Natalie Häusler

Q: Under what circumstances does the poem emerge?

A: Assuming a world exists? Bodies and a language. A speaker and a receiver who share that language.

Among the earliest known writing surfaces are tablets coated in beeswax or unfired clay. Both materials are highly receptive, and thus well-suited for inscription with a stylus; in addition, marks made in clay and wax are 'erased' with relative ease, and tablets can be quickly resurfaced and subsequently reused. Such malleability made them an economical solution for the scribes, amanuenses and other slaves of antiquity whose job it was to take dictation from their masters, recording and temporarily storing information – such as accounts and inventories – too transitory to either carve in stone or commit to costly papyrus scrolls. Not all inscription was so instrumental, however: personal correspondence, notes and even hymns have been discovered scrawled into these ancient surfaces. Drawings, too.

While archaeological evidence suggests that the use of ceramic tablets began to diminish as early as the Bronze Age, beeswax surfaces remained commonly in use well into the medieval period, and according to some accounts as late as the mid-19th century, by which time wax had been industrially recomposed into petroleum-based paraffin, and given application in different (if not entirely so) methods of inscription.

In his 1919 essay entitled ‘Primal Sound’, Rainer Maria Rilke writes of a science experiment undertaken during his childhood:

our science master… encouraged us to try our skill in making [a phonograph] from the material that lay nearest to hand. Nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to bottle fruit. This provided a vibrating membrane, in the middle of which we struck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. With these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. It now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle. I do not remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the best of our ability. …what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder.

Several years later, while studying anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the poet identifies by way of a “rhythmic peculiarity of imagination” an analogous set of markings in the skull’s coronal suture, the junction formed between the two parietal bones and the frontal bone of the cranium. He speculates that these mysterious marks might too be played like the wax cylinder of his childhood phonograph. In this nameless inscription, a poet who thinks the human through the non-human language of things envisions a kind of writing without writers – a primal sound surpassing voice.

Rilke, however, is discontent. For to “complete” the coronal suture's cipher in such a way would present yet another problem: that of the transfer of experience from one sense to another. In order to render the world in sufficient clarity and detail, he argues, the modern European poet must isolate the five senses such that each sector may be individually developed and extended toward the immaterial plane – or put differently, the eternal domain of the poem. As if experience was distributed through human technological innovation and discrete media channels. Knowledge of these sensory rifts is, Rilke adds, the poet's privileged burden. Which is why, remarking on the opinions of “a lady” who perceives in his radical phonography a “wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses,” nothing short of “the presence of mind and grace of love... the sublime reality of the poem,” the renowned author mansplains that rather than giving proof of love, the transfer of sense suggested by primal sound actually risks the “splendid danger” of the lover who, situated at the center of the known and the incomprehensible, is overwhelmed by an abundance of simultaneous sensory impressions that lack any individual character. More simply put, poems risk becoming noise. Such spatial and sonic dislocation of course will not do, lest poems lie vulnerable to the contingencies of time. Because love (like politics) is fleeting, proclamations made under its influence cannot endure poetry's non-temporal requirements. Nothing real can pass through its filter. But in offering vocalizations to reorient the very senses that it previously separated, the phonograph needle promises a miracle to the poet lost in feeling: the time-stamp of the work of art.

Nearly sixty years later, following the efforts of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, Canadian sound-poet Steve McCaffery redistributed voice along another axis in ‘Sound Poetry – A Survey': the cut-up ‘voice-time’ of magnetic audiotape. “Voice becomes a point of departure rather than the point of arrival,” he writes. “The tape recorder, however, allows speech – for the first time in its history – a separation from voice.” Whereas the traces on a wax cylinder, and to a certain extent the coronal suture, preserve a certain amount of temporal continuity, the ‘primal sound’ of audiotape emerges from its spatial properties for multiplication and recombination, non-linear recording and playback. (McCaffery's own work, as well as that of The Four Horsemen group in which he was a member, often features aggressive, 'primal' vocalizations that are as evocative of punk as they are of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics with which he is often associated.) Just two years after French writer and theorist Hélène Cixous famously proposed the development of an écriture féminine, writing that inscribes into language the specificities of female embodiment and sexual difference, the modernist male dream of separating speech, voice and body had achieved fruition. Liberated from the particularities of bodies and the real-time of performance – i.e. its semantic content – the poem had at last been overtaken by the machine.

As they encode sound into binary sequences of presence and absence, today’s digital recording technologies transform speech, voice and body numerically, returning them in a sense to the accounts and inventories of antiquity; the master’s voice mingling with the computer-generated speech of so-called ‘digital assistants’ (whose names, not coincidentally, are gendered). More strangely perhaps, the poem has once again found a home in the real-time of live-performance, and a body of sorts in allegory. As Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman argue in their 2009 book Notes on Conceptualisms, if allegory builds toward an idea, then “all conceptual writing is allegorical writing.” To read or otherwise experience a written work, therefore, becomes unnecessary as long as one 'gets' the idea. Like Rilke, who a century before imagined a mechanized reading of the human skull, Place and Fitterman localize a system that transcends the material plane of somatic experience: that of information.

From coronal suture phonography to magnetic audiotape and the algorithm, the history of the poem as a form of storage and retrieval for the human voice is, like so many tablets of clay and wax, smoothed over and resurfaced. Presaged several years prior by Roland Barthes in a well-known essay for Avalanche magazine, the body of the author is supplanted by the image of a reader, discrete and autonomous poems by disseminated and networked texts. Given this historical schema, it is fair to wonder: what became of the reader's body? Under late-capitalism's semiotic regime of value creation, information technologies and data harvesting, sense experience is something of a premium; and the poem's domain is no longer the lofty realm of the eternal, but an earth-bound abjection that is both economic and social (so-called Instapoets notwithstanding). Precarious and fragile, poems at present require communities, architectures and environments to support them. In such a context, any attempts to attest to their reality, sublime or otherwise, may depend precisely on following the voice of Rilke's anonymous “lady” interlocutor. That is to say, by restaging their relationship to reception, the contingencies of embodiment, time, and sense experience – in other words, their “presence of mind and grace of love.” 

In her work, Ecology – Sunrise of the Heart (2018), German artist and poet Natalie Häusler does just this. Viewers are invited to step two at a time onto a hexagonal platform comprising varicolored rhomboidal tiles saturated with organic and mineral-based pigments. Echoing her sculpture Aquascape (Mountain I) (2018), an underwater environment supported by a plinth of hand-painted ceramic tile, the platform resembles a positive cast of a dried lake bed or an ancient sea floor, its surface indexed with what appear to be the fossilized remains of aquatic life: algae, kelp and sponges but also – incongruously – sheets of beeswax. With so many textures underfoot, standing on the platform becomes a challenge (at times painful), as does maintaining a steady balance; one must proceed with care. At various points on the hexagon, men's voices penetrate the installation's ambient soundscape (a separate composition in six-channel surround sound played on studio monitors) of field-recordings featuring chimes and flowing water. Emanating from ultrasonic speakers overhead, these uncannily proximate voices (rendered audible in the interference patterns created when two high-frequency waves collide with a listener’s body) dispassionately recite peculiar strings of words:

A sexual orbit is: the most penetrating of the three basic types of ionizing radiation;

A solar hormone is: the energy in a system that is available to perform useful work;

A daughter cell is: located in the Santa Monica mountains between the city of Malibu and the city of Los Angeles, California, and is one of the world’s largest open space preserves inside an urban enclosure;

and so on. What at first glance appears to be among Häusler's least 'poetic' works (at least in the conventional sense), upon further hearing reveals a series of ecopoetical operations.

Ecopoetics is a term that emerged in the late 20th century to describe a broad range of contemporary approaches to poetry with focus on relationships between human beings and their environment – from work addressing environmental injustice to the human capacity for becoming-animal. Often eschewing traditional forms of Nature writing in favor of “creative-critical edges between writing and ecology,” such approaches tend toward the interdisciplinary and experimental, for instance, modeling non-human communication systems, feedback, or even quotidian practices such as recycling. Described in somewhat simpler terms by Jonathan Skinner, editor of the influential journal ecopoetics (2001-2009), “'Eco' here signals – no more, no less – the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. 'Poetics' is used as poiesis or making... Thus ecopoetics: a house making.”

Like much of Häusler's work, Ecology's 'house' is thick with strangeness, pitching the viewer into a field of somatic and lexical discontinuities that replace one another incessantly. For this intermedia environment, the artist has appropriated the geometry of honeycomb, as well as terms from The Dictionary of Ecology and Environmental Science (1993) – a reference book aimed at compiling and standardizing vocabulary around environmental concerns such as pollution, endangered species and waste disposal. Here, freighted pairs such as 'air quality' and 'gamma radiation' (terms that flank the gallery's main hall in the form of silkscreen prints on fabric stretched over stretcher bars) are decoupled and recombined at random by a computer program; these new terms are then re-attached to chance definitions, generating combinations that have no logical, factual or 'natural' consistency. Topanga Canyon, whose definition is cited above, might thus become a device for measuring the depth of the ocean, a type of fog, or a carnivorous plant.

The contradiction staged here between the urgencies evoked by the term 'ecology', and the non-instrumentality embodied by any poem, spans discursive rifts separating our present moment from that of the dictionary's publication, a mere twenty-five years prior. Terms such as 'Alpine Tundra', or 'Arctic Sea Smoke' become as unstable as their real-world referents following nearly three decades of global warming and climate change. Notably absent, moreover, are terms such as 'anthropocene', 'colony collapse', and 'sustainability' that have in recent years entered into the vernacular – for English-speakers, at any rate. Instead, one hears of 'cloud therapy', 'inclusive fitness', and 'conceptual camouflage', a strangely Californian vocabulary at once semiotically abundant, yet semantically deficient. But unlike, for example, poems generated using N+7 – a procedure which substitutes every noun in a source-text with the noun appearing seven entries ahead in the dictionary – Ecology's composition is dynamic. Its 'voice-time' is in a constant state of flux, ensuring that the language doesn't ossify into jargon, or congeal into genres such as satire or critique. Indeed, the combinations that it yields aren't particularly absurd or undermining. Rather, they take on a generative quality of potential as they elaborate new affinities and networks of association.

At stake then in these acts of naming and renaming is not only human relationships to scale, speed, temporality, and complexity, but epistemology as well – our ways of knowing and engaging with the world at large. Points, in Rilkean terms, at which the known and the incomprehensible converge. That Ecology should call into question modern desires to isolate, rationalize and fix objects – including human language, voice and sense perception – within empiricist frameworks is, therefore, fundamental to its poiesis, which owes as much to Ovid as it does to Oulipo. For taken up here are precisely the forms of relationship that are situated by embodied experience: what can be intuited, felt and transmitted, but not exhaustively or quantitatively known. Call it Nature, the unconscious, or even primal sound. Triangulating sight, hearing and touch, Häusler's work distributes orders of attention where such alterity might be received.

