ART-PRESENTATION: Ars Viva 2018
Since 1953, the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy Federation of German Industries has been awarding the annual ARS VIVA prize to young artists living in Germany whose works are distinguished by their progressive nature. The winners of the ARS VIVA prize in 2017/18 are Anna-Sophie Berger from Austria, Oscar Enberg and Zac Langdon-Pole both from New Zealand (Part II).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive
Following an initial exhibition at the Kunstverein in Munich, the three winners are showing their work at S.M.A.K. in the exhibition “Ars Viva 2018”, in this way the Museum presents a focused view of the international young art scene. Although their art and the focus of their research are very different, each of the three artists raises exploratory questions about the social, historical and economic aspects of objects and their surroundings. Each visualises and combines contemporary conventions concerning production, distribution and valuation. In this exhibition, various artistic strategies also intersect, such as hybridisation, recontextualisation and semantic analysis. In Anna-Sophie Berger’s “Complicit 1” and “Complicit 2” (both 2018) the “bouquets” of foodstuffs plays on the idea of the consumer’s responsibility. Berger sees these works as portraits of the buyer in a broad, sociological sense and as documentation of the specific design of products from her home country, Austria. The finger and hand prints stand for the joint responsibility borne by the consumer of these products. For Berger this is more about a gauging of the capacity to act than about an idea of anti-consumption, which is a significant nuance in the European context and the sometimes heated debates between the European Union and its member states. Her “Berla 1 (Bestellschein)” and “Berla 2 (Verkaufs- u. Lieferbedingungen)” (both 2018) are reproductions of items from the archives of a factory making fashion accessories that was run by Berger’s family for three generations until it finally had to close down in 2005. In post-industrial Western Europe, this sort of family company became superfluous after the expansion of the European Union to the east, partly because of the possibility of cheaper production in low-wage countries. Berger does not see these blown-up scans of the original documents only as something nostalgic, but also as a metaphor for the distribution of goods. The order form and the accompanying conditions of sale are an analogue counterpart to the online sale conditions that we accept with a single digital click. Details such as three-figure telephone numbers and original letterheads reinforce the historical character of the work. By showing this work in Ghent, not far from Brussels, Berger embeds her family history in European economic history. On the occasion of this exhibition, Oscar Enberg is for the first time presenting two existing works “table d’hôte or Soldier with Whore” (2017) and “A contented cuckold in the new fashion” (2017), which he displayed at Kunstverein in Munich as two separate works, as a single installation. A sombre bed is accompanied by an array of practical, yet perverse, objects: a bottle opener cum shoehorn (a tool for the foot and the mouth), a cane, a series of horn mouthpieces, and a pair of dirty socks from Dundaga, Latvia. This town was the birthplace of Arvid von Blumenthal, also known as Crocodile Harry. Each of these items are utility objects, and together they imply the presence of a lone male. The handle of his walking stick alludes to this absent character’s possible state of mind, a certain shame regarding the solitary existence. The host here not only accepts a degree of humiliation, but also encourages it. A cast of a hat worn by Red Beryl, the protagonist in Enberg’s film, has been turned into a clock that is set to the time in Coober Pedy, the Australian town where the film is set. The installation symbolises debauched desire, self-deprecation and avarice. On a footstool upholstered in fabric sourced in Coober Pedy lies a green felt hat in rabbit fur, a form synonymous with the cuckolded male. When Europeans first brought back stuffed specimens of Birds of Paradise from Papua New Guinea, these creatures no longer had any feet or wings, leading to the misconception that the birds were like flying serpents that never touched the earth until they died. Zac Langdon-Pole’s “Paradise Blueprint” (2018) stems from a previous project in which Langdon-Pole removed the legs of a taxidermied Bird of Paradise to re-prepare it in accordance with the initial forms of encounter and trade between the two cultures. Here Langdon-Pole has used the cut-off legs themselves as the basis for wallpaper. After making cyanotype photograms of these avian legs, Langdon-Pole then multiplied them to form a wallpaper pattern. Historically, cyanotypes were used by the 19th Century botanist Anna Atkins in her classification studies, and more widely in the 20th Century as “blueprints” to reproduce architectural plans. Having wallpapered the entire first room in this repeating pattern, these bird legs become like negative shapes in a blue sky, somewhere between falling and flight, whereby the presence of the cut-off legs is at once documented and rendered absent. In “Assimilation Study” (2017) the severed wings of a Mallard duck, a Ring-necked Parrot and a pigeon are placed in proximity to casts of the human shoulder blade bone, an exercise in anatomical comparison and contrast. The display evokes a sort of interspecies interchange, or impure amalgamation. The work also points to issues related to locality, by selecting specific native and non-native species to Europe, and mobility, whereby the transcontinental flight patterns of birds are compared to the migrations of people across the world.
Info: S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1, Gent, Duration: 10/2-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://smak.be
