ART-PRESENTATION: Meet Me in Heaven, Part II
As the vehicle of mass communication of the 21st Century, the internet, supplies us via social media, live streams, and news feeds with a steady stream of real-time images of natural disasters, accidents, and warfare. These are the media through which we witness the suffering and death on a daily basis. Yet since suffering on so vast a scale far exceeds any one individual’s capacity for comprehension, the same flood of images tends to leave us largely unmoved. At the same time, society by and large excludes death from public discourse and to such an extent that it has become a taboo (Part I)
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Schloss Tüssling Projects Archive
The exhibition “Meet Me in Heaven” takes its title from “Meet me in Heaven I will wait for you” (2004 -11) by Tracey Emin, brings together works by: Elmgreen & Dragset, Tracey Emin, John Isaacs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kris Martin, Michael Müller, David Nicholson, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Jack Pierson, Michael Sailstorfer, Andrea Stappert and Nasan Tur, that engage with the finiteness of life. By breaking one of the last taboos, they fulfill a key mission of art, which is to make us conscious of what we have repressed. The works featured in this exhibition have in common that can be read as a way of tackling even such an abstract theme as death. And even if some of the works are a product of a very different train of thought, they still fit in with the show’s larger discursive context and narrative. In Michael Sailstorfer’s “Zeit ist keine Autobahn, Frankfurt” (2008), an electric motor drives a tire, which simply rubs against a wall at alternating speeds. There is no progress here; only a loss of profile. The work can be viewed as an allegory of life -it might also remind us of the unfortunate Sisyphos- although it also triggers our auditory and olfactory sensors. “Sea View” (2016) by Nasan Tur is based on a photograph of the Mediterranean but with the boats brimming with refugees airbrushed out of it, In the work the artistic strategy of hiding certain key elements, of not showing the horror, is actually a means of amplifying it. For his video work “First Shot” (2014), Tur had several people stand in front of a black backdrop and fire a pistol for the first time in their lives. To intensify the action, moreover, he then replayed the video in slow motion. The work thus homes in on the sharp rise in gun ownership among private individuals, while at the same time asking under what circumstances we ourselves might be willing to shift our moral boundaries so far that we, too, would be willing and able to pull the trigger. “Untitled (blue tit)” (2016) by David Nicholson shows a dead blue tit that the artist found in his studio one day and proceeded to paint in true old fashion, it is an objet trouvé translated into a photorealistic painting. Yet what is really captured here is death. In Kris Martin’s “Narziss & Goldmund” (2016), two halves of a 15th Century death’s head, sawn through the middle, are presented on a mirrored plinth. The work is named after Hermann Hesse’s novel implying that the two halves of the skull stand for the radically different personalities of the two protagonists: Narziss the Apollonian and Goldmund the Dionysian. In his work the artist seems to be asking viewers which of the two characteristics is the dominant one for them personally, even if with the skull as a symbol, he leaves us in no doubt that all life ends in death.
Info: Curator: Philipp Bollmann, Schloss Tüssling Projects, Marktplatz 1, Tüssling, Duration: 1-18/6/17, www.stprojects.de
