Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

An exhibition at the Dresden Kunsthaus explores how artists stand with respect to knowledge and truth.

Why is an apple tree being blown up? Did that really happen? Or are the two documentary photographs computer generated? One way or the other, the viewer is confused, but not necessarily convinced. To interpret this as an allusion to the Tree of Knowledge would probably be reading too much into it.

Is that true? possibilities of (non-)knowledge is the title of the exhibition at the Dresden Kunsthaus Dresden, which poses the question of what role artistic strategies can play in the production and revision of knowledge.

The viewer can decide whether photos of the Michael Sailstorfer’s Raketenbaum (Rocket Tree) are true or not only once he learns that the Berlin artist has made quite a splash with such slapstick experiments. He then knows that Sailstorfer will have actually prepared the tree to be a missile.

Odd shifts of meaning

Mensch und Feuer (Man and Fire), Schießende Mädchen (Shooting Girls), Vandalismus (Vandalism), Auto berühren (Car Touch), in Löcher blacken (Looking into Holes) – these are only a few of the roughly 100 categories under which the Hamburg artist Peter Piller has collected and classified press photos. At the exhibition the visitor can browse through a book published in 2007 that presents a selection of 1,583 pictures in 40 categories from the Peter Piller Archive. From 1994 to 2005 Piller, who now teaches photography in Leipzig, worked for a media agency where his job was to evaluate 150 regional newspapers. The task inspired him to this random, yet socially and photo-journalistically insightful, painstaking work. By detaching the photos from their original context and putting them in series, he creates odd shifts of meaning.

The artist Eran Schaerf, who was born in Tel Aviv and lives today in Berlin and Brussels, also pursues the question of how word and image combine into news. His installation Twice upon A Time shows how differently both can be used and understood, or not understood. “Everyone is a co-author of what he imagines” is a sequence from his audio play Sie hörten Nachrichten (They Were Listening to News). The sequence is emitted from an internally reflected, on four sides outwardly closed three-dimensional parallelogram, and confronts the visitor with a not easily understandable combination of the factual and the fictional.

More questions than answers

In a video by the Serbian artist Katarina Zdjelar, the viewer sees awkward hands trying to take down an English pop song in the writer’s own language. And also the result when it is sung. Everyone has experienced something like this.

Jakob Kolding offers the visitor something tangible to take home, with the bargain feeling to boot: two posters. Their meaning remains unclear. The visitor reads: A Plan for Escape. After researching on the Internet, he learns that this was the title of an exhibition by the Danish artist, which alluded to a particular novel.

The works by Jeanne Faust also have previous solo exhibitions as their backdrop. In the video Reconstructing Damon Albarn in Kinshasa, an elderly white man addresses the viewer. He talks about a picture that he saw in a newspaper. Then he tries to recreate the photo. A young black man dons feather ornaments and paint. When both he and the white man are sitting next to one another, he presses the self-timer. The visitor can encounter this photograph at another place in the exhibition. But an aha experience does not and should not occur. How images emerge, are seen and remembered is a process containing many unknowns. More questions are asked than are answered.

The claims of not-knowing

What does the viewer think when he sees the two footballs that Jonathan Monk has conveyed into an aquarium, and then titled Remake of the Weekend? Only insiders probably know that this is an allusion to the 1985 object series by the American artist Jeff Koons.

The visitor can obtain some information from the Lexikon zur zeitgenössischen Kunst (Lexicon of Contemporary Art) by the Swiss artist duo Com&Com. This is actually an extensive catalogue of their fourteen years collaboration, but also contains a glossary with comments on over 200 terms used in contemporary art production.

Bjørn Melhus’s allusion to a rampant media format is quite unmistakable. The video The Oral Thing is an equally amusing and wicked parody of talk show programs – intelligent and with a marvelously playful aesthetics. A blessing in this exhibition that promises more than it can deliver. Yet the theme is as exciting as it is topical: Can and will art (still) be a means of knowledge? Or does its potential lie rather and above all in questioning the production of knowledge – its procedures, interests and traditional authorities? And to unsettle through doubt and not-knowing?

It is a pity that the Dresden exhibition poses these questions in a rather vague and hermetic manner. For it was developed in connection with an exemplary project. “Kultur in Schule und Studium” (Culture in School and at University) is a scholarship program of the Professional Association for Art Education and the Siemens Foundation. It enables students of art education to test teaching concepts in schools together with artists.