However, in its lexical fragmentation, ambient sounds, and disembodied voices, Häusler's environment doesn't attempt to restore, express or simulate the full range of sensory experience; such approaches would be too naïve, coherent or spectacular. The colors and geometries don't symbolize a premodern utopia or model a future homeostasis; if anything, the platform seems to mark catastrophe. Following Jacques Lacan, the Real that it posits is registered in dialogue with cybernetic systems, media technologies, and other 'communication effects' that in his lecture 'Pleasure and Reality' (one of Häusler's references for this exhibition) the psychoanalyst compared to the experience of eating honey in bed. Neither strictly a raw, unmediated mass, nor – as is the case with phonograph needles and wax cylinders – an undifferentiated stream of flows, it is rather a matter of both-and. Not only are distinct sensory sectors brought to bear on viewers' bodies, but the distances that separate them as well – the knowledge of which was once solely the possession of European (white, male) poets. As in meditation practices that cultivate states of bare awareness in which sensation is met openly and without judgment, viewers are immersed in instances of heightened receptivity: an abundance of simultaneous sense impressions that cannot be easily reconciled or neatly resolved in a single idea, term, or 'channel'. On the contrary, oriented and disoriented by these oscillations of surplus and deficit, viewers here modulate between cognitive and affective states. Or, somewhat more lyrically, between presence of mind and grace of love. Sunrise of the heart, indeed.

“Sex,” as Häusler writes in her book-length poem ‘Corals’ (2015) “is the ecology of the poem.” When read alongside concerns in Sunrise of the Heart, this rather provocative line suggests that the poem can only emerge in encounters between bodies broadly defined – in the worldly eroticism and pleasure of being-together, to and for one another, that is continually formed and transformed through language. Indeed, it is through such a reciprocity of life and language that poems are realized, and enter into relationship with the different organisms, processes, and structures (more often than not of a provisional sort) by which they are supported. Like coral – or honeycomb for that matter – this becoming-form is radically vulnerable. In environments that localize the poem's agency in the bodies of its receivers, Häusler's work figures it as co-emergence. For voice alone makes neither for a house, nor the mouth's most splendid dangers. As the Needles, California-born poet Alice Notley (a favorite of the artist) aptly puts it, “this is the body speaking – the physiology of my vision is also clouds & sky & grass & paintings. My skin makes words – fingertip and tongue. Let’s touch tongues.” 

“Honey is either very hard or very fluid. If it's hard, it is difficult to cut, since there are no natural breaks. If it's very liquid, it is suddenly all over the place - I assume that you are all familiar with the experience of eating honey in bed at breakfast time.” 1

‘Natalie Haeusler. Honey’ is the fourth solo show in KIT’s (Kunst im Tunnel / Kunsthalle Duesseldorf) 11-year history, which given its extraordinary architecture and scale presents both a challenge and a particular opportunity for young artists.

Natalie Haeusler’s (1983-) intensive engagement with the tunnel architecture began over a year ago. Her artistic approach involves conceiving spaces or environments in which objects and languages come together organically. Painting and the written word in dialogue constitute her point of departure situated between poetry and visual art. In the process of creating a work, she integrates sculptural, painterly, functional and sound elements.

The ‘Roman de la Rose’ (1230/75), a medieval French allegorical poem on the art of love, was a highly popular text in its own day and provoked one of the first documented instances of feminist literary criticism. The poem’s plot consists of a lengthy dream that plays out within a walled (pleasure) garden, initiating readers into the art of courtly love through a number of ingenious allegories wherein the rose represents female sexuality.

Haeusler created an enclosed garden, loosely associated with the medieval original text, in which a number of states of consciousness are embodied through images, objects and sound. These allegorical figures are developed in a contemporary re-writing and textual transformation of a variety of source texts, that the artist has encountered during her literary research. At the same time, however, the works incorporate themes such as naturopathic treatments, ecology and reform movements.

In her work, ‘Ecology – Sunrise of the Heart’ (2018), viewers are invited to step two at a time onto a hexagonal platform comprising varicolored rhomboidal tiles saturated with organic and mineral-based pigments. Echoing the sculpture ‚Aquascape (Mountain I)’ (2018), an underwater environment supported by a plinth of hand-painted ceramic tile, the platform resembles a positive cast of a dried lake bed or an ancient sea floor, its surface indexed with what appear to be the fossilized remains of aquatic life: algae, kelp and sponges but also – incongruously – sheets of beeswax. At various points on the hexagon, men's voices penetrate the installation's ambient soundscape (a separate composition in six-channel surround sound played on studio monitors) of field-recordings featuring chimes and flowing water. Emanating from ultrasonic speakers overhead, these uncannily proximate voices (rendered audible in the interference patterns created when two high-frequency waves collide with a listener’s body) dispassionately recite peculiar strings of words:

“A sexual orbit is: the most penetrating of the three basic types of ionizing radiation;

A solar hormone is: the energy in a system that is available to perform useful work;

A daughter cell is: located in the Santa Monica mountains between the city of Malibu and the city of Los Angeles, California, and is one of the world’s largest open space preserves inside an urban enclosure;” 2

Like much of Haeusler’s work, ‘Ecology’s’ ‘house’ is thick with strangeness, pitching the viewer into a field of somatic and lexical discontinuities that replace one another incessantly.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the work ‘Bethsabée reste au bains’ (2013/18), which can be seen as an extension of the fountain in medieval garden architectures.

The basin measuring ten meters long and two meters wide is a Kneipp bath filled with knee-high, ice-cold water, which also functions as a sound sculpture. This special form of bath was developed by Sebastian Kneipp for hydro-therapy around the end of the nineteenth century. Kneipp therapy additionally includes the use of herbal extracts, exercise and dietary recommendations, thereby aligning itself with the ‘Lebensreform’ movements that developed around the same time in opposition to industrialisation.

The basin’s tiled exterior was made by the artist, applying a single letter on each unfired tile by hand, which was then covered with a purple craquelling glaze. In doing so, she created a continuous text in which the letters resemble watercolors. The graphic symbols inscribed under the glaze seem to swim, visually enhancing the presence of water.

Haeusler’s poem ‘Bethsabée reste au bains’ is a re-writing of the biblical story of Bathsheba and King David. While Bathsheba plays a rather passive role in the original text, in Haeusler’s version she becomes the main protagonist, driving the action in her own particular way:

“Devastated / she went / underwater. / Underwater / she couldn’t / smell anything anymore, / which was exactly / what she aimed for./ But he was still waiting / at the edge of the pool / with his letter, / this king on a mission/ to be and to make history, / while she wanted/     to smell nothing, / which was / a very different aim / of course. / The water was /like a skin surrounding her skin, / while she was / like a gap within / this liquid, / her body an interruption of the     allover. / She knew well then / how to make use / of her solid state, / and finally felt / that she understood / the advantages of being / a lump of flesh, / feeling the contact / with each thing in a different way, / and feeling herself differently / depending on what she was touched by. / Then the water turned upside down and she found herself in an oval shaped room. It seemed as if she had in fact, in some way, traveled through the swimming pool to another place. Lack of oxygen must have caused this architectural space to take shape, the double oval ∞.” 3

---
1 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960), Seminar VII.  
    Porter trans., Routledge, London, 1992, p.19.
2 Natalie Häusler, excerpt from ‘ECOLOGY - Sunrise of the Heart’, 2017/18
3 Natalie Häusler, excerpt from ‘Bethsabée reste au bains’, 2013/18



Natalie Haeusler. Honey
KIT Duesseldorf
23.06.2018 – 23.09.2018

AUCH ICH BIN IN ARKADIEN GEWESEN 1
veröffentlicht im Magazin  Von Hundert

Aus der Perspektive des Freundes und Modells für eine Skulptur zu schreiben ist eine Perspektive auf die Arbeit die privater und komplexer nicht sein könnte. Sie erzeugt Unbehagen. Der Literaturwissenschaftler Peter Szondi interpretierte 1971 ein Gedicht seines Freundes Paul Celan, dessen Entstehung er als Zeuge beiwohnte. Seine Interpretation ist teils biographischer Bericht, teils Interpretation und bleibt ein Fragment und vergeblicher Versuch. Er bezeugt Zeitgenossenschaft, jedoch eine die auf zeitlichen Verschiebungen, Alterität zwischen Künstler und Kritiker, Kunstwerk und Lebensrealität basiert. Die Temporalität der Zeitgenossenschaft bleibt asynchron2 und ein Zusammenkommen wird immer nur antizipiert.

I.

C: Adah wir müssen gleich zu Lidl, noch einkaufen gehen, ja?/ A: I canʼt go to the motorbike anymore / C: I didnʼt say motorbike, I said Lidl Adah. We are going to Lidl now! We have to buy some food. / A: No! 3

http://npiece.com/natalie-haeusler/works/loving-the-motor-cycle/loving-the-motor-cycle?l=de

Am 6.5.2017 zeichnete Natalie Häusler Interviews mit mir und meinen beiden Töchtern auf. Thema der Gespräche war die Angst meiner jüngsten Tochter Adah vor einem Motorrad in unserem Haus. Die Soundcollage “Loving the motor-cycle”, 2017, 29:12 min, (MP3 Player, Kopfhörer, Motorrad) ist eine Komposition aus Gesprächsfragmenten und Sequenzen ätherischer Synthesizerklänge und Vocals des Tracks “You”, aufgenommen bei einem Konzert der Band “Trumpet Trumpet Synthesizer.”4 Die Auswahl und Neuanordnung des Gesprächsmaterials zeugt von Häuslers soziologischer Herangehensweise an diese Arbeit. Die Protagonisten sind weiblich, vom Kleinkind, zur Jugendlichen bis zur Erwachsenen, sie antworten unvorbereitet auf Fragen der Künstlerin.

Das konkrete Objekt erscheint dabei sowohl in der Ausstellung als auch in der Soundcollage: In der Ausstellung sitzt der Besucher selbst auf einer Honda CRF 250 L Enduro und hört den Sound über Kopfhörer. In der Soundcollage zeichnen zwei Szenen Adahs Begegnung mit dem Motorrad auf. Sie binden die selektiven Ausschnitte aus dem Interview in ein loses Narrativ. Häusler entwickelt dabei eine Form des Schreiben, die soziologisch motiviert, mit unmittelbar aus ihrem Leben genommen Protagonisten arbeitet. Diese verlieren ihren spezifischen biographischen Bezug in der Arbeit. Das Motorrad als Fetisch fordert jedoch die Bindung der Protagonisten zum ausgestellten Objekt repetitiv und kontinuierlich ein. Die Arbeit wird zur pendelnden Meditation über den Zusammenhang zwischen Angst und Obsession, zu einer sich wiederholenden, durch die Maschine vermittelten Auseinandersetzung mit psychischen Zuständen, zyklisch/ hormonell, “motor” und “cycle”. Die szenische Abfolge ist aber auch durch Humor, bildhafte Sprache und den emotional suggestiv changierenden Soundtrack geprägt, so dass sie die Angst und die Faszination mit der Maschine in ein bejahendes “loving” auflöst.

