|
PETER KOGLER’S EXHIBITION MAY BE VISITED FROM 9 SEPTEMBER – 31 OCTOBER 2009 AT THE AMERICAN HOSPITAL ART GALLERY “OPERATION ROOM”.
Peter Kogler's space-related works are based on a multi-variant vocabulary of labyrinth-like structures. A never-ceasing and occasionally ornamental system of tubes - frequently combined with motifs of ants or rats - irritate the viewer's perception of real space either in form of overlapping wallpapers or of computer-animated projections. On the one hand, these virtual scenarios of space and motion undermine the familiar rigid orthogonal qualities of architecture and its confines. On the other hand, the dynamic, transient and in part gyrating systems characterize and describe in a graphic manner the function of their architectural settings as centers of the incessant, circulating flow of people and images within the urban space. Going beyond the mere representation of physical matter, Kogler relates a more comprehensive and naturalistic image of reality by referring to those invisible data streams and channels of communication which so very much influence our perception and ideas of reality. Kogler understands space less as a fixed category, an external world that wants investigation, but more as a social ambience, partly defined by current technologies and in a state of constant transformation which continuously shifts our idea and interpretation of reality. The artist thereby draws a portrait of a hyper-mobile society consisting of a network of locations and protagonists who in a globalized world have lost their fixed standards of space, time and motion. In this context, the idea of re-orientation in a medialized cosmos and the denial of defined benchmarks for orientation do not so much contradict but actually depend on each other.
This said, the space projection in which the walls appear to successively dissolve and liquefy whilst a physically tangible sound track interprets the visual modulations and intensifies the viewers' perception constitutes a highlight of the artist's approach. The sound, composed by Franz Pomassl with whom Kogler frequently collaborates clarifies that perception is a multi-sensual act that goes beyond mere seeing: In fact, images and sound are dynamic categories that can comment and commend one another. This staged audiovisual apotheosis of instability and the ephemeral catches hold of the viewer whose sight and body are drawn into the maelstrom of an installation that permanently deconstructs itself. Although one knows from experience that the room, its location and its structure are fixed and static, one's perception is the contrary. The viewer feels that the floor is slipping away under the feet and the vision begins to reel; this impression in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are suspended has far reaching consequences: One the one hand, one experiences how relative and fragile our familiar coordinate systems are within which we normally exist. On the other hand, one is made aware how much the real and the virtual feed on each other. Our idea of reality is actually much determined by the presence of simulation and stimulation via media imagery and virtual realities.
Kogler suspends the laws of boundaries not only between real and medial architecture but also between the viewer and the artwork. The picture is neither rigid, nor is it placed as usual across from the viewer. Instead, it has transformed itself into a three-dimensional and - in addition - audible form of movement that surrounds and encloses the viewer. For Kogler, the deliberate blurring of boundaries between art and architecture which drafts the viewer into being part of the artwork has been a central theme in his work from its early stages on. Looking back at an early work, cardboard picture frames with an empty center (Untitled, 1984), we recognize this idea of intertwining the artwork and its surrounding space, of the viewed and the viewer at a phase when the artist was not yet working with computers. Using analogous materials and sculptural forms Kogler already thematized film and medial imaging and content procedures.
At first glance, the three-dimensional cardboard frame object consisting of a relief of intertwined charcoal figure drawings looks like a baroque frame in the style of the old masters. The figure chain creates an ornamental pattern in which the individual shapes dissolve in the whole of the texture and lose their individuality: "When the human body is intertwined into such ‘geometric groupings' and when it becomes a ‘root factor of architecture' (…) because the distinction between the human and the mechanic has yielded (…) in favor of the powerful life of non organic things."(Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement, Editions de Minuit, Paris 1983). Gilles Deuleze's annotation on the representation of crowds as ornaments in Fritz Lang's films (i.e. Metropolis, 1927) can be accurately applied to Kogler's figurative patterns. The sequential and ornamental crowd scenes on the picture frame with its looping structure, its black and white contrasts and its perspectives reflect the influence of a cinematic stylistic vocabulary. Apart from Fritz Lang, other filmmakers such as Sergej Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), Dsiga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), Vsevolod Pudovkin (The End of St Petersburg, 1927), Walter Ruttmann (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, 1927), Friedrich Murnau (The Last Laugh, 1923) and Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) have been a major influence on Kogler's interest in the historical context of urbanism and media, between the socio-political and mass aesthetics. These films, with their assemblages of expressively elevated and symbolically condensed depictions of the masses and their scenery with distorted perspectives offered Kogler motifs for his artistic investigation into the medialization of the modern information society and its impact on the individual and society. Kogler's early works are dominated by black and white contrasts which essentially describe the interplay of light and shadow - a comment on the relationship between the individual and the crowd between the poles of real existence and medial existence .
