disparate interpretations.
The magic of the images entails the necessity of actively classifying them.
This provokes second and third glances at familiar social complexes that exist
quite outside the isolation of the art system. But a significant critical
re-surveying of art’s scope and agency also arises. And remember that if you
experience art as a strain or view exhibitions with mistrust, it is easy to
avert one’s gaze from Germaine Koh’s casual works and return to everyday life.
The triggered disturbances of her unobtrusive artistic method will still
interfere with your perspective more than your brief contact with them would
lead you to expect.
Gerrit Gohlke is an independent writer living in Berlin. He has been
editor of Be Magazin since 1995. His publications examine art’s
operating conditions within media society and its relation to new media,
technology and science. Since the 1990s he has organized several conferences on
NetArt and software art for Künstlerhaus
Bethanien in Berlin. He is currently teaching in the History of Art and
Design department of Bergische Universität Wuppertal.
Translated from the German by Mitch Cohen, edited by Germaine Koh