II.

C: Meine Mutter hat ja als ich Jugendliche war immer zu mir gesagt, dass man sich ab und zu mal entpuppt wie so eine Schlange. Das ist so. 5

http://npiece.com/natalie-haeusler/works/the-rhyme/der-reim-slash-the-rhyme?l=de

Im vorigen Jahr hatte Natalie Häusler eine andere Skulptur in enger Verbindung mit einer Soundcollage entwickelt, die eine ähnliche Involviertheit der Protagonisten mit dem Objekt dokumentierte. “Der Reim / The Rhyme”, 2016, 15:17 min, ist ein Extrakt aus ca. 40 Stunden Tonaufnahmen, aufgezeichnet während der Abformung der Körper von Eric und mir für die Skulpturen “Vacuum Bed No.2 (Christine)” und “Vacuum Bed No.1 (Eric)”, (Gips, Latex, Seile, Kabel, Metall, Plastikschlauch, Vakuumpumpe, Timer, 210 x 110 x 50 cm.) Die Skulpturen wurden im Frühjahr 2016 in der Ausstellung “Der Reim/The Rhyme” (Kunstverein Bielefeld, 2016), und dann in einem zweiten Environment dieses Jahr in Berlin in “Hello from Rue Desert” (Supportico Lopez, 2017) gezeigt. Vakuumbetten ähnlicher Bauart werden in der Bondage und BDSM Praxis verwendet. Der gesamte Körper wird hierbei mittels Unterdruck in Latex eingeschlossen. Dafür wird ein Holzrahmen von einer Latexhülle, die durch einen luftdichten Reißverschluss zugänglich gemacht wird, umspannt. Durch ein Ventil kann mit einer Vakuumpumpe die Luft abgesaugt werden, wodurch der Körper in seiner Position fixiert und dadurch eine sensorische Deprivation auslöst wird. In der Skulptur befinden sich in einem ähnlich konstruierten Vakuumbett anstelle eines lebenden Körpers Gipsabdrücke von einzelnen Körperteilen, aber auch vom kompletten Torso. Die Körperfragmente scheinen frei in der Skulptur zu schweben, einige Körperteile tauchen dabei vielfach auf während andere fehlen.

N: You are not the kind of person that wants to be in a vacuum bed? / E: No definitely not. It‘s funny how this must be a very similar experience. / N: Yeah, I think so.6

Die Herstellung der Abgüsse fand im Winter 2015 in Natalie Häuslers Atelier statt. Ich lag auf einer Liege während warme Gipsbinden auf meinen Körper aufgetragen wurden. Ziel dieser Sitzposition war es unter anderem auch ein freies, assoziatives Sprechen anzuregen. Häusler zeichnete unsere Gespräche während dieser Sitzungen auf. Aus diesen Aufzeichnungen wurden einzelne Szenen für die Soundcollage entnommen. Dabei werden Geräusche des Arbeitsvorgangs hörbar. Die Nähe des Mikrofons zum Körper und zum Material generiert eine Atmosphäre der Intimität im Bezug zum Modell, zum Künstler und zur im Entstehen begriffenen Skulptur. Die Lebendigkeit der Protagonisten tritt stark in den Vordergrund – sie lachen, schreien, diskutieren, erheben Einwände, äußern Unbehagen, stellen Fragen – Aspekte, die in der Skulptur selbst nicht sichtbar sind. Sie wird durch die Gespräche verbal umschrieben und gewissermaßen zum Leben erweckt. Die Arbeitsatmosphäre des Ateliers, indirekt kommentiert durch die sich verändernde Musik im Hintergrund, wird von deutsch/ englischen Reimgruppen durchbrochen, abwechselnd rezitiert von Eric oder mir, Wortfelder entstehen, die Bezüge zu völlig unterschiedlichen Bereichen aufblitzen lassen und dabei Mikronarrative erzeugen: Messer, besser, lesser, professor / root, boot, gut, Mut / Bett, fett, nett, rat, mat / wear, care, fair, leer / schreien, lion.7 Die Reimstruktur bindet die Spuren des Arbeitsvorgangs an ein Schema der Lautwiederholung.

Im Objekt selbst ist eine eigene Geschichte der Herstellung schon sedimentiert, die von den spezifischen materiellen Eigenschaften des Vakuumbetts, geprägt wurde. Die Skulptur als Teil der weiterentwickelten Arbeit verliert zunächst den direkten Bezug zum Prozess und dessen Protagonisten. Doch das Vakuumbett soll unmittelbaren Kontakt von Material und Körper ermöglichen und den Körper in seiner absoluten Spezifizität fassen. Dies sind schon selbst die Variablen, die die spezifischen Protagonisten nicht mehr aus der Skulptur eliminierbar machen. Die Vakuumbetten verweisen formal kontinuierlich auf die Spezifität des Körpers, ohne diesen dabei selber als Inhalt zu konstituieren oder ausformulieren zu müssen. Die Komponente des Fetisch überschreibt diese Methode der Reproduktion pathologisch, als eine Form der Zwangshandlung. Sie verankert Lust und Körperempfinden in einem strengen Schema der Wiederholung (= Reim). Die psychopathologische Dynamik ist somit die Ausgangslage für ein in Form verwirklichtes Schema der Wiederholung und Selbstreferentialität.

Die Inklusion von Dokumenten und Spuren des Arbeitsprozesses ist dabei an das selbe Gesetz der Selbstreferentialität und Wiederholung gebunden. Dieses mise en abyme Verfahren, die Verdoppelung und das Selbstzitat der eigenen Arbeit innerhalb des von ihr festgelegten Rahmens, ist aber nicht unbedingt durch genaues Reproduzieren realisiert. Eher verweist die Beschreibung des Entstehungsprozesses das fertige Objekt immer wieder auf seinen noch unfertigen Zustand, in dem die Protagonisten noch eine zentralere Rolle spielten. “[It is a way of] inserting its memory into the piece, letting it think about itself, its past, its youth, middle age, its wetness and dryness.”8 (Robert Morris in seinen Notizen zu “Continuous Project Altered Daily” (1969)) Die Selbstreferentialität wird zu einer Form des Erinnerns, einer Einschreibung von Erlebtem, Biographischem und dem lebendigen Körper in das Material.

Mein Körper, der Symptome produzierte, mein brüchiges Sprechen, unser Denken, ist in den Gips und in diesem Text eingelagert. Das direkte Beschreiben der Szenen des Arbeitsvorgangs, und der Arbeiten wird (Auto)biographie, verweist latent auf meine unstete Körperlichkeit. Wir überleben die Arbeit und uns selbst darin. Es ist eine Art und Weise miteinander zu interagieren mit der wir schon als Teenager experimentiert haben.

Das Environment richtet seine Vektoren, innerhalb des installativen Rahmens, nicht nur auf die im Raum versammelten Elemente, sondern auch auf ihre Vor-und Nachwelt aus. Von Material zu Gespräch, von Skulptur zu Text, suchen sie, in einer zeitlichen Wiederholungsschleife kontinuierlich nach Orten der Formwerdung.

“Work” is amidst change.

It is without predefinition from

a material, from modes that are plugged

in, or attached.

It is not in context with what is

named an “installation”

The air, the light of the sun,

the water, the dialogue of people

can't be affixed or “installed”

What could be called “work” would be

in concert with the whole of work

and with what is in continuous

movement as is language itself. 9

(Maria Nordman, De Sculptura,

Works In The City, 1986)

___

1 Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin und die Tradition des Elegischen, 1936. Panofsky beschreibt die Wandlung des Arkadienmotivs anhand eines Interpretationskonflikts zwischen zwei von Poussins Biographen, die auch mit ihm befreundet waren. Siehe Arkadienmotive, Locus Amoenus in N. Häusler, Hello from Rue Desert (2017)

2 Terry Smith, “The Contemporary Question”, in Ed. T. Smith, O. Enwezor, N. Condee: Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity and Contemporaneity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

3  Auszug aus “Loving the motor-cycle”, 2017, 29:12 min, (MP3 Player, Kopfhörer, Motorrad)

4 Loving the motor-cycle“, 2017, 29:12 min (MP3 Player, Kopfhörer, Motorrad), gezeigt im Rahmen der Ausstellung „Parkplatztreffen 2“ des Kunstverein St. Pauli in Hamburg ist eine Komposition aus Interviews mit Christine Schott und ihren Töchtern Adah und Sonja, die brückenartig verbunden sind durch Aufnahmen eines Livekonzerts der befreundeten Musiker Weston Minissali und Brad Henkel (Trumpet Trumpet Synthesizer, Feb. 2016, Roulette, NY).

5 Auszug aus “Der Reim / The Rhyme”, 2016, 15:17 min

6 Auszug aus “Der Reim / The Rhyme”, 2016, 15:17 min

7 Auszug aus “Der Reim / The Rhyme”, 2016, 15:17 min

8 Robert Morris, “Continuous Project Altered Daily”, Notes by Morris on Thursday March 20, 1969, notebook, Robert Morris Archives, Gardiner, NY, entn

9 Maria Nordman, De Sculptura, Works In The City, S.10 

___

Bildunterschriften 
Bild 1: Loving the motor-cycle, 2017
Installationsansicht, Kunstverein St Pauli, Hamburg 
MP3 Player, Kopfhörer, Motorrad 
29:12 min, Maße variabel

Bild 2: Vacuum Bed No.2 (Christine), 2016 
Installationsansicht, Supportico Lopez, Berlin 
Latex, Gips, Seile, Kabel, Metall, Plastikschlauch,Vakuumpumpe, Timer 
210 x 110 x 50 cm

Bild 3: Im Atelier während der Arbeit an Vacuum Bed No.2 (Christine), Februar 2016

March 4th, 2017 

She is bell and he is beau.
Hello from Rue Desert.

Q: "I'm trying to say that a house is on a deserted dirt road. According to the dictionary, a deserted road is une rue déserte and a dirt road is a chemin en terre. How do I combine these 2? Should I use 'chemin' or 'rue'? And which adjective comes first? Thank you!" 

A: "What you have here is a dirt road, that is deserted. I would use chemin. Chemin is masculine, so désert.
Un chemin de terre désert. Sur un chemin de terre abandonné... ?" [1]

I am constructing environments.

The locus amoenus is subversive but not private. It is not a solitary place, locus solus, but one of sociability. Love making, singing and even storytelling may take place here: See the shepherds of Theokrit, the lovers of Colonna, or the meeting of a group of storytellers in a locus amoenus, fleeing the plague in Boccaccio's Decameron.

The locus amoenus is primordial and quite literary, archaic and mediated through texts, conceived of by poets and architects: Architexture. [2]

The locus amoenus is a focal point of social organization. [3]

It consists of a basic set of recurring elements:
A Tree, A Source of Water, Sunshine, and The Song of Birds.

The (Hello) Tree, a fig tree, is said to have aphrodisiac effects and is also associated with a tendency to attract suicides. Only after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden do they become aware of their own nudity.

The hands of the tree said hi to me. That was obvious.

The exhibition animates a linguistic presence in its environment, yet not one that heavy-handedly carries out a modern conflict of signification and the loss of words’ symbolic power. It is the language of poetry that is active. It has a secret intimacy with the Tree, Sun, Water, who say Hello, and wave their hands. It is a language where form bears meaning and therefore can still relate to the natural world as a place that we talk to. [4]

[1] Conversation taken from a translation blog.
[2] Über Typus und Ort. Protokoll eines Gespräches mit Oswald Matthias Ungers, Lexikon der Linguistik, Locus Amoenus, Just Fernández López
[3] Das Umkippen des 'locus amoenus' in einen 'locus terribilis'., Bettina Schwalb, 2013
[4] Notes on "Hello from Rue Desert", Christine Schott, 2017

__ 

Natalie Häusler, Hello from Rue Desert

Supportico Lopez, Berlin 

4 March – 15 April 2017

March 4, 2017 6-9pm

RoseNose 

Rhyme is how a poem reproduces. Autopoesis occurs as a proliferation of the same, the same sound of a syllable, a word ending. It repeats and differentiates within a narrow phonetic regime. It is the poem’s way of making itself continue, of shuffling through language in order to bring about more itself—form, norm, storm; shocked, mocked, knocked, locked; rose, nose.

The rhymes generated for the work’s sound piece are improvisations; the readers are searching for a next, a possible word that rhymes with the former. Word choice appears to be arbitrary. Content instead arises where sounds and syllables speak as bodies to another, as forms that solidify when they meet their word-opponent. One word is being pushed towards the next, into a continuum that spills language into the future, into the open space.

Two bodies, male and female, are sealed in latex that is smooth and reflective like a mirror. The surface properties of the latex echo those of the PVC strip curtains that are draped in the exhibition space to create areas of enclosure. Growing on the vertical slats that frame these compound structures are thorns, roses and vines; words and calligraphy; NoseRose. Plaster casts of these bodies are enclosed in a latex vacuum bed, which seals the naked body completely, making indi- vidual detail highly visible. It is a form of clothing that reveals everything of the naked body while covering it in its entirety. The nose is covered and air only flows through a small straw that is attached to the mouth.

George Segal’s expanded sculpture “Alice listening to Her Poetry and Music” (1970-71) casts the entire body of poet Alice Notley in a sitting position with one hand cupping her chin. The poet is sitting at a table, listening to the record- ing of her own poems. Poetry here appears as an agent in the work’s temporal expansion. Other than the sculpture, which has achieved the status of an irreproducible, finite object, poetry is being constantly reproduced in space, reread and sent through a loop of repetition that makes it endure in time. It is curious to note, however, that Segal made this sculpture of Alice Notley when she was young. The cast does not preserve the body as a finite, dead form. Rather, it fixes it in a moment of its aliveness, on the brink of its becoming. Notley was still becoming the celebrated poet she is today; Segal memorialized her before that.

In the more recent poem “The Gift” (2015), Alice Notley now remembers speaking to her dead father, whom she con- jures. The poem summons a language that survives, a language that speaks from the other side, from us as we once were, and us awake still, or again. In the audio recording of the reading, Notley adds narrative autobiographical elements. The poem is read repeatedly, and interrupted by conversations with an imagined reader that explains the biographical origin of phrases and words in the poem. The entwinement of these poetic speech registers with a highly personal description of the history of the poem’s creation serves as cue for the formal arrangement of the sound piece in “The Rhyme”. “The Rhyme” reveals remnants of the situation when it was a work in progress. The bodies of friends that were cast in plaster, and the conversations that the artist had with them during the casting sessions now belong to a formally more stringent, metric environment.

It’s the reclining position, lying on the chair like that and having your body patted, patched up and wrapped with warm, moist cloth, that gets you talking. And you can’t stop. We were looking at photographs from when I was 19, just married. When you made casts of my body, my torso and face, my eyes and mouth were sealed, and I could not move my hands or arms. It was black under the cast. I was hoping to get out of this alive, intact. After all I was just starting over.

As participant and observer, I was attempting to intuit the finished work, attempting therefore to intuit the posterity of my body. I would emerge from the cast, living, to see the completed work from the outside. The intuiting body, the one still asleep but about to be awoken to the finished work, is what remains as sculpture, a cocoon always in the state of anticipating its waking to its next, its related form.

Natalie Häusler, Corals

“Sex,” writes German artist and poet Natalie Häusler in her book-length poem Corals “is the ecology of the poem.” Or put differently, a poem can only exist in the relationships between bodies – in the eroticism of being-together that is continually formed and transformed through language. For 'Corals', her second solo-show at Supportico Lopez, Häusler continues her investigations into the relationships between visual-art practice and the poem as a lived phenomena. Using a combination of sound, painting, sculpture and text, 'Corals' proposes an environment in which Häusler's homonymous poem can live.

Like the poem itself – which plays with its homophone 'choral', ebbing and flowing in various directions, using saturated imagery and linguistic shifts in order to explore a diversity of themes such as solitude and symbiosis – Häusler's exhibition presents viewers with a number of fluid forms. Together, the body of works on view coalesce to evoke a nightclub setting – drunkenness, rhythm and sweat. A series of coral-colored doors made from acoustic dampening foam, while referencing notions of access, privacy and silence, stage intimate encounters within the gallery space. Palm-shaped agglomerations of fossilized coral, oysters, bracelets and audio-adapters. Elsewhere, an audio recording of Corals, read by several protagonists who had a role in the poem's emergence, plays inside a bar-like sculpture that features printed excerpts from the poem immersed, along with aquatic plants, in wine bottles. Other works further allude to the act of writing and its affective register as an anonymous message addressed to nothing and no one in particular. “Hugging, nodding, walking.”

A poem might be worthless outside its limited readership, an abject and fragile ornament. But as Häusler suggests, it wants to be warm, to be felt, to be plastic, to be recycled and rejected. It also “wants to be / graveyard.” But not to annihilate itself. The poem wants to remember. When was the last time you left a club and it was morning?

-- 

Natalie Häusler, Corals

2 April – 25 April 2015 

Supportico Lopez 
Kurfürstenstrasse 14/b 
10785 Berlin

Natalie Häusler, Aykan/Casino, 2013, stained glass, speakers, mp3 player, sound, book page from ‘still life’, 78 × 48 × 16 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Supportico Lopez, Berlin; photograph: Hans-Georg Gaul

In The Company of Flesh and Blood:

Approaching sincerity via poetry and art

It was a question of sincerity that, in 1964, prompted then-poet Marcel Broodthaers to announce that he was becoming an artist. For the first time in his life, he claimed, he wanted to make something insincere: ‘I, too, wondered whether I couldn’t sell something and succeed in life,’ he declared in the invitation to his first exhibition. ‘I had, for quite a little while, been good for nothing. I am nearly 40 years old […] The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work at once.’ Broodthaers’s rhetoric doesn’t just suggest visual art’s compromised status, sold as a commodity or an instrument of the culture industry or institutions of state. It also implicitly elevates poetry as neither false nor hypocritical – an invention of the utmost integrity. Unlike artists, poets don’t (or can’t) sell out.

Whether you read Broodthaers’s words as prescient, cynical or naïve, variations on this debate still play out 50 years later. For example, in a recent panel discussion at the Audiatur poetry festival in Bergen, artist and publisher Jason Dodge (who is featured in this issue) remarked that, whereas the market for published poetry is non-existent in comparison, the vast amount of wealth circulating in the art economy has the potential to fuel all kinds of unscrupulous behaviour. Of course, exposure within an art context can help poets reach new and possibly more lucrative markets. During the same discussion – albeit on a somewhat different register – Italian Marxist theorist and art-camp follower Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi advocated for poetic ambivalence against capitalism’s ‘techno-linguistic automatisms’ and cynical attitudes that suppose ethical action to be impossible. While neither Dodge nor Berardi addressed sincerity explicitly, their comments nonetheless described a tendency to exalt the reading and writing of poetry as a possible counter to greed, disillusionment and meaninglessness – a resistant, if not altogether anti-capitalist, position. On the economic periphery, poetry makes the development of a renewed ethics possible, a solidary stance toward other human beings.

Parallelling these sentiments, poet and painter Etel Adnan, in ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ (a text commissioned in 2013 for the Serpentine Gallery), advises that when a person begins to write poetry, ‘you have put your life on the line […] not metaphorically, but in a kind of a tragic honesty’. Tragic, she cautions, because poetry is a sort of destiny; no one would actually choose such a difficult, impecunious existence. Reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s later writings on the Greek concept of parrhesia (or fearless speech), Adnan paints a compelling picture: a young poet embarks on a hero’s journey, and is saved precisely because he or she is damned.

As someone who came to poetry through working as an artist, I’m sympathetic to these ideas. It’s emboldening – although ultimately misguided – to think that writing poetry is a critical solution (if anything, it opens more questions). It’s advantageous to imagine that the reading and writing of poetry can constitute a kind of linguistic rupture in the central nervous system of contemporary capital. Indeed, this emergent politics likely gives a partial account for the enthusiasm with which artists have rediscovered poetry in recent years. The contemporary art world has shown a renewed interest in concrete poetry and ‘conceptual poetics’, fostered in part by Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of the internet archive UbuWeb, as well as the inclusion of work by poets such as Adnan, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines in the most recent Whitney Biennial (the latter two as part of the contribution by the publisher Semiotext(e)). While it’s heartening to imagine a multitude of readers experiencing the challenges and thrills of poetic language, I hesitate. Especially when I see exhibition announcements written in confessional fragments or elliptical free verse.

