Installation view Speculations on Anonymous Materials; .
Photo by Achim Hatzius.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Installation view Speculations on Anonymous Materials; .
Photo by Achim Hatzius.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York.

Fridericianum, Kassel, 2011:

“I think that it is more interesting to talk about art in terms of the material that determines the work, rather than the artist’s identity…”
–Pamela Rosenkranz

Art’s task changes in a world suffused with generated images. It is imperative to reflect on what are often highly psychologically charged worlds of images, the ways they are reproduced, and represented. Over the last two decades, the relationships between image and text, language and body, body and space, subject and object have changed rapidly. Art’s brief is no longer to generate unique, original images, but to seek reflection in a de-subjectivized approach to the existing stocks of objects, images and spaces. The order of the day is to understand the world from the vantage point of abstraction and not to abstract from the world. The element of individual creation takes a back seat and the transfer of images and objects into the world of art becomes irrelevant as such. Today, visual reflection possesses a rhythmic, process-based and serial form. Serial repetition is less a matter of counterpointing sameness and difference and more a matter of weaving a never-ending web of relations; reflection can only occur within speculative variation.

The Speculations on Anonymous Materials exhibition for the first time worldwide brings together approaches in international art that reinterpret the anonymous materials created by rapid and incisive technological transformation: With the technological changes of the 21st century, the way we experience the world, our bodies, images and language has also changed radically. Responding to this, the artists on show do not set out to address the major paradigms of art history or the ideology of the exhibition space, but instead tackle objects and constellations encountered in everyday life. They do not aspire to create independent artistic worlds but instead draw on the wealth of images, materials, appliances and communications that surround us. However, they do not engage with these resources as masterful individuals aloof from society but instead regard themselves as elements of our culture. They thus seek to avoid the diktat of individual self-optimization: The notion of the artist genius who creates intuitively and through his art also encourages the viewers to confront their own selves and their link to the world through contemplation is abandoned for the sake of an interaction with the materials that structure our everyday lives. The artists transfer these mundane objects into the world of art without grand ado to then serially rearrange them.

These artistic works therefore fly in the face of any clear interpretation and undermine any supposition that there can be a world in which all is reconciled. Instead we encounter material speculations on the intangibility of tangible objects that we are all familiar with and yet cannot really construe.

In Chronic Expectation, Simon Denny reconstructs the public discourse about an alleged scientific discovery, which for a short time promised insights into the hitherto unexplained chronic fatigue syndrome from which 17 million people worldwide suffer. Between 2009 and 2011, primarily journals in the english-speaking world (all of which can be seen in Denny’s installation) reported a possible link between the illness and the retrovirus XMRV. As later transpired, however, XMRV was the product of contaminated samples, a laboratory-derived virus with no danger of infection for people. Denny’s installation reconstructs the complex interplay between the organizational structures, persuasion and politics of the media, and those of scientific discourses such as the above. the split-screen prints of key journal articles reflect on the technological developments that accompanied the debate. Denny’s archival project reveals how digital image processing plays an ever more fundamental role within the structures of scientific argumentation and truth claims. From aesthetic practices and the acceleration of technology to celebrity cult, Chronic Expectation demonstrates the decisive role played by hybrid forms of media presentation and circulation in the production of knowledge in contemporary societies.

Artists: Michele Abeles, Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga & Jessie Stead, Alisa Baremboym, Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers, Antoine Catala, Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanović, GCC, Yngve Holen, Sachin Kaeley, Daniel Keller, Josh Kline, Oliver Laric, Tobias Madison, Katja Novitskova, Ken Okiishi, Jon Rafman, James Richards, Pamela Rosenkranz, Avery Singer, Timur Si-Qin, and Ryan Trecartin.