I don\u2019t want to. I can\u2019t. I mustn\u2019t! Not now. Maybe I\u2019ll come back to it tomorrow. We\u2019re perpetually compelled to postpone what we would want, should do, might wish for. Acting hasn\u2019t felt like this in a long time: like an uncertain proposition that\u2019s presumably inappropriate just now and may well be just as inappropriate the day after tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Perhaps you\u2019re at home. Perhaps the kids are getting on your nerves. Perhaps you\u2019re sitting all alone in a gallery and have no idea what you should actually make plans for. Perhaps you\u2019re not even getting replies to your emails anymore because people have wandered off somewhere beyond reach. An island life. And inside your head, ideas are starting to hunker down in the same places where they were perched yesterday and you shoo away the cobwebs between them.<\/p>\n
KOW presents Sophie Gogl. It\u2019s her first exhibition with KOW, scheduled to open for the 2021 Gallery Weekend. We talk on the phone. There will be fourteen tondos to be hung. She\u2019s obviously going to come to Berlin from Vienna to hang them, she says. Tondos are circular canvases, and these are painted on both sides and will be suspended from the ceiling instead of being bolted to the wall the way paintings more typically are.<\/p>\n
She has epistulaphobia, she says on the phone, and I ask whether that\u2019s a virus. No, she says. It means that you\u2019re scared of letters. I simply can\u2019t open them, Sophie says, and I think: Yes. Bad news. Most of them are about money. There are so many things I keep kicking down the road, she says, and I nod quietly. And then you open the fridge and take out a jar of jam, you unscrew the lid and stick your knife into a cushion of green mold, Sophie says, because the jam has been sitting there, unnoticed, for months and now it just can\u2019t keep going on, its willpower is spent, and so it\u2019s embarked on a life of its own.<\/p>\n
The front sides of her tondos, which measure 90 cm, are diligent replicas of jam and honey jar lids. The first was the \u201cBonne Maman,\u201d with that simulated checkered tablecloth on the lid, Sophie Gogl says. As though mom had filled the jar with a fresh homemade preserve and sealed it with a cute doily. That domesticity is so fake. And then you think to yourself that you\u2019re supposed to be a bonne maman yourself, a loving mother, and make a jam sandwich for your kid, the one that if you\u2019re honest is annoying you right now, and what you\u2019d really like to say is: Not now. Come back for more jam sandwiches tomorrow. If we have any edible jam left by then.<\/p>\n
Painting is kind of like that, she says. There\u2019s the constant expectation that you do everything well and get it right, that you make good on the promise of a deliciously sweet world on the canvas. An obsolete promise that you can never live up to anyway, and at some point you lose interest in even trying. And as a viewer, I second her, my gaze on the picture is laced with bitterness: Come on, show me the world! And painting says: Kiss my ass, get back to me tomorrow. What you\u2019re left with are surfaces of honey glazing and wet cotton candy that taste bitter when you nibble them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a dilemma, Sophie Gogl says. I want to paint, I really do, but we\u2019re overstimulated anyway. Being fed a steady drip of so much visual stuff that has us on edge as it is, and then you twist the dainty lid on that jam jar and the world inside it is unpalatable. Everything\u2019s peachy on the outside and when you turn it around it\u2019s all crap, already over the hill or postponed until who knows when, or there\u2019s a displacement activity that\u2019s utterly unconnected to the issue at hand. I\u2019m scrolling through the back sides of the tondos on the phone. Pasta is stuck in a grimy sink, something to do with comic strips and childhood, a golf course in a Nintendo aesthetic. That\u2019s a perennial favorite, Sophie says. Gaming is a great substitute if you\u2019re looking to procrastinate on something else. I keep scrolling and see letters composed of dry moss and little plastic flowers. An N, an O, a T, \u2026<\/p>\n
And so fourteen tondos by Sophie Gogl hang from the ceiling at KOW like an intimate question addressed to our own time: What can wait? And at what cost? Or gain. Should I really do or see this now, do I have to, do I want to? Do I risk mold, depression, failure if I postpone myself, my action, my gaze? Is it anarchy to simply say no to the world\u2019s requirement profiles at this particular moment? Or is that everyday life? \u201cNot Now,\u201d that\u2019s the concise formula that a synoptic reading of Sophie Gogl\u2019s pictures, letter by letter, yields. Telling us what we\u2019ve known for quite some time: that there\u2019s not a whole lot of room for action right now?<\/p>\n
No. Gogl\u2019s \u201cNot Now\u201d is not corona painting for an audience paralyzed by uncertainty. Nor is it \u201cI would prefer not to,\u201d the philosophically tinged formulaic refusal repeated by Melville\u2019s Bartleby. What I mean, she says on the phone, is in the end much blunter. Do I really have to do this now? Can I take a rain check? Can I do something else instead? Saying it opens up fresh intervals and interspaces of indeterminacy. And that\u2019s where painting can take place.<\/p>\n
Alexander Koch
\nBerlin, Mai 2021<\/p>\n
Ausstellungstext KOW<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don\u2019t want to. I can\u2019t. I mustn\u2019t! Not now. Maybe I\u2019ll come back to it tomorrow. We\u2019re perpetually compelled to postpone what we would want, should do, might wish for. Acting hasn\u2019t felt like this in a long time: like an uncertain proposition that\u2019s presumably inappropriate just now and may well be just as… Continue reading Jars. Sophie Gogl, KOW<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texts","entry"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["de","en"],"languages":{"de":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3745,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/3745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}