Idee, Design, Konzept: Yannick Nuss und Johannes Hucht
Sommersemester 2017
Betreuung:
Jonathan Bepler, Heike Schuppelius, Thomas Rustemeyer
Studierende/r:
Lena Loy, Lukas Rehm & Tilmann Rödiger, Jason King, Max Negrelli & Matthew Doyle, Klemens Czurda, Petros Tatsiopoulos & Tasos Nyfadopoulos, Mona Altmann
Wie dokumentiert man eine Ausstellung? Was wird als vorzeigbar was als vernachlässigbar bewertet und worin liegt der Mehrwert einer nachträglichen Konservierung? Können Designer*innen diese Arbeit als eigenständige Position verstehen ohne den Blick auf ein Ganzes zu verlieren? Mit der Publikation «Dissociative Experiences Scales» versuchen wir Format und Inhalt eines Ausstellungskatalogs neu zu begreifen und standardisierte Formensprachen in der Visualisierung zu hinterfragen. Lediglich ein Zeitstrahl dient der Orientierung und führt durch einen Strom aus Bild- und Textmaterial. Momente, Belanglosigkeiten, Details und Zufälliges rücken in den Fokus und verschwinden wieder oder werden übersehen. Der Prozess eines steten Auf- und Abbaus bildet dabei das immer wiederkehrende Thema der Publikation, DISSOCIATIVE EXPERIENCES SCALES
04.07. – 09.07.2016, AN EXHIBITION BY LENA LOY, LUKAS REHM & TILMANN RÖDIGER, JASON KING, MAX NEGRELLI & MATTHEW DOYLE, KLEMENS CZURDA, PETROS TATSIOPOULOS & TASOS NYFADOPOULOS, MONA ALTMANN, JONATHAN BEPLER, HEIKE SCHUPPELIUS, THOMAS RUSTEMEYER AT CIRCUITS AND CURRENTS, NOTARA 13 & TOSITSA, EXARCHEIA 10683, ATHENS, GREECE
A young Italian I once met on my travels through his country told me he had been a Spanish conquistador. What was I to do but believe him? I have known many who have less fanciful, but far more unbelievable accounts of who they are. At the time I certainly could not have begun to answer the question « Who are you? » without the fear of somehow being wrong.
I had just given up a rather comfortable existence in the States, and was touring around Europe before beginning my studies in Karlsruhe. I did not have much money at the time and would sneak into museums through side exits, which, with little variation in Italy at least, opened directly onto the streets. I stood across from my first Botticellis, Caravaggios, and Berninis on that trip, as well as countless ruins and archaeological inventories. Before this canonical bric - a - brac, a lot of it procured by unconscionable means, I was also on the search for something like an identity. I wanted to understand, in a mythic sense that I could never divest entirely of its irony, where I had come from.
As I wandered through the enormous collections, I was appalled by how gory many of the recurring motifs were. The Slaughter of the Innocents, the beheading of Holofernes, the crucifixion of Christ all had the effect of incriminating me in a culture of sadism. When I came across the goriest of them all, Gentileschi’s Holofernes in the Uffizi, I felt an indictment more particular. The upward spurt of the blood from the neck was far more unapologetic than all of the other depictions of the decapitated general, whose blood usually only trickles neatly down the sheets.
Gentileschi was the only female painter I remember seeing with any frequency on my travels. She was a student of Caravaggio, that murderous dilettante who loved to paint his boys from the streets without first cleaning the dirt off their bodies. In Caravaggio I saw, and immediately identified with, the camp and rueful resignation that is not unlike the same on display at gay nightclubs and drag shows. But coming across Gentileschi’s Holofernes, I saw a woman’s self-assertion against the catch - 22 forced upon her by men, and men like me – either the abjectness of libidinal fantasy or Caravaggio’s incestuous dark rooms, where she has no place at all.
The Uffizi was so overwhelming that I bled money on a Phaidon edition of The Story of Art on sale in the gift shop. On the train between cities, I learned, for example, that Michelangelo insisted on painting the Sistine ceiling all by himself and that Rembrandt was the first painter to just stop painting when he felt like it. My entire journey, which went southwards through Italy before curving upwards through Greece to Istanbul, possessed all the feverish enlightenment of the Grand Tours of old. I had fallen in love already in the first city I visited and wore my heartache like a fashion in the rest of them. I was the last age one could purchase the Eurail ticket at its discounted rate, and in a piazza in Naples I penned a poem that was a farewell to youth.
I became acquainted with the young Italian in Rome. We had contacted each other through a gay cruising website, which I had also used to arrange my accommodations in the city. We met in the ruins of the Caracalla baths, whose incredible sculptures, unbeknownst to me at the time, were awaiting me a couple hundred kilometers south in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. He was in his mid - twenties like myself. He practiced a therapeutic hypnotism by trade, and was an ardent student of the Theosophy of Rudolf Steiner. These occultist sympathies made his belief in reincarnation only par for the course.
It was driving back from the ruins, in a van strangely oversized for a hypnotist, that he confessed to me what he had been in his past life. It is a confession that has stayed with me since, perhaps out of nostalgia for the kind of magic and reckless compliance with which I greeted it. Perhaps the same magic and reckless compliance with which I climbed into strangers’ vehicles or slept on their couches. Despite not finding much purchase in his reasoning, the open - endedness of my own transit at the time made me more willing to accept the transient nature of something like a soul, or an identity.
Though it never came to be, we planned on meeting again so I could partake in one of his hypnotic sessions.
I remember the thrill even then of it being possible to unearth some repressed knowledge of who I was or had been, but it was a cheap thrill, like Mussolini’s bulldozing through Renaissance stables to get at the agoras beneath.
In Oregon, where I had studied and lived for seven years, I felt my identity becoming harder to get away from and yet at the same time harder to get to. I will never shake the horror of sitting in my own apartment, across from someone I had come to know better than anyone before, and finding myself at such a loss as to who I was. It might be an onus of civilization, this obligation to pass judgment upon who another is, but also just as much this having been somewhere and not having been oneself.
2017
Idee, Design, Konzept: Yannick Nuss und Johannes Hucht
Sommersemester
2017
Betreuung:
Jonathan Bepler, Heike Schuppelius, Thomas Rustemeyer
Studierende/r: