On Dithering

Motives of Suspension, Suture and Digression

Works in the exhibition (Choice)
(Courtesy, unless otherwise mentioned: the artists)

Bani Abidi (born 1971 in Karachi, lives in Berlin)
Reserved, 2006
Two channel video, 9 min.
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The city has come to halt. A state dignitary is about to arrive. Traffic is blocked to make way for the unhampered movement of four luxury vehicles. School children with crumpled paper flags in hand wait patiently to wave at the passing motorcade. An anxious reception committee of officious bureaucrats paces up and down a red carpet … (source: www.baniabidi.com/works.html).

Pilar Albarracin (born 1968 in Sevilla, lives in Sevilla)
La muerte de Zaldiko (Zaldiko’s Death), 2012
Video installation (black-and-white) with taxidermied horse head
Courtesy: The artist and Galerie Vallois, Paris
www.pilaralbarracin.com
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The installation La muerte de Zaldiko (Zaldiko’s Death) is based on a performance carried out by Pilar Albarracín involving a taxidermied horse head in an indoor riding arena surrounded by a group of living horses. A horse trainer drives them to move in a circle around the artist. Something seems to be causing their reluctance, as if they were dreading their deceased fellow species .

Artic: Texte aus der fröhlichen Wissenschaft, zaudern, No. 7, 2000
Eighty pages, foam binding, layout by Anita Kolb
www.artic-magazin.de
Courtesy: Archive Iris Dressler / Hans D. Christ
With contributions by Agentur Bilwet, Dan Perjovschi, Leander Scholz, Jens E. Sennewald, Bernhard Balkenhol, Roberto Di Bella, among others
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The magazine Artic, first published in 1993, presents literary, theoretical, and artistic contributions subsumed under a certain theme for each issue. The unique graphic design developed for each issue likewise embraces this theme. Artic No. 7 of 2000 was dedicated to the theme of dithering. The elaborate production of Artic, often involving considerable craftsmanship, not only makes each single magazine into a unique copy; it also defies the economic dictate of time efficiency. In a certain sense, this makes Artic itself an act of dithering, disrupting seemingly efficient processes of production …

Robert Barry (born 1936 in New York, lives in New Jersey)
It Can Change …, 1970–71
Installation, slide projection with twenty black-and-white slides
Courtesy: Collection Generali Foundation, Vienna
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The slide work It Can Change counts among Robert Barry’s Word Lists pieces, created between 1970 and 1971. These works are comprised of a series of words or sentences where, with each new word, the meaning is expanded, shifted, or routed in another direction. What is being described here always remains vague.

(Text:)
IT CAN CHANGE  / IT HAS VARIETY / IT DOESN’T HAVE A SPECIFIC TIME / IT IS NOT IN ANY SPECIFIC PLACE / SOME OF IT IS FAMILIAR / SOME OF IT IS STRANGE / SOME OF IT IS UNKNOWN / SOME OF IT CAN NEVER BE KNOWN  / SOME OF IT COULD BE KNOWN; BUT NEVER WILL BE / THERE IS ALWAYS MORE OF IT BEING REVEALED / DESCRIPTIONS OF IT ARE INCOMPLETE / SOME OF IT CANNOT BE DESCRIBED / SOME OF IT IS COMMON KNOWLEDGE / ITS ORIGIN IS INDETERMINATE / IT CAN COMPLETELY CHANGE IN AN INSTANT / IT IS OPEN TO NEW POSSIBILITIES / IT CAN CEASE TO EXIST AT ANY TIME / SOME OF IT NO LONGER EXISTS / SOME OF IT EXISTED BEFORE ANYONE KNEW OF IT / ANY PART MAY CEASE TO EXIST AT ANY TIME AND NEVER RETURN

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (born 1940 in Vechta, died 1975 in London)
Der Film in Worten (Film in Words), 1982; Erkundungen für die Präzisierung des Gefühls für einen Aufstand: Reise. Zeit. Magazin (Reconnaissances for the Specification of Feeling for an Uprising: Travel. Time. Journal), 1987; Schnitte (Cuts), 1988
Courtesy: Archive Iris Dressler / Hans D. Christ
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Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s posthumously published collage editions present complex text-image montages. These montages operate with repetitions and shifts or disruption and revival of personal thoughts and impressions, on the one hand, and snatches of language and imagery from pop culture and mass media, on the other. Terms and expressions like “imaginary barricades,” “whence have you come,” “paralyzed,” “flashback,” “cut,” “sequel,” or “Kodak-colored smile” repeatedly appear. Through linguistic convolutions, Brinkmann communicates and shifts meaning and sensory order:
" (…) /: I was totally torn, between listening, because I heard something different than I saw, and I smelled something different than I sensed, and I thought something different than I felt, and I felt something different than I saw, and I saw something different than I smelled, and I smelled something different than I thought, and I thought something different than I heard/ (…)” (excerpted from Schnitte, p. 8).

Mircae Cantor (geb. 1977 in Rumänien)
 
Vertical Attempt, 2009
Video, 1'
Courtesy: Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris
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A young boy is sitting on a sink next to a running water faucet. He uses a pair of scissors to slice into the spouting water. His cutting motion correlates with the cut of the film, thus terminating the one-second-long video. Here the cut marks both the gap and the link—the suture—of the filmic loop.

Io, 2009
Diptych, photographs, bw, each 20 x 30 cm
Courtesy: Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris
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This diptych shows nearly identical photographs of a small boy who is gazing out the window of a train toward a tunnel. At first glance it appears to be one and the same image—one positive and one negative exposure. But in actuality, the first picture shows the situation just before the train arrives at the tunnel and the second picture the moment before it departs the tunnel again. The acts of entering and exiting, juxtaposed side by side, are short-circuited to create a kind of imaginary loop.

Carlfriedrich Claus (born 1930 in Annaberg, died 1998 in Chemnitz)
Aggregat K, 1988 / 1993
Reprint (reduced in size by 70 percent) of the 1988 edition comprising eighteen sheets, eight envelopes, and two leporellos, published by Gerhard Wolf Janus press GmbH, Berlin
Courtesy: Archiv Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
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In his graphic and audio works, Carlfriedrich Claus fathoms the boundaries between language, drawing, text, and sound. He creates conceptual landscapes from intervolving textures, ranging from cryptic symbols to phrasal sequences, albeit hardly decipherable ones. The portfolio Aggregat K, which encompasses sheets of paper printed on both sides and transparencies, as well as leporellos printed on only one side, initiates a complex interplay of possible creations spawned through folding, superimposition, and layered formations. Here Claus explores the possibilities of nonverbal communication, thus orbiting the conflicting relationships between vacuity and form, chaos and gestalt, stagnation and movement, coding and decryption.

Sigmund Freud (born 1856 in Freiberg in Mähren [Austrian Empire at the time], now the Czech town of P?íbor, died 1939 in London)
Der Moses des Michelangelo (The Moses of Michelangelo), 1914
Published in Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften III (1914), pp. 15–36. English translation published as Sigmund Freud “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London, 1955), pp. 209–28.
www.clas.ufl.edu/users/burt/filmphilology/FreudMoses.pdf
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Aided by a graphic animation of The Moses of Michelangelo, drafted according to his instructions, Sigmund Freud pursued a unique reading of this work. It shows Moses at the end of a “stormy movement” (Freud), which starts with him turning to the spectacle surrounding the Golden Calf and his related anger and ends with the repression of his burst of emotion—just in time to save the Tables of the Law, which are lodged under his right arm, from falling. Michelangelo can thus be said to have interpreted Holy Scripture as he saw fit: in lieu of a wrathful Moses caught up in the act of shattering the Tables of the Law in the heat of passion, he shows a heroic prophet who is initially torn between law and passion before ultimately reining in his temper to welcome the law. “Nor will he throw away the Tables so that they will break on the stones, for it is on their especial account that he has controlled his anger; it was to preserve them that he kept his passion in check” (Freud). In his essay Über das Zaudern (On Hestitation), Joseph Vogl takes up this line of interpretation by Freud. According to Vogl, it was not Michelangelo but the psychoanalyst himself who attempted to revise this biblical narrative, and not least because of a misunderstanding. Freud quite obviously misreaded the prophet’s two horns—the iconographic equivalent of a radiant nimbus—which anchor Michelangelo’s Moses in the narrative of the second (and not the first, as per Freud) descent from Mount Sinai. This was after the dance related to the Golden Calf and his burst of anger. So it is Freud himself who stops and detains Moses and who introduces an “exemplary blockade in the biblical text” (Vogl 2008, p. 20).

Herbordt / Mohren
(Bernhard Herbordt born 1978 in Würzburg;  Melanie Mohren born 1979 in Bonn; live in Stuttgart)

Alles was ich habe #4: Reden (All I Have #4: Speeches), 2011
Publication
Courtesy: The artists
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All I Have is a long-term research and archive project appearing in formats between exhibition and performance. It collects, transforms, and rearranges both fragments of a potential act of living together and practices for another future. After several series of interviews with scientists, journalists, activists, and artists, All I Have #4: Speeches drafts a map of something that is about to arrive and explores how language creates reality through action and how individuals position themselves in it through speech.

Die Institution, 2013
Video, 8’31’’
Business card
Durational Performance, Römerstraße 2, Stuttgart, July 4–14, 2013; Intervention, Württembergischer Kunstverein, July 4–14, 2013
www.die-institution.org
Courtesy: The artists
Design of the publication and business card: Demian Bern
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Taking the form of a durational performance, The Institution stages an institution for ten days. It is a home, a public laboratory, and an imaginary multimedia concept. It revolves around the promise of another social relationship and focuses on the model of an institution which integrates what has been excluded—yet which must stay temporarily, so as to not become authoritarian once again.

Runa Islam (born 1970 in Dhaka, lives in London)
Dead Time, 2000
16mm, 5 min.
Courtesy: The artist and White Cube, London
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Dead Time shows the face of a woman who is staring into space, filmed slightly from below. This scene is followed by a pan across a diffuse urban panorama, before the camera takes an interior view, where it is first trained on the closed shades of a window. From here it moves across the room, displaying but weak foregrounding and depth of field, and finally comes to rest on the head of a woman leaned upon a table. Her face is mirrored in the shiny, polished tabletop, upon which she subsequently spins a golden ring like a top, drawing the gaze of the camera to capture its strongly time-lapsed gyrations in the closing sequence. In parallel to the projection, a gradually swelling melody arises to which the spinning sounds of the revolving ring are seamlessly attuned. The title of the piece makes reference to a filmic narrative technique developed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The technique takes advantage of “dead time,” or uneventful moments, to allow transitions between the real world and imaginary images or dream sequences to play out in this state of suspension. Runa Islam divests this method of any manner of definable narration and uses it to construct a self-referential, helical movement revolving around itself.
 
Anna K. E. (born 1986 Tiflis, lives in New York)
Cultural Catalyst That Drives the Popular Dialogue Globally, 2012
Video (http://vimeo.com/55451930)
Courtesy: The artist, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
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The camera shadows the pointe shoes of the artist, who is aimlessly meandering through her studio to classical music.

Gerald van der Kaap (born 1959, lives in Amsterdam)
Hong Kong: Reporter, 1998
Video
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The loop created from a brief video fragment shows the face of a reporter who is incessently rubbing her hands across her face to loosen it up before she goes on air to moderate.

Mobile Academy (Hannah Hurtzig / Karin Harrasser / Chris Kondek)
Joseph Vogl: Über das Zaudern (Joseph Vogl: On Hesitation), 2008
Film installation, ca. 60 min.
Produced as Nachtlektion Nr. 1 (Night Lesson No. 1) in the scope of Manifesta 7, Trento
Courtesy: Mobile Academy
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In this video, Joseph Vogl speaks of dithering as a shadow of action that is more than just a cessation of movement: pausing and hesitating make it possible to experience time and history to begin with, and it essentially contributes to stimulating a sense of potentiality. “Like a submerged theme or anathema, hesitation seems to leave a strangely blurred trail that comes into sharp focus wherever—in the long history of the West—a culture of action and a culture of work are refracted and reflected on. Hesitation accompanies the imperative of action and making things happen like a shadow, like ruinous opponent. One could speak here of a hesitation-function …” (http://www.mobileacademy-berlin.com/englisch/2008/nightless01.html)

Christian Morgenstern (born 1871 in Munich, died 1914 in Meran)
The Snail's Monologue
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"Shall I dwell in my shell? / Shall I not dwell in my shell? / Dwell in shell? / Rather not dwell? / Shall I not dwell? / Shall I dwell, / dwell in shell, / shall I shell, / shallIshhIsallIshellIshallI...?
(The snail gets so entangled with his thoughts, or, rather, the thoughts run away with him so that he must postpone the decision.)"

Anna Oppermann (born 1940 in Eutin, died 1993 in Celle)
Ersatzproblem am Beispiel Bohnen (Substitute Problem by Way of the Example Beans), 1968–77
Ensemble, interpretating installation
Plant referenced: beans
Topic, keywords: hysteria, sense of nature among middle-class citizens, reflective nature of drawing, interpretation of symbols and ambiguity of symbols, substitute problems
Courtesy: Estate Anna Oppermann, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
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Anna Oppermann saw the world, human relationships as “ensembles”: as arrangements consisting of perceptions of and reflections on events, norms, stories, emotions, and theories. She observed her own everyday life as well as that of those around her very closely, seeking out objects, images or concepts in which she saw metaphors for its absurdities and areas of conflict. She drew, photographed, painted, and described them in detail, collected texts and quotes, and finally arranged all of the parts as still lifes. She subsequently captured the arrangements from alternating perspectives and in varying constellations and added these new views to the arrangements. In this way, her ensembles successively grew out into the surrounding space.

Dan Perjovschi (born 1961 in Sibiu, lives in Bucharest)
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Dan Perjovschi’s bitingly ironic drawings, jotted down in just a few strokes, are widely known. They offer commentary both on the general craziness of everyday life and on short-term political events. In the year 2000 he was invited by Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ to make a contribution to the Zaudern (Dithering) issue of Artic magazine. Shown in the present exhibition is the insert created at that time along with a series of the artist’s current drawings.

