{"id":1799,"date":"2022-10-09T21:43:21","date_gmt":"2022-10-09T19:43:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/?p=1799"},"modified":"2025-04-24T00:56:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T22:56:48","slug":"das-auto-rosi-aber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/das-auto-rosi-aber\/","title":{"rendered":"Das Auto Rosi Aber (2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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KOW Berlin<\/a><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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With Anna Boghiguian, Candice Breitz, Marco A. Castillo, Alice Creischer, Chto Delat, Heinrich Dunst, Anna Ehrenstein, Peter Friedl, Sophie Gogl, Clegg & Guttmann, Barbara Hammer, Hiwa K, Simon Lehner, Renzo Martens, Oswald Oberhuber, Mario Pfeifer, Santiago Sierra, Michael E. Smith, Franz Erhard Walther, curated by Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

And so there it falls into the funnel of meaning-making, the work of art, sucked in by the process in which media, politics, and society manufacture opinions. Faster and faster it corkscrews downward, the work of art, toward the one point that is its inevitable destination, the one possible exit: there it comes! Yes, there it is. The message.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard a lot in 2022 about which message works of art send, what they mean to say and do. Squeezed like lemons, they\u2019re supposed to explain themselves, where they stand on morality, which values they stand for, which politics they advocate, and accordingly how licit or illicit they ought to be. Now, we at KOW are friends of political art, even if we prefer to call it art with a focus on society. And that\u2019s exactly why, as this weird year 2022, in which meddlesome tendencies have escalated and coalesced that pester art and other forms of free thinking and action, draws to a close, we thought it was time to take a fresh look at how things actually stand with works of art, with their messages and their politics. As in the past, we gazed in the mirror of our own gallery program. We set out the findings of our inquiry in a presentation of works by nineteen artists represented by the gallery. The show, with which we say farewell to the old year and welcome the new one, is a postulate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Untranslatability<\/strong>
\nThe first thing that struck us: standing before a work, which aspects of it can we actually translate into our language (and whose language, for that matter, is that)? And even when language is literally in the picture (or is an object in its own right), what does it \u201csay\u201d? Or does it show rather than say something? Though if it does, what\u2019s that? A meaning? Unlikely. What it lets us see is not necessarily what\u2019s being shown. And vice versa. And what\u2019s being shown doesn\u2019t necessarily have any bearing on what it means. Sounds complicated? It\u2019s not. What works of art do and achieve, an experience of form, is simply beyond the power of language, ideas, and theories to recover, it can\u2019t be translated into political or moral messages, it\u2019s impossible to squeeze through a funnel, to compress down to an essence, let alone an essence that would be cogent and universally acknowledged. The meaning of a work can never be adequately constructed, it always remains ramshackle, mutable, precarious, amenable to other and othering gazes, and it can take on a completely different cast the day after tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Intentions<\/strong>
\nTo say that works of art harbor intentions, that they \u201cwant\u201d something, would be to put it oddly. Strictly speaking, they simply stand and hang there and offer themselves to our looking at and thinking about them. They come with a context, of course, that embeds them in all sorts of premises and aims, too. Still, what becomes of them, which meaning they attain in society\u2019s discourse, is up to the observations and communications of a third party\u2014the audience. What can be said about the intentions of artists is a tricky question. There\u2019s no doubt they take stances, have convictions, want to say and achieve something. Then again, many of them don\u2019t mean to make a big fuss about their intentions. And good intentions, we all know, don\u2019t automatically make good works. What\u2019s more, artists know from daily experience that the form in their work keeps escaping their own intention and control, perhaps even (in the guise, say, of a physical material) defies it. Many works of art come into being in a passage through\u2014in the fulcrum of\u2014these tensions. To claim that works straightforwardly reflect the artist\u2019s intention would be a bit na\u00efve. Especially since communal or collective art forms make it even harder to attribute intentions. And the beholders? What about their intentions? Well, we might say those are half the battle. Their agenda, their designs, their situation contribute to making the work what it is. Yet they, too, experience that they\u2019re never fully on top of it (and anyone who claims otherwise\u2014because they are, say, in the business of evaluating art, as members of an expert committee or jury\u2014can do so only by standing on their authority).<\/p>\n

Collisions<\/strong>
\nDoes this mean that nothing is clear, nothing is cogent, nothing is dependable? No, it doesn\u2019t. It means that views, interests, interpretations, people, and things are perpetually tangled up with each other and keep colliding, which is a good and wonderful and sometimes harsh experience. To be involved with art is to deal in differences and incongruities\u2014and to have an instrument at one\u2019s disposal with which both can be given form, can be cast into a poetic model in which signifiers, interpreters, and meanings can never be made to coincide. An ongoing commotion instead unfolds between them, one that can bring friction and blowups; everything can go awry and be derailed. This commotion sparks a game we might call democratic politics: it brings realities and doubles of the real to the scene, forms whose affiliations are never quite transparent and that our aspirations, intentions, and demands can latch on to\u2014or bounce off of, as the case may be\u2014in an engagement that\u2019s never altogether under our control. We may find that a disruption of our wonted arrangements. But that\u2019s exactly what we need: if we\u2019re open to it, new arrangements emerge on the horizon.<\/p>\n

Emotions<\/strong>
\nThey sometimes harshly disrupt arrangements, affiliations, and attributions, patterns of meaning-making and intentions: emotions. There\u2019s nothing wrong with attributing emotional qualities to the experience of art, but those can run directly counter to intellectual or moral impulses. They can shatter a work (or a person) into colorful facets that are virtually impossible to put back together. That, too, is a form of the political. Pain and concept are very different stories. Both may be present, but they need not interlock and may in fact be utterly antithetical. That\u2019s something we must bear. There\u2019s no seamless identification of work\/ feeling\/ meaning\/ message; indeed, the best we can hope for is that we can experience the inner conflict the work contains within itself. We may also find ourselves conflicted, as when we think something is absolutely gorgeous that we also believe to be, say, profoundly questionable on the moral level. Or vice versa. Can such conflicts be resolved? Sometimes they can\u2019t. Is that bad? No, on the contrary, says the Car Rosi but.<\/p>\n

Concept and text: Alexander Koch
\nTranslation: Gerrit Jackson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KOW Berlin<\/p>\n

The exhibition was a response to the climate of accusatory labeling that has taken hold in German media and politics since documenta 15\u2014an atmosphere that has increasingly threatened artistic and free expression in the country (and in many others), often resulting in censorship and defunding. Featuring works by Anna Boghiguian, Candice Breitz, Marco A. Castillo, Alice Creischer, Chto Delat, Heinrich Dunst, Anna Ehrenstein, Peter Friedl, Sophie Gogl, Clegg & Guttmann, Barbara Hammer, Hiwa K, Simon Lehner, Renzo Martens, Oswald Oberhuber, Mario Pfeifer, Santiago Sierra, Michael E. Smith, and Franz Erhard Walther. Curated by Alexander Koch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"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":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exhibitions","entry"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["de","en"],"languages":{"de":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":true},"en":{"title":false,"content":true,"excerpt":true}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799","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=1799"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1812,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799\/revisions\/1812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}