Since William Wordsworth’s claim in 1802, in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, that ‘poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’, the demand for a coextensivity between avowal and sentiment has become, if not a major poetic value, then at least a premise whose popular acceptance remains contested. In a series of lectures from 1970 titled Sincerity and Authenticity, literary critic Lionel Trilling argued that sincerity as a dominant literary standard had been replaced by a ‘more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in’. In other words: authenticity. Whereas sincerity can be motivated by social norms and relationships – such as considering the demands of another, a public, a market – authenticity emerges instead from the imperative to be true to oneself. (Obviously, as Trilling himself was aware, the ideal of authenticity produces its own norms, such as nonconformity and idiosyncrasy). Marshalled against things like academicism, intertextuality and appropriation, sincerity in writing often appears as an ethical stance of emotional honesty, fidelity to individual experience, and transparent, demotic speech: expressions of one’s being and sensibility. Of course, the way individuals read and appropriate text is partly how a sense of self is constructed. Think of how we receive, interpret and restate different cultural ‘texts’ on topics such as gender, class and race. Boundaries between something like self-realization and external, normative prompts are fluid. Even Wordsworth admitted that poets must occasionally ‘slip into an entire delusion’ while writing.

As a qualitative measure, sincerity also runs aground. It would badly miss the point, for example, to question the sincerity of artist and poet Jimmie Durham’s ‘I Want You to Hear These Words About Jo Ann Yellowbird (Ars Poetica)’ (undated), an elegy for the Native American activist who committed suicide after a police officer’s kick to her stomach caused the stillbirth of her child. On another level, measuring the sincerity of a text by an artist and writer such as Caroline Bergvall, whose work often deals with etymology and changes in language use over time, doesn’t really make sense given the complex historical and performative concerns embedded within it. These kinds of failings are, perhaps, also why today the word ‘poem’ tends to resonate with more dubious ones such as ‘unsophisticated’ or ‘escapist’ or, somewhat less harshly, ‘quirky’, ‘romantic’ and ‘sentimental’. Certainly, many writers lumped under the new sincerity moniker, such as Dorothea Laskey and Tao Lin, can read this way. Others, instead, offer sincerity not as an end but as a means – a lifestyle urging readers to ‘be more awesome’ because ‘you only live once’.

Counter to such practices, the sincerity that I’m interested in makes itself felt as both a rhetorical value and as a mode of address: to paraphrase Wordsworth ‘from one speaker to another’. In this sense, it’s useful to think through how sincerity is modulated, especially in contemporary art, where it tends to appear as both disavowal and appropriation. As in the work of Broodthaers, whose status as an ex-poet tacitly authorized his artistic work, sincerity is full of contradictions, inducing linguistic slippage and opening poetic fault lines. It can even become ironic, as it did during the opening of the exhibition ‘Poetry will be made by all!’, recently on view at the LUMA Foundation in Zurich and organized by Goldsmith, Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist as part of the 89+ project. This two-day event comprised a series of readings by an array of artists and writers from the ‘generation of innovators born in or after 1989’, as well as their older and more established counterparts. Among the younger group of invitees, American artist Dena Yago’s reading was the most overtly sceptical. Wearing an outfit printed with the word ‘SALE’, Yago read poems from her forthcoming book, Ambergris (2014), that she had printed out and affixed to unopened plastic food wrappers, including bags of organic salad and leafy green vegetables. While suggesting that her own writing rests squarely on the surface of things, Yago’s performance also comically rebuked the links to freshness, wholesomeness and even purity that her participation represented. More poignantly, however, Yago – who is also part of the trend-forecasting group K-HOLE – hinted at what is at stake in contemporary art events such as these: namely, the reduction of poetry to a label, a brand, a sign-value.

Admittedly, the art world isn’t wholly to blame for this reductivism. Much can be attributed to the spread, during the last decade or so, of the aforementioned ‘conceptual poetry’ practices that, like conceptualism in visual art, tend to give preference not to the solitary act of reading but rather to devising systems, distribution channels and virtuosity in performance.

In a rebuttal of such moves, German artist, poet and co-founder of American Books, Natalie Häusler, envisions a poem’s performance not as a demonstration of the author’s individual expertise, but as a readerly agency that is given form when spoken aloud. Seldom performed live, Häusler’s poems are typically heard as looped recordings within an exhibition context, either embedded in individual works or as part of a larger installation; the readers are acquaintances and friends who are identifiable only by the sound of their voices (and sometimes their initials). Yet, while composed with others’ voices in mind, Häusler’s poems don’t read like instruction works or scores. Her long poem ‘Impressionisme’ (2013), for example – a 12-hour sound piece featuring several readers from various places around the world – is a quasi-phenomenological investigation that employs a straightforward, descriptive style. Shifting between English, French and German, it is personal and contemplative, containing passages such as: ‘I leave a trace on the ground. I am / breathing, changing therefore the air around me. / All of this is happening at any moment, at least. / Er sagt in seiner Antwort auf den Rilke Text: / «Dieser Malte ist…» Parisis Passes «einfach nur / ein Kleinbürger.» Auch ich bin, denke ich dann, / eine Kleinbürgerin. Nyami 54 passes.’ While listening to the recording, one hears the non-German speakers tentatively making their way through this passage. Conversely, one can also hear the German speakers negotiating with the Englishand French. Being myself a speaker of neither German or French, I receive them mostly as rhythm and tone. Despite its plain address, Häusler’s work calls attention to the slippages of the voice and the poem’s non-denotative meanings, the ways it is re-authored when it comes into contact with different readers. As happens with the names of the passing tourist boats that recur through­out the poem (such as Parisis and Nyami54 in the excerpt above), attention is paid to what takes place when a statement is displaced – when it moves through a foreign context, whether a language or a body.

Indeed, as the Swedish artist and poet Karl Larsson writes in his book Parrot (2010), ‘to a certain extent / an assumed body / (like an exotic bird) / can hold almost any argument / it can be the screen of endless projections’. Also playing with notions of displacement and assumed identity (it was Larsson’s first book written in English), Parrot is both reverent and irreverent, a three-part poem on the artistic work of Broodthaers and, more generally, the application of literary methodology to artistic practice. Austere both in its language and design, Larsson’s book is nevertheless dense with historical and literary references, appropriated text and echoes of the Belgian artist. However, Larsson’s parrot doesn’t speak nonsense; it doesn’t just mimic, make allusions or (half-jokingly) point toward absence. No, this parrot is also serious; it has something to say. But how can such a bird speak for itself? Later on, in the same passage, Larsson provides one answer: ‘it takes a long time / to learn the obvious / and to agree / with the standpoint / that poetry emanates / from silence / when casual living suggests / that all things become / what they are / by being spoken of / parrot / body of words.’

Clearly, the assumed body to which the poem refers is that of poetry itself. Here, poetry does not figure as a conceptual construct or an indiscriminate host for whatever utterance. Rather, in a continual state of emergence, poetry must always find its own form. That is, it not only insists on its materiality and presence, but also on its inheritance as a product of reading. Lines such as ‘To be a poet is to be literal / unaffected by allegory and metaphor / just like a beast / myopic and bad’, while undermining the poet’s visionary status and claims to moral authority, also suggest that, as a way of doing and making, poetry is not always transcendent, but very much implicated in the present – however mundane, messy or impure that may be. Indeed, in the last of the book’s three sections, ‘Torrent’, Larsson reminds us that the concept of sincerity was once used to denote a measure of purity in things and not people: ‘sine (without) / cera (wax) / and the wonders of the hand that gives, / the hand that takes / sculptors / of ancient Greece or Rome / who were skilled enough / not to use wax / to cover the flaws / in their work / sincerity.’ A sculpture can be considered sincere when all its faults appear deliberate. The sincere artist, far from being naïve, is a master of craft.

If sincerity can emerge through style and skilful performance, then this aspect, whether in art or poetry, does not merely take shape with reference to the tragic honesty of self or its ethical coherence. Rather, it gains definition through the complex relationship between author and reader. This is one of sincerity’s most compelling contradictions and, as Trilling pointed out, one of its most enduring problems. It’s also what Broodthaers was saying in his announcement. And Wordsworth too, each time he slipped into delusion. In order to address an outside, artists and poets alike have to break with our identities and speak beyond ourselves; we need spaces and occasions for it. I’m interested in these margins. I’ll seek them in the company of flesh and blood.

First published in FRIEZE, Issue 164

Jun - Aug 2014

Read the article here:
http://www.frieze.com/article/company-flesh-and-blood

Image: Natalie Häusler, RYB/RGB/CMYK (red), 2011Courtesy: The artist. Photo: Warhus Rittershaus

The artists Gerry Bibby and Natalie Häusler, both based in Berlin, weave their works of sculpture, installation and performance around text sources. Sharing the particularity of using a process that starts with words, the two artists produce an equally original conversation as a result of a fleeting encounter and an exchange of their writings and poems. here’s the outcome: thoughts on the meaning of their respective practices, in a dense, poetic attempt to track down and explore common ground.

NATALIE HÄUSLER

BED

Olive tree‚
is a dry‚
too narrow to be climbed 
by an ambitious individual
hungry for something
less oily
than life.

TABLE (asking for advice)

The impact‚
of no impact on whatsoever
is so convincing‚
difficult to break the spell
because its nature is
magical.

With its supposedly hidden set of tricks
it appears
“indifferent”
none of our tricks will apply
although both of our tricks happen
on the very same stage.

Tell me, hat
what gives you direction
in this tremendously alien
substance?

(1) BED; (2) TABLE (asking for advice) both poems from:
FRAUD, Natalie Häusler 2013

GERRY BIBBY

Casting Spells, while it may be an age-old practice, is still perhaps a complicated process of speculation and absorption. (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in an early Jim Jarmusch film, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), where a Soviet East converses with an American landscape). The efficacy of the one who casts the spells doesn’t really matter, I guess, if the sufferer is somehow convinced about it.

The supernatural prowess of the object whose identity could be manifold, that is, a whole population of this intent, malicious or otherwise, can possibly influence the effectiveness of the spell, while still residing somewhere in her/his consciousness. A viral proposition that can also indirectly impose itself on him/her, if those in the direct proximity are infected.

I very rarely find myself talking about magic, except perhaps if I’ve found myself up against an opaque, stubborn and numbing pragmatism. Or maybe it’s been pinned to a kind of camp turn of phrase, an appreciation.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about it.

I might have written through metaphor but that perhaps was also “wearing it well”, or not.

Anyway, this fledgling conversation. We’ve spoken with each other many times but not in such a presentation format. I have been presented with these two poems from you. One of them TABLE (asking for advice) talks about another conversation, one with a table. The resistance of the object, its lack of porousness, is described somehow as a problem of a muted set of relationships, of a kind where attempts to build something from those relationships through language and action, between subjectivities, objects and situations, can lack the kind of impact that is desired. The spell there is a sedation, an inability to form productive concomitances or conflicts.

I tried an exchange with a table some time ago, in New York City. But maybe it wasn’t the table you were asking for advice? You said the titles of your works were actually sites of writing. Maybe you weren’t alone.

