Everything That Is Solid Dissolves Into Air

Exhibition’s text for Marit Wolters:Everything That Is Solid Dissolves Into Air at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, July 2018.

“Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms.”
—Jorge Luis Borges

Marit Wolters’s installation Everything That Is Solid Dissolves Into Air at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York is an invitation to reflect on how the perception of change affects our imagination of what is still possible to be realized, for us as individuals and as a collective, in times of precariousness and emergency.

Ascents and failures, encounters and disruptions, a hesitant structure, a metaphor of our time. Like every metaphor, the installation suggests making something visible. In this case, the relation between fragility, movement, and an ethereal base envisions a social structure where each component is taken into account.

By breaking up standardized methods of processing and assembling materials and focusing on the transformative potential that is established in relational processes that stem from issues of vital importance such as migration, the Vienna-based artist questions multiple and intensified mechanisms of exclusion/re-inclusion.

Wolters’s aesthetics is constituted by the use of materials and methods that are known from the construction industry: aerated concrete sculptures and reinforced steel structures are created in a dialectic process of assembly and disassembly. In her sculptures the potential of collapsing is present, often exploited, sometimes endured in the process of demolding and reformulating new assemblages. What is assumed and perceived as given becomes fragile and fragmentary, an operation that enables the constitution of meaning, a potential Spielraum in which new perspectives and interrelations are within reach.

The fragile and ephemeral constructions, interstices of sculpture, architecture, and landscape, are in constant dialogue with the site they are taking over without, however, ignoring the spectator’s role. The pieces, first confronted by the visitor, become vectors for the constitution of the gaze, and this confrontation necessarily implies a historical and ideological position.

The installation establishes a dialogue with the viewer marked by harmonic progressions and encounters, generating a sensation of narrative in suspense. The structure, in its architectural form, dominated by marked tensions and apparent rigidity, requires close observation from multiple perspectives, inducing both fragility and a subtle disturbance, creating spun micro histories not exempt from criticism and vindication.

The exhibition room is articulated through the body’s presence, with its movement and pauses, configuring images and events intimately related to the architecture of the artist's imagination. The sense of theatricality that the piece possesses unleashes an attractive and ambivalent tension, questioning certain sculptural parameters such as movement and intervention.

Stirring a state of suspension, Everything That Is Solid Dissolves Into Air allows us to overcome the real throughout a dissonant and asymmetric view regarding use value and aesthetic value, in a poetics that encourages dialogue and reflection about the challenges of our time.

Adorno | Darstellung

1.1  Verklärte Nacht

1.11 Die Welt von Gestern

1.2  Sehnsucht | Nach MF01121979

1.21 Phantasmagorie

TRANSPARENT

Direction +  Production: Katharina Schaar

FASSADE/PARADE

Foreword for

Tobias Faisst: FASSADE/PARADE

POOL Publishing, Vienna, Austria, 2017

“Human, all too human”.

—Friedrich Nietzsche.

This book, a book of aesthetic failures, invites us to reflect beyond the mere exercise of Camp. This selection of photographs functions like a pharmakonin the Derridean sense: presents the “différanceof difference”, it shows the cure and the illness by suggesting what can be perceived as ugly within the absence-presence of beauty, “it reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other”.

To be beautiful, to impress, to show oneself through appearance is something that every culture has had throughout history. Clothes, temples, everyday life artefacts are some examples of objects that were meant to have at the moment of its production—especially the ones related to rituals and power—certain kind of what we now call aesthetic valuein order to catch the gaze and the attention of its recipients by impressing them.

Our contemporary time is no less concerned about beauty and how to impress. In a self-design society like ours, the construction of the appearance goes beyond the mere act of showing how we look; our façade reveals what we would like to become.

Hal Foster in Design and Crimestated: “…you don’t have to be filthy rich to be projected not only as a designer but as designed –whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face (designer surgery) or your lagging personality (designer drugs), your historical memory (designer museums), or your DNA future (designer children).”

Nowadays it is not enough to feel the pressure of being forced to self-design oneself. The façade has to be constituted with at least some sort of aesthetic quality, and since design replaced art as the exclusive container of beauty, and art and aesthetics is no longer a happy equation, we ended up adding aesthetically designed values to ourselves.

Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin claimed that it is better to be an artwork rather than to be an artist, and as we know, contemporary art practices have shown us some “exceptions” of individuals that projected and sold themselves in the art world as a work of art. However, this attitude carries some risks that sometimes we are not aware of, and one of them is the need to constantly adapting oneself to new aesthetic changes; definitely, we are becoming a transactional-self.

In our self-design society, where the ideals of the author as a producer and "everyone is an artist", have been overcome by the possibility of being our own self-production in order to become a piece of art—or at least a designer-product—, one can only expect that this exposure will catch the gaze, the pleasure and definitely the critic and the suspicion of the beholder, since design, like art, still is perceived as artificial: it hides something behind the surface.

Boris Groys reminds us that “today, everyone is subjected to an aesthetic evaluation—everyone is required to take aesthetic responsibility for his or her appearance in the world, for his or her self-design. Where it was once a privilege and a burden for the chosen few, in our time self-design has come to be the mass cultural practice par excellence.”