Lia Perjovschi (born 1961, lives in Bucharest)
Mind Maps, 1999 till today
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Lia Perjovschi’s installations are based on her International Archive of Contemporary Art, compiled since the nineteen-nineties. Besides catalogues and documentation, it also contains merchandise articles from museum shops all over the world, popular-scientific publications, and much more. The artist presents this archive in ever-changing constellations, accompanied by her complex mind maps. In the exhibition On Dithering, she is showing a selection of these mind maps.

Andreas Schulze (born 1965 in Leipzig, lives in Leipzig)
U.S. Trilogy (Vegas, A Los Angeles Story, Outside New York City), 2006–2011
Three-part photo series, black-and-white
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The U.S. Trilogy encompasses three photo series that are now being shown in Stuttgart for the first time: Vegas, A Los Angeles Story, and Outside New York City. Each series is comprised of open arrangements of sober black-and-white photographs that show people, objects, and desolate indoor or outdoor areas. The spaces, façades, and objects usually appear close-up, as a fragment, mere surface, or pattern. The chilliness and emptiness of these images is disrupted by a few faces charged with emotion, which, however, reflect not personalities but rather pictorial clichés.
The relationships between the protagonists, spaces, and objects remain vague, caught up in latency, in mere possibility. The gaze is consistently riveted on something that seems meaningful, yet which simultaneously conceals its meaning. Each action, each event, each oddity insinuated here is readily retracted, seeming to be only residual, like the remnants of what has transpired.

Stefanie Seibold 
(born 1967 in Stuttgart, lives in Vienna)

Sapphic Modernism I (An Archive of Feelings), 2013
Objects (2 folding screens), 2 collages, new production, co-produced by Württembergischer Kunstverein
Supported by Schreinerei Seibold, Stuttgart
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Two projection screens for imaginary pictures. Objects that simultaneously present themselves and withdraw again, hinting at an “in-between” space, with no clear front or back. Or even if so, the behind is always more exciting than the front. In the early twentieth century, the paravent—or “Spanish wall”—was positioned, with its modern concept, in the tradition of the applied arts and interior design, especially tropes of modernist female artistic activity. In both its Western and original Far Eastern origins, the paravent was also posited in “theatrical” tradition—hiding, dressing up, make believe, and conveying erotic promises. An undefinable, queer non-place. An in-between. (Stefanie Seibold)
Stefanie Seibold examines in her artistic work forms of social performativity and possibilities of its transformation and resignification. …She appropriates images and texts from the heterogeneous areas of the mainstream, subculture but also of the avant-garde and weaves them together in form of a subjective archive. Her interest aims at building spaces that question strategies of visibility as well as defer fixed areas of meaning in order to develop and provide new narrative structures. (Peggy Buth)?

Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag (born 1965 in Lübeck, lives in Berlin)
sundogs // Nebensonnen, 2011
HD video, two-channel sound, 24 min.
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The video installation sundogs // Nebensonnen is based on a musical piece composed by Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag for Peter Carp’s production of Winterreise by Elfriede Jelinek. The latter piece, in turn, harks back to Franz Schubert’s eponymous song cycle of 1827, which integrates poems by Wilhelm Müller.
Analogue to Jelinek’s text, where fragments of Müller’s poem series appear in Jelinek’s convolutions of seemingly endless monologue, Sonntag takes up two motifs from Gute Nacht (Good Night) and Wegweiser (Signpost) respectively. He distorts and overextends them on the piano and alpine horn until they fade away, amid soundscapes of contrabass and other strings, in a seemingly boundless flow of crescendo and diminuendo. These psychoacoustic simulations of endlessly rising and falling noise, already cultivated by Sonntag in 1993, are based on a manipulation of turning points, which, similar to the Möbius strip or Escher’s stairs, can never be resolved.
Continuous musical progression establishes the foundation for the audio-visual composition. The visual film material is uncut and unedited. It shows a landscape that is rapidly speeding by, which is repeatedly disrupted by hints of urban and industrial surroundings. Filmed with a strong contre-jour effect, the landscape seems almost graphic in nature. The only fixed point is the close-up remoteness of the sun’s glaring disc at the center of the picture.

Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet,
(Straub: born 1933 in Metz, lives in Rom, Paris; Huillet: born 1936 in Paris, died 2006 in Cholet)
En Rachâchant, 1982
16 mm on Digi-Beta, bw, language: french, 6:55 Min.
Courtesy: L'Agence du court métrage, Paris

En Rachâchant tells the story of a little boy named Ernesto who refuses to go to school because the school teaches things he doesn’t know. It refers to a children’s story by Marguerite Duras.