When we first met to formalize our conversation, we talked about antagonisms. It’s something we both thought we’d been drawn to in our work. There was, however, an uneasiness about what forms they assume, their efficacy and purpose – whether they stood strangely in the current landscape in which we find each other.

A cigarette. Several shrieking, squabbling seagulls.

I’d say I’m happy being dissatisfied and talking about it. Not sour grapes, but resisting being sedated by that aforementioned spell. Anyway, my suspicions/intuitions were confirmed yesterday when, in Amsterdam, I took part in a seminar organized by If I Can’t Dance… In a presentation titled Testing Some Beliefs, Gregg Bordowitz read some poetry by gay African-American poets dealing with HIV/AIDS, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I think. The indignant and searing candor of the works produced words that moved and had voice. Regardless of the machinations he was employing with regard to “appropriation” (the theme of the seminar), or to those specific writers or works, he seemed to also be appropriating a certain political disposition that ran through both the works and his presentation-one I also associate with a certain political climate at the time. Anger. In those words, produced by these writers dealing with the AIDS crisis and race relations in the US, a really productive antagonism was enacted. The poems are amazing. I’d love to read or hear them more often…

Maybe we could ask them, Natalie, instead of just the hat?

At any rate they seemed to climb on, ambitiously, despite the slippery, oily nature of their skins and the fragility of the limbs that supported them.

Sometimes, in this seemingly unerring soup, one needs a pep talk.

Now, on the train, it’s moving fast through a thick evergreen forest that despite the illuminating snow has sucked the light from all around… I wanted a cigarette but Apple Dawn stopover lasted like three drags. Have to wait until the border.

I was trying to find an image of Magritte’s hat when I stumbled upon Carl Sandburg. A socialist poet from the US whose quote under an image read, “Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment”. Anyway, this is also what I saw when I read that. Hat. Perhaps it’s better to think of that surreal lineage and the mind, rather than magic… Writing can be a strange and special exercise for the mind. And I figure that it’s somehow also the mind that makes objects.

Another activity at the seminar was to look at a work by Louise Lawler, It Is Something Like… (1998). The title of the work resides on the front of two colored postcards that sit in a plexiglas display case. Text on the back of the postcards reads “Putting Words In Your Mouth”. It struck me that this is what we’ve done with each other, putting our own texts into each other’s mouths. I’m not sure I’ve done yours justice, but that’s the difference between the reading mind and the writing one, I guess.

I’ve not really considered my writing to be poetry, as such. I’ve talked about “language costumes”. If it’s something you put on, or are dressed in, then it’s possibly easier to change the conditions of it, but maybe poetry doesn’t need changing. I’m not sure. Prose is also not right. I’ve had an aversion for conventions since I was much younger than I am now.

Two cigarettes at the border. Fox prints in the snow. 

GERRY BIBBY

Setting*: A locus determined primarily by its function. That location, here, is an object that behaves as:
1) a platform designated for the performance of activities‚ both convivial and administrative.
2) a storage display structure that individuates and organises, other objects from the space around them.

Action: The aim is to liberate a vital structural component of this location and in so doing, endow this new object with a symbolic value – allow it to achieve a use value not predicated by those aforementioned functions.

Several Players will negotiate both the allegorical and physical problems the action proposes.

* digestion 

(1) Script/score for the performance 5 Stages Liberation Project, Gerry Bibby (2010)

Many were dropping like flies. Some of them with a doughy weightlessness akin to steamed buns. It could have been the march of age – the half-life of their cells beckoning a call to duty. It was becoming evident that the poison in the air prompted a shedding of hard-won delinquencies and a donning of professional monikers married with reproductive reflexes. There was the smell of fear on the breeze, excreted by a slowly bloating Capital.

(2) digestion, Gerry Bibby (2011)

NATALIE HÄUSLER

Right now you are on a train to Amsterdam, for a performance. Perhaps you are writing as part of our correspondence, which we began yesterday evening. I’ve heard about your work more than I’ve actually seen it. I knew you before I knew what you were doing, and my first contact with your work was when several friends mentioned a connection or overlap between what the two of us were doing. Of course I’m curious. The most general filter that combines our ways of working is the use of one’s own texts within a visual/sculptural/performative practice. At the same time, such a comparison is a bit like the situation of the flies in your second text, which obviously talks about something else. Two flies, getting too close to the flame of simple identification and similarity, used as devices for ordering things into easy categories. One of the first things we talked about in that bar was the different nature of our texts, my focus on poetry as a form of observation or documentary device, and your use of various types of writing which you call “language costumes” to be activated in performances. So I’ll try on the costume suggested by this quote from your text, for a moment, assuming a role that might not have been in the score for its performance but could easily be one for a future performance of the same text, if I understood you correctly. At the same time, I will treat your text the way I treat my materials, texts and objects. I release them into a process for further interaction, where my focus right now lies on the moment of paralysis, the moment before potential meaning gets extracted, of confusion, of non-identification with a certain material, a proposed space to inhabit or a structure on display. All colors are offered and it still feels like someone else’s taste.

We try to get an initial understanding of where our common ground might more specifically be. We talk about some artists that interest us both, realizing that it is for different reasons and that we each refer to diverse aspects of their work. We talk about George Brecht, his chairs and his event cards, our use of furniture and Marcel Duchamp. You call his relationship to chance sadomasochistic. I recall a line from one of your poems describing the bend of a spine, to talk about my own interest in the first moment of discovery of a poem, and the violence or piercing embedded in this interaction with a text, when you plant your language into someone else ‘s brain. You say that the subject is discrete and free to decide how much to engage, and therefore the responsibility for this act of violence isn’t so great after all. I agree in a way, but at the same time I wonder if in daily life I am truly acting as a discrete subject.

To generate environments or installations and/or to involve collaborators in performances is a quite decisive step towards an awareness of the act of channeling and organizing perception, that of the performer and that of the viewer. While I read the score for your performance 5 Stages Liberation Project I remember the title of a piece I once did which was A situation of subtle control. I sense an investigation of similar questions here, regarding ways to redefine, escape or transform supposedly fixed structures by putting them on display and interacting with them. You even mention this in your score: “several players will negotiate both the allegorical and physical problems the action proposes." Of course, again, there is a different intention here, insofar as your focus lies on the physical interaction with the object and the different stages it passes through. I attach a kind of subjective consciousness to the objects which always remain partly in the world of ideas, attempting a kind of interactivity but also rejecting it. When your text is stuck to the object after the performance, the object has already been through some kind of narrative in interaction with the performer. My objects can come forth as untouchable, though made out of deliberately seductive materials. The art object often appears to me as a dying patient; only if connected to all kinds of machinery can it stay alive. The patient is kept alive for several reasons of external interest, external to the patient. Maybe I tend to emphasize this in sometimes annoying ways, where the objects I supply require a kind of special care, and if they don’t receive it one can watch them falling apart, whether it be through the use of liquids, organic matter like fruit, fragile materials, or unreliable old electronic devices. You say that you intend to be in a degree of control within your performances, also over the failures, so that what could be considered a failure is already included in the score. Whereas, once the “situation” is installed, I observe the loss of control.

It’s the next morning and I’m sitting at the kitchen table. Usually I would work on some poems now. Today I continue our conversation. I imagine you and try to remember what you said the other night. To remember an artwork is a weird thing. Often there is an aspect one can clearly envision, a certain detail remembered as intriguing, which under closer observation might not even be how one had remembered it, but one keeps thinking further, with this very aspect in mind. When I was working on the pieces for Case Mod I kept thinking of George Brecht’s crystal vitrines, those delicate glass boxes he built especially for various kinds of crystals, with their names, or something else, engraved into the glass. I think this work was referred to as a project he was engaged in after he had decided to quit making art. I also thought of Paul Thek’s glass boxes with body parts in them. I somehow remembered the boxes as being sticky, covered all over with silicone, but I couldn’t find any proof for this memory when I did an image search. I think the reality of an artist’s work in other people’s memory is quite interesting, discrete, as you called the subject. This is another aspect of why I like this conversation where I get to know your work in imagination. Our conversation is a recessed, imagined one, similar to the objects in your performances. I am in the subway now, leaving work to do a reading of my friend Ed’s new text. I think about his dry delivery and how he used to be very nervous when reading, and now when I asked if I could record him reading one of my poems, he read it in one breath. I selected A very short SCIFI story: “People will prefer to be objects soon./ We are heading towards it./ I will resist,/ I want to be a subject./ Despite the obvious weakness of the subject position/ I will never/ give up on it.” I am on the bus again, to meet you at the very same bar where we met at the beginning of our correspondence. It’s snowing really hard. You told me later that night that you cut off one leg of a table for a piece you once did in New York, and compensated for the instability caused by this act of destruction by using a person’s weight sitting on the edge of the table for the whole time. Broodthaers covered all remaining copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête in plaster, as a gesture of transition from poetry to the production of art objects, calling it “the idea of inventing something insincere, finally”. I realize, when being excited hearing you talk about what you did to the table, that what we seem to certainly share is an interest in the liberating force of the migrating thought, from brain to page, to object, to body, to brain, to action. 

Originally published on Mousse 37 (February–March 2013)

Find the article here:

http://moussemagazine.it/gerry-bibby-natalie-hausler-2013/

What a mess. When I walked into Natalie Häusler’s solo show Case Mod at Supportico Lopez, Berlin in January, I expected to find the work I’d seen on the gallery’s website. The installation shots of monika/subway (floor piece) (2012) promised a neat grid of cardboard tiles, painted in bright acrylic colours and covering the gallery’s main floor. By the time I arrived, the tiles were wildly scattered and marred by dusty footprints. Häusler had fastidiously positioned them but failed to use glue. The mingling of guests at the opening had displaced them over the course of the evening. The most beaten footpath near the entrance bore the brunt of the destruction while tiles near the walls were untrampled. As an itinerary, monika/subway started as a grid of happy shades, only to end up mapping visitor traffic. But it was disturbing to see in one fell swoop this gradual accumulation of movement, which suggested a disaster and its victims, say, or the path of a tornado and the stampede of people escaping. Only then did it occur to me that a twister in slow-motion might look like a ballet of objects. And that Häusler’s installation might be about measuring movement, speed, duration – a kind of action painting in an expanded field.