The consequence of living a life as a territory of total design, or like Hal Foster perfectly state: from jeans to genes –, is that my image, my façade, becomes the embodiment of my taste, my ethics, my politic and moral values. Not to mention that the “individuality expressed in ever nail” leaves no spielraum (running-room)—as Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus claimed in his critic to Art Nouveau’s total design project—for the development of the subjectivity and the culture.

Something with aesthetic qualities means something that has the power to seduce. It is the sensuous form what creates the perceptive pleasure that leads to the aesthetic experience. Aesthetics, following Kant, focuses on the notion of beauty and resides in the realm of sensitivity, not compatible with the cognitive sphere of understanding. Beauty is a universal and transcendental category shared by society via sensus communis that should be experienced based in disinterested pleasure in the act of judging; aesthetics is, let us not forget, about perception.

However, many contemporary art practices are not conceived as a field where the aesthetic experience is plausible, nevertheless we keep on judging most of the art and definitely all kind of design based in modern categories like beauty, even though the divorce art-aesthetics seems to don’t have conciliation unless we stand on the side of a modern conception of art when it comes to its reception, or we find out a way to make them work together without falling in anachronisms.

These “lost souls” clearly show that the easy access to tools of production for making art, or at least for designing it, does not mean its immediate and/or qualitative achievement. The art world unveils more and more the fallacy of its pseudo-democracy. The fusion art-life enables people, anyone and everyone, to make art, but not because there is a certain kind of democratisation in the access to art—in consumption especially— means that the production, reception and acceptance are democratic—if we understand democratic as for everyone.

Since art’s aim isn’t any more to contain beauty or to reveal the truth, design has become the field where more sectors of our society expresses their “artistic skills” and their vision of beauty, but most of the times in a mannerism way: decorating, adding something to every layer, playing arbitrary with the space, composition and colours.

This attitude shows clearly the conception of an idea of beauty and aesthetic value that resides in the ornamentation of the image-product to be shown; furthermore, this attitude can be seen as the feeling that people have in perceiving oneself free to create art and design by altering the reality of things.

On the contrary, modern avant-garde design pursues to eliminate any layer, decoration or unnecessary addition; it is reductionist and seeks to show things as they are, without ornament, in order to manifest the essence, the real, the soul of worldly objects and individuals. It pursues the achievement of purity as much as for the object and as for the one who stares at it. Thus, since the recipient is not disturbed with the illusionary ornament that does not allow him or her to see things as they are, he or she is finally able to confront the-truth-of-things.

The project of modern design developed by Adolf Loos has been achieving more and more its utopian statements, but modified, immerse and operating within the rules of the capitalist system mixed with an aura of avant-garde and definitely with the fantasy of offering freedom via self-design. High-end design functions quite close like contemporary and modern art: it shares a world with the public, however, speaks a private language. Design brought back the antagonism high art-folklore, avant-garde- kitsch, but in this case in the form of high-end design-low-cheap-ugly publicity.

This differentiation shows an economical and educational gap, but not sadly enough, contemporary aesthetics are also a tool of exclusion for unprivileged sectors of our society. Différancehere means celebrating the status quo by offering a placebo to the ill in order to postpone equality for further time and space.

Keti Chukhrov, when analysing the false democratization of art suggests that “complex art is considered bourgeois. It needs skills, connoisseurship, and culture that can only belong to the socially privileged. Therefore, when dealing with zones of the socially unprivileged, art should reject its artistic features: complexities, paradoxes, involvement. ”

Let us not forget that the figure of Duchamp appears to reveal how aesthetic gratification is no longer important, or at least not the exclusive one. He wanted, as explained by Arthur Danto, “to inspire a kind of intellectual gratification […], and part of his agenda was to render taste irrelevant, another was to render skill irrelevant. He wanted to get rid of the “eye” of the artist and the “hand” of the artist, etc.”

If we take a walk through the city we will confront ourselves with an incredible amount of images, most of them low-end advertisement that by large scale high-end design products. Furthermore, this parade, this massive visual pollution transcends the physical space of the city and goes to new territories —something that design does it perfectly.

However, the self-design paradigm can be considered as a move from territorialities to totalities, since the whole Internet, especially social media websites like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, are also fields where we put our façade on constant parade, and by doing that we are exposing ourselves to public judgement.

Duchamp liked to say that “not everyone is an artist, but everyone is a fucking critic”. The course of history has altered this statement, and nowadays everyone is an artist—or at least everyone has the right to feel him or herself as one (thank you, Joseph Beuys!)—and yes, everyone still is a fucking critic, a beauty critic, judging aesthetics almost in Kantian terms, but anachronistically. 

The right to be free to feel oneself an artist, a critic and a piece of art, has created even more pressure on each individual: It is almost an obligation to be productive—economically and artistically—and we are constantly liking and judging façades by “crossing over into the other”, and by doing that we are condemning ourselves to be-come beautiful, no matter what they say.

Chance Meeting/Zufallsbegegnung

Direction +  Production: Katharina Schaar

Don’t Move

Direction +  Production: Katharina Schaar