What is most interesting in this context, however, is the staged relationship triangle of artwork, space and viewer. The middle of the frame contains nothing but the empty wall on which it is hung. Thus the wall and the room itself both become the framework and the content of the work. The room in which the viewers themselves is standing now literally becomes the content of the work which they perceives and we, the viewers, have quasi become part of a "picture" that witnesses the reversal of conditions and conventions: Whilst traditionally the figure would take the center of a picture which in turn is enclosed by a frame that draws a boundary to the surrounding space, in Kogler's work the frame functions as the picture carrier thus questioning its role as a boundary to its surroundings and the viewer.
Regarding the theme of the integration of space and viewers, Kogler's video productions with white rats and other works from the early 80s serve as links between his early work and the current room projections: As an initial motif, a white rat is filmed running through a labyrinth model. After that the film is processed with a computer to produce a motion picture in which the image of the rat appears to multiply and move with an almost ornamental effect on a predetermined path. The rat appears like a polysemous and delicate yet monstrous creature that exudes equally a sense of beauty and of repulsion. This ambivalence of effects reminds us of the ambiguity and contradictions of a reality that is saturated with streams of data and information: Heteronomy and manipulation on the one hand, creative subversion and boundless energy on the other outline the broad range of possible effects and the potentials of media-technologically controlled communication - all this embodied by the aimless and yet purposeful figure of the rat.
Apart from the rat, Kogler's repertoire of motifs includes the ant as a central metaphor for the intertwined categories of nature and technology, of natural and artificial intelligence. Both creatures allegedly symbolize opposites which however in their interaction aptly describe the character of urban civilization. Kogler chose the ant as an ideal motif because it combines both the organic and the chaotic with a high degree of organization as well as the individual with the collective. Also, the symmetry of its body structure functions as a sign that combines ornamental abstraction with the concrete, animalistic sensuality of life. The ant motif can therefore be found in a whole variety of combinations with technoid and organic labyrinths in numerous pictures, wallpaper installations and room projections.
But let us return to the rats. When Kogler projects their images on the floor as running in ornamental-labyrinth loops, one finds oneself transported into a claustrophobic situation in which the creepy rodents threaten to get unbearably close. Once again, Kogler manages to blur the viewer's distance to the work and its motif in a physically and psychologically tangible manner. Any attempt of evasion and the failure to do so intensifies the correspondence between the work, its motif and one's own physicality. Is the rat a menacing opponent or merely a symbolic sign of one's own doing and one's own inextricable existential entanglements? Is it a simultaneously animalistic and technoid alter ego that hints at the suppressed contradictions of our own identity? Is the room through which we are moving a dynamic construction of labyrinth pitfalls? It is the accurate quality of the structure and the hermetic, fixed circular movements of this work that trigger these questions.
The white rat is not a totally novel feature in Kogler's latest works either and its role as a link between the space and the viewer has its antecedents. Kogler previously used it as a frame motif in 1981 where the rat quasi chases itself and in its circular depiction squares the circle, similar to a film loop. What matters here is that the rats are not drawn or painted on paper but that their silhouettes were punched out of the paper and the underlying white of the wall composes their "bodies". Thus, the wall turns from context into text and the underground becomes the picture, the outside of the picture becomes its innermost. Once again, we stand in front of a "picture" that internalizes the room of which we are part.
Kogler's latest works, installations of video/audio projections, document his consistent attempt to close the gap between architecture and the body, between the room with its artwork and the viewers present in that very room to amalgamate both in a dynamic wake in which the virtual becomes real and the real appears to be contaminated by the virtual. When we compare Kogler's oeuvre of analog and digital works, his early and latest work, we may be led to the following presumption: That those early cardboard objects in which the figures function also as architectural objects or are part of these, are quasi anthropomorphic architectures which anticipate the liquefaction of the space and its hybridization with the viewer.
|