This field includes not only installations and painting but also poetry, which – since she fuses all three – allows for the different actions of exhibiting, writing, reading, recitation and listening. By 2011, Häusler – who was born in Munich and moved to Berlin in 2012 after two years in New York (the first on a DAAD grant) – had earned an MFA from Bard College and a Meisterschüler degree from Braunschweig, both in painting. The same year, she also co-founded the poetry press AMERICAN BOOKS with poets Ed Steck and Brett Price. The first publication Solicitations (2012) – with contributions from 35 artists and writers – was published last July. The first of Häusler’s poems to appear in her art – LOSS – LUST I in her eponymous installation-performance staged at Bard in 2010 – was printed on foolscap, read aloud by two friends and then scattered across the installation, like salt on soup. The poem – partly in German, mostly in English – cites a 1920 letter by Franz Kafka, persuading his beloved Milena Jesenská that they can see each other better in writing than through actually meeting. Häusler adds her takes on opacity and knowledge in the relation between the artist, the work and its viewers: ‘to reveal your process makes you vulnerable’. As her friends read her poem, Häusler spilled ink on the installation’s fabrics and booklets, which recalled Rorschach tests and censorship; interpretation and illegibility. Since then, her poems have appeared in other materials beyond paper and measure other actions beyond recitation. For Ann (rising) (2012) – an installation for the display windows of Motto bookstore in Berlin – included fragments of her poem BED (2012) printed on champagne glasses, themselves broken into shards. Other installations like A situation of subtle control/ inward-outward gaze (2011) and We are getting a little bit too close here (still life) (2012) – shown last year at Kunsthalle Ravensburg for the +6|2012 Shortlist Columbus Art Award – feature poems printed on table-like surfaces. Yet the words look distorted, as if they were floating in water or reflected in a funhouse mirror. Häusler likes such effects of movement, perhaps as a textual take on drip painting, and light palettes that combine colours while keeping them distinct: tiles, screensavers, watercolours, stained glass. Case Mod featured eight broken pieces of stained glass hanging in a row on one wall; each piece was adorned with a poem printed on tracing paper along with an out-dated MP3 player. One could read the poems, like CASINO in aykan/casino (2013), or listen to them on the earphones – at least until the batteries died. The show included yet another measure of duration: the book WATERCOLOURS (2012) traces a year of Häusler’s email correspondence, including illustrations, with fellow artist David Horvitz.  

Häusler – who begins a six-month residency at Paris’s Cité des Arts in May – may have turned to poetry to avoid using language as elucidation, which sinks so many of today’s post-conceptual and research-based works. Her poetic brand of expanded action painting ends up emphasizing, not her actions, but how viewers may wear down art through interpretation or even their physical presence. What pilgrims trust they shall encounter (Advanced Morandi Effect / Mere Exposure Effect) (2012), shown at Supportico Lopez last year, included a table of drinking glasses, crowded together and brimming with water. As I approached the work, my footsteps made the glasses tremble, visibly and audibly. As I moved closer, they chattered like teeth, as if the prospect of contact were terrifying. 

Find the article here:

https://frieze.com/article/natalie-h%C3%A4usler?language=en 

Case Mod, Mixed media, Installation view Supportico Lopez, Berlin, 2013 (Courtesy: the artist, Photograph: Hans-Georg Gaul)

Combining sound, painting, text, and sculptural elements, Natalie
Häusler’s latest exhibition, “Case Mod,” blurs the division between
engaging with an artwork sensorially and approaching it cerebrally.
Spreading across the gallery’s floor is a Color Field painting
consisting of cardboard tiles washed in vibrant acrylic paint. Titled
Subway/Monika (floor piece) (all works 2012), the piece evokes the
Emergency Broadcast System image that used to flash across
television screens. Hung on the gallery wall are ten sculptures:
Each is made of broken stained glass and consists of shelves on
which an MP3 player and speakers play sound tracks featuring the
voices of the artist’s friends reciting poetry she has penned herself.
In order to hear each poem, one must lean in—but the edges of
each piece are sharp, acting almost as warnings not to get too
close. The texts of the respective poems are printed on transparent
paper and draped over the top of each shelf, softening the boundaries
of the shelves and almost turning them into works of concrete poetry.

The title of the show comes from case modification, the practice of altering
the chassis of a computer hard drive in an attempt to show off some special
or unique feature. While the only thing being modified in the gallery is the
floor, and then only nonpermanently, the works in this exhibition activate
the viewer’s capacity to transform a complex of sound, text, and art into his
or her own artistically enjoyable experience.

SUPPORTICO LOPEZ

Kurfürstenstrasse 14/b

January 11–February 16

All rights reserved. artforum.com is a registered trademark of Artforum
International Magazine, New York, NY

Case Mod 

Natalie Häusler’s installation Case Mod (from: Case Modification) exacts from the gallery space a field in which intimate and reciprocal encounters between audience and art practice are put to the test. Häusler compiles a situation, combining several elements derived from a simultaneity of studio and writing practice. Emerging forms, in this case, watercolor, sculpture and poetry, query whether they can uphold their fragilities and force of expression when exposed to the viewer and to each other. They articulate their mutuality when arranged in the exhibition space, producing crosscuts and intimacies, of visual, written and audio material, as well as of object and spectator / reader / listener. The audience becomes belated witness of the art practice as such, which the installation at once showcases and archives. Yet the present moment is highlighted, as the visitors leave their own marks on the piece, subtly shifting the color palette or destroying it altogether. Audio recordings of the voices of close friends, who are practicing artists and writers, reciting the poems, track down their intimate reception by an audience that is involved in both activities, production and reception. They capture the moment of surprise, when the poem was read for the first time. The intimacy of this contact is shared with the passing visitor, who must come close to the audio shelf, to be able to hear the individual reading. These shelves, each of which is cut and built from one sheet of stained glass, and customized for its assigned set of outmoded electronic equipment, serve as seductive support and hazardous repellant at the same time. The temporary construction of a space of this kind is part of Häusler’s inquiry of forms of intimacy, risk, close contact with the material, and inclusion to question modes of reception. 

____

TABLE 

plums and fruit and knife
and knives and knife
and plum and bite
and fruit and juice
and cut and bite
and flesh and plum
and plum and plums
and cut and flesh and juice
    
    Language, or “knife”, if we follow the poem, can break the rules a poem has set up for itself. Here, “knife” cuts the semantic chain that fruit and plum, as a whole-part lexical relation, establishes, and therefore makes the poem change course. We ask whether such clean incisions into an artwork’s inner logic can be achieved in visual practice as well. Natalie Häusler’s installation Case Mod (i.e. from: Case Modification) attempts to master the art of incision that poetic language seems to achieve with such elegance and directness. Language, bound by the laws of signification, allows for such sudden moves that can cause a drastic re-shuffling of the poem’s continued logic and imagery. Yet whereas “knife” can terrorize and hijack the lines of the poem, the knife-drawing on silk remains in direct and three-dimensional contact with its neighbors, the other artworks. It
hovers above and among them as a large exclamation mark or downward thrust, but its support, silk that remains fluid and in motion, is emblematic of  "knife's" continuity with a constructed and to a large extent fixed environment that moves forward in time on a single spatial axis. “Knife” within the installation also cuts open the installation and attempts a rupture, but the installation will not yield and abandon the other things it has gathered and brought together. It is the poem itself that gives us a taste for such continuing oscillation and movement in the image of “juice”, palette fluid matter that erupts from the cut object, spilling the poem and rendering its borders fluid. Similarly, Häusler constructs a floor from monochrome paintings on cardboard that ask for something to be spilled on their already water-based, painted surface, to wash its colors, shift the palette, soak and dissolve it.

    As parallel to the poem’s stark shifts of image registers, the shifts in the installation take place on the fluid surfaces of painting, which cause more finely tuned ruptures. The color mosaics, installed on the gallery floor, are painted in monochrome, warm hues, but are also configured  as a structural grid. By that Häusler emphasizes the possibilities for variation and non-permanence of the grids that serve both as painting and architectural support. 

    Wall shelves built from tinted glass echo the monochrome palette of the floor painting, but also serve as structural support for the exhibition of Häusler’s poems, both in audio and print format. They break the sound waves that emanate from the audio speakers they carry, and become catalysts for the dispersal of Häusler’s poem’s in the exhibition space. The poems are read out loud by close friends, who are practicing artist and writers. They track down a moment of intimate reception by these readers who are involved in both the production and reception of the poem. The intimacy of this contact is shared with the passing visitor, who must come close to the audio shelf to be able to hear the individual poem. These shelves, each cut and built from one sheet of stained glass, each customized for its assigned set of outmoded electronic equipment, serve as seductive support and hazardous repellant at the same time.

Thus, the combined material oscillates between structural grid, and the contingencies and intimacies of painterly and poetic practice. The visitor finds her or himself in between those dynamic poles. Thus the installation both draws, even coerces the visitor into co-creating its surfaces, yet inserts antagonistic lines and breakages into those spaces of intimacy. The temporary construction of a space of this kind is part of Häusler’s inquiry into forms of intimacy, risk, close contact with the material, and inclusion as forms of reception.

    Natalie Häusler’s installation Case Mod  exacts from the gallery space a field in which she puts intimate and reciprocal encounters between audience and art practice to the test. Her work interrogates the installation space as a space of social and political relevance, not by making statements via an argumentative dialectics, but through observation, commentary and systematic disruption, for which the inclusion of her poetry serves as focal point. Her commentary emanates from and necessarily includes the subjective, which she insists must remain visible in her work. Häusler generates systems and constructions that colonize the exhibition space in an exacting fashion, yet builds into these exhaustive structures parts that will disintegrate, that can spill and are fluid. Her poems, and language as such, remain part of the installation as points of contraction and literacy. They activate the gallery space as literate, social, and by extension political space. The convergence of poetic and visual practice is never hierarchical nor does one cancel out or override the other. Rather, the act of exhibiting her poems activates their potential for a formal as well as critical multi-dimensionality and both practices enter into a binding contract, which demands of these forms to remain accountable, to each other as well as to the viewer.

The book “Watercolors” documenting a one and a half year long correspondence in form of watercolors sent via email between Natalie Häusler and Californian artist David Horvitz is part of the exhibition. A book launch will be held on January 12th at Motto Berlin.

__ 

Case Mod

11 January – 16 February 2013

Supportico Lopez, Berlin 

July 17-24, 2011
UBS Gallery
Red Hook, NY

Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition

Bard’s MFA Thesis show proved worth the hot, dusty trip to the UBS gallery in Red Hook, NY—a pole barn transformed into a sizable exhibition space. The show featured all twenty-six members of the 2011 graduating class working with, and between, the mediums of drawing, installation, painting, photography, sculpture, text, and video.

Natalie Häusler’s work would typically be identified as installation, however the artist conceived of her thesis project as a type of expanded-field painting. For the piece We are getting a little bit too close here, the artist examined interior design and architecture, borrowing marks and color palettes from tiles as well as cropped graphic forms found in educational institutions. Covering constructed walls, flooring, and shelves, her gridded and layered composition remains within, and strays outside of, self-prescribed bounds. Using disparate mediums such as laser prints, fabric, vinyl tiles, and acrylic paint, Häusler draws attention to the surfaces of these physical structures, while simultaneously delving into illusionistic space. Ultimately, the piece exhibits its own self-consciousness—calling attention to its context as an institutional site of art education.

