Open Access

Rezension zu Sigrid Sigurdsson - Kartographie einer Reise. Geschichtserfahrung im offenen Archiv. Hg. Viola Hildebrand-Schat. Freiburg im Breisgau: Modo 2020. 756 S.

Sowohl in der bildenden Kunst als auch in der Literatur finden sich seit Beginn der Institutionalisierung des klassischen Büros, hierzu zählen bereits vor der Etablierung des Begriffs im 19. Jahrhundert unterschiedliche Räume wie Kontor, Kanzlei, Amts- und Schreibstuben, Versuche, dieses zunächst kunstfern und prosaisch wirkende Thema künstlerisch zu verarbeiten. Während sich zu den literarischen Figuren des Büros durchaus Forschungsliteratur finden lässt, ist eine umfassendere literatur- und kunstwissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit den räumlich-materiellen Dimensionen des Büros bisher ausgeblieben. Ich möchte daher im Folgenden unterschiedliche Darstellungsmöglichkeiten materieller Bürokultur in Kunst und Literatur untersuchen und diese Dinggeschichten auf ihr ästhetisches Potential und ihren Einsatz als Mittel zur Gesellschaftsreflexion hinterfragen. Besonders berücksichtigt werden dabei Facetten von Mensch-Ding-Beziehungen, die Formen der Verfremdung, Verdinglichung und der Verlebendigung generieren. Exemplarisch betrachtet werden sollen so verschiedene künstlerische Darstellungen wie Renaissance-Gemälde, Objektkunst und Installationen; als literarische Beispiele werden Romanauszüge aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert und vor allem Gedichte hinzugezogen, da gerade lyrische Texte über das Büro aufgrund ihrer hohen Beschreibungsintensität oft kreativ auf Büroartefakte Bezug nehmen.

Dear Remco van den Berg, Recently we received mail on the Boulevard, from my good friend Othillia G. in Amsterdam. It had taken quite a lot of thinking on her part, as she warned at the start of her letter. Revealing disgraceful matters in public tends to have negative effects when the culprit involved is an influential individual. To denounce their misconduct may prove, after all, that they matter. It will strengthen their conviction that their poisonous arrows have in fact hit their target. [...] Your book, honored with five stars in the newspapers, deals with the relationship between contemporary visual art and what you refer to as the European migration crisis. In your exposé, you praised several successful artists for making sublimely detached photographs or arthouse films of people on the move, often fleeing from some form of violence or bitter poverty. As of the turn of the century, but openly and visibly after 2015, they have therefore tried hard to reach the EU (and sometimes, later, the UK). They cross borders under the direst circumstances, in some desolate landscape or at sea, outside of the legal paths. Some of the artists discussed in your book, mostly men, notably, have purposely posted themselves in hideouts near such borders, using military thermal imaging cameras to make spectacular recordings of this phenomenon. As such they confront their audience with artistic images of persons who may recognize themselves in these pictures, or who may be identified by people who know them, say when they encounter these works within the context of an exhibition. Sure enough, there is a commercial market for these artworks and the subsequent coffee-table books. Many of those artists will earn quite a nice sum by callously representing the deep suffering of others. [...]

In 2016, the Danish ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum presented "Textures of Life", a monographic exhibition dedicated to works by the artist Joana Vasconcelos (*1971). The large-scale installation "Valkyrie Rán" (2016) had been exclusively commissioned as a centerpiece, and when the exhibition ended, the work was acquired by the museum and shown again between March 2020 and January 2023. The installation occupied the foyer, suspended from the ceiling of the spacious hall. Made from inflatables covered with different-colored fabrics, crocheted by hand, the soft body of "Valkyrie Rán" extended throughout the entire length of the winding space. Conical and tubular shapes