A selection from Chris Austin’s Notations project, on display in a dedicated room, belongs to a highly sculptural strain of contemporary photography. The project draws from an archive of 501 black and white photographs shot at the artist’s childhood home in Chicago over the past seven years. An image of the backyard, Untitled, is the largest and most prominent. In it, a central form that appears to be both static and moving is shrouded in black cloth and surrounded by fallen leaves, barren tree branches, and a blank white sky. Other smaller pieces in the series are multiple-exposure amalgams of shots taken from different vantage points inside of the house—the additive results of 27, 35, 59, or all 501 photographs generate curious and minimal geometric forms. The blurriness of their edges and status as abstraction supports Austin’s aim—to create a kind of prosthesis for memory, while delving into the murky space between what is tangible and intangible. He trades in mystery and obscurity, resisting full disclosure of his subject matter. The aesthetic is dark and ominous, presenting memory, time, and space as unknowable, otherworldly specters.

Reminiscent of Postminimalist Gordon Matta-Clark’s (and more recently, Monica Bonvicini’s) propensity for breaking surfaces or slicing through architecture, Adam Marnie enacts smaller, serial acts of aesthetic destruction that engage both the mechanisms of photography and the languages of sculpture and painting. In the main UBS gallery, his Camera Incidere spans four walls spaced at set intervals. Together, the walls and the artworks hung on them manipulate the distance between a windowed roll-gate and a large photo-collage at the back of the room. Each of the intermediary walls are linked by mounted drawings and photographs that breach their own frames, display constructed fissures in drywall, and allow the viewer to gaze through aperture-like peep-holes. The work changes according to the conditions of the gallery—the amount of light at a given time of day alters the overall effect. As its title reveals, the piece is, in part, an investigation of optics and the act of looking. Given that “incidere” means to incise, affect, or record, it is as if Marnie has materialized the impact of light—leaving its imagined, forceful trace on sequential partitions.

Some of the most promising works in this thesis exhibition displayed a resistance to, and questioning of, the confines of one primary medium of choice. Amongst many Bard alums, there is a long-standing joke that its best photographers are sculptors, and vice-versa. In this year’s culminating presentation, these three artist standouts resoundingly supported the claim. -Kristen Chappa

http://www.sculpture-center.org/exhibitionsCuratorsNotebook.htm

Facing pages /

an extra-capsular abyss

________________________________

There is some fruit on the table. It is arranged specifically in order of the absent individual’s preference of taste. The absent individual has left the table. The originating point of preference of taste has been lost. The fruit is simply on the table.

A swath of color inhabits black presence – pure toner – in collapsible movement. A template of encompassment separates the leaning of remote embodiment into the act of containment. It is a strand of shifting frequencies. It is a crumpling of experienced language – synthetic in its mechanical output, pure in its own authorial extinguishing. It is a preservation of what is extinguishable, what can be spoiled. It is in layers.

The fluid stretch across planes shifting levels positions the viewer within a mixture of expired moments, a memory, sensory details and objects (the fruit, the poem, the mechanics). A wash of bits spectrally marks the material with a possession simultaneously grounding and hypnotic. Liquid tension eliminates all borders. The space is inhabited by a pure tone of recently uprooted foundation – it is a sea of process, slicked into activity only accountable to those who wander into it or away from it. The uneven flow of practical and chemical pressure mimics fictionalized cerebral tides.

How could the mecha-luminosity of a fabricated landscape stimulate unforeseen fluid outcomes from the viewer?

The surface is the viewer’s mirror. What is placed, left, or forgotten on the surface stares back in its permanence. The surface absorbs any sensory detail and eliminates its immediate resonance. An invisible barrier between the space between the user and the surface isolates any momentary sensation, as if an absent individual had laid a thin cloth over the surface, able to mouthed, touched, or dipped but unable to finally soak through.

_______________________________

Memorial taste is an eclipse of chemical,
an often-sought trigger of malignant

archivists.

________________________________

The user enters the space. The space is constantly reconstructed – constantly concrete – to conform to an integral landscape of inner-alienation, not an establishment: a foreground that is complimented only by the presence of the inhabitant. Each entrance is an interaction of a collapsed/contained sensory simulation. Each entrance constructs an isolated sensory cohesion: the invisible physicality of language mends the space between material and surface. Language adds an extramarital atmospheric space between the user and the work. It is thick.

The absence of an actual present foundation is the participatory willingness of the user to enter the frozen moment of the work. The surface is only the remaining acute sensory detail that has purged reactionary presence from motivated execution into the stuck object.

There is a thick atmosphere permeating the residual space. There is a thick atmosphere situating the residual space. There is a thick atmosphere permeating the residual space situating the user within it. The user meshes the thin fabrics of atmospheric presence and visible space. The ability for all of this material, space, and inhabitance to deconstruct is possible through the reconstruction of what was constructively shed in the initial experience. It is then a string of alienated incidents: a footstep in shavings, a light alternating spatial majority into cornered sectors of a room, a long layer of silk, a mockery, a warped spiral of snapshot-language specifically filtered through a single linguistic lens, a piece of fruit next to a poem, a jellyfish, a motion of form through light-scanned repetition, a high resolution handrail into corners of full color, and a copy. It creates columns to support the space – an umbrella of impressions made on surfaces. It all becomes pigment washing over textile.

_______________________________

The moment when associative memory

spurs: the surface, handled and

absorbed.

_______________________________

The fruit – in all of its generic austerity – sinks into the surface. An arrangement is observed (not constructed) as if taste could obscure a palette. The fruit materializes spectrally. Its insignificance matched only by its tepid appearance within the thin toner membrane. The lush innards of the fruit remain unearthed in a two-dimensional stasis. The eminent rot, spoiling, and unsavory deflation of the fruit is eliminated. Its taste is put on reserve. Its iconography stabilized. It’s holding.

A preservative of optional chance: the numbered, marketable object potentially guiding the viewer to a mouthwatering stupor.

At the unmet corners, if deflated, the collapsed prints would bracket and smear derivative colors into isolated swabs. A nod (or nodding) to instant technical reproduction scales a wall in series. A ground cut of institutional layering – the kind that keep feet moving – is housed without paste, replenishing their loss of solidity with a new touch. The hand reconstructs formatted copies of encountered landscapes in an established touch offering a droll plastering of splintered spectrum among myriads of alternating grayscale.

Is the intrusion of sensory-connective color into the dry-dusted compression of foundational dominion blissful? It is the mechanical imitation of quickly seen color fading out of motion that is captured post-productively and remembered as signifiers of lived moments, as if it is a lullaby to the creation of these forms in the apparatus. It is an often interruption.

What about a piece of fruit?

_______________________________

A regular object placed inside irregular

intervals of process glides smoothly

under a surface.
_______________________________

An austere gesture is hidden within cavalcades of collapse. An austere gesture is a pattern of the unnecessary inhabitant within a compilation. The strict embedment of specific flagged chapters of a crumpled systemic organization is treading bureaucratic water pushing. The austere gesture is revealed in the sketch of order – the incomplete wandering of development, or the inalienable initiative of light movement, burying significance in reductive progression.

The user is getting too close to the branding of the institution here. The user doubles when an echo reflects surfaces into the language generated from the reading of the text – a separation from presentation and consumption. The generated text differs from the language generated from the reading. This movement of generations from pigmented depiction to faux-marbled buoyancy lapses transference of recognizable material. The copy of architecture or text fogs out the sincerity of a claustrophobic space, malfunctioning as if the compiled couplings could be parsed out, uncoupled, and filed appropriately.

_______________________________

A layer of orange tiles asks surfaces to

mimic pages facing the viewer, facing

pages.

_______________________________

Pure toner – the liquid wash of the aliened individual present in mechanics – recalls the interruption of a clean perception. The distortion had yet to retract synaptic shavings of sight, had yet to reconfigure the shards of shattered optical formations, had yet to disrupt adhered tile, had yet to envision the slow melt of a liquefied grid, and had yet to concrete the confusion of error within the mechanics of execution.

Layers of the work are strict in their methods of execution – mechanical, individual, and circular. The layers loop, circling content, creating a myriad of subject matters – a mix of falling definition distorted by the presence of delay. The layer that is alien – brighter and late in the replication process – is the layer of the user’s experience. It is folded politely within the residual space of everything else.

The loop in the execution returns the user to the wash of it all. It lapses transparency over an unsinkable sensory response to cover oneself with it all – to continuously converse limbs into repetitions of predictive copies of what continuously conversing limbs would be if these limbs would structuralize. This rendering of possible moving limbs is a mirroring of the user within the function of the loop – the reflection of the individual within the pure toner.

________________________________________

The surface as an absence/or the

usable territory facing pages and

pages rerouting absence together.

Facing walls in color/thin sheets in

faint mockery reshape publications

of opening air, the last factor exits.

The surface translucently transfers/

a solid haunt mechanizes availability

for physical visibility inter-relations.

Facing walls, like ink/there is an

exchange of use facing pages and

pages reusing absence for absence.

__________________________________________

Natalie Haeusler’s work is the immobile, penultimate faction of an object’s unnatural extinction from memory. The material has become unknown to the body encapsulating its perception. The real is extracted from the source of abstraction – it marinates within a myriad of time that is being shuffled and warped into an uneasy permanence (like a jellyfish within architecture). It is a fluid source – a liquid gesture – that permeates through the work, sheathing its spectral gleam into folds of mechanical process. Within this fluidity, the course of known or speculated settlement is listless. It has become a functionless image of the object’s presence mirroring its own abstraction’s source of emulation. The memory is now an alien shading of prior handling floating over emulated surfaces.

Or: a piece of fruit.

Or: something else.

Or: a weighted liquid displaced and suddenly caught within the machine, placing it amongst scaled reproductions of architecture, forgotten arenas, and the inevitable damp staining of lingering fluid.

Or: the personalized extraction of the original user (content developer) enveloped within the transforming surfaces of the authorized surface configuration. Colors shift underneath as printed darkened pastels merge with institutional tiling in a momentary collision scattered to fragmentary introductions.

Or: the feeling of being lost, simply.

Or: the toner of the mind’s eye, one could say.

Or: a collection of fruit and a reproduction of a collection of fruit in a temperature-controlled room.

Or: the endless assumption of ever-elsewhere trimming the inner-surface of any temporal space. An extra-capsular abyss below the pigment is forging experience, place, gesture, and process into a wash of processional faux-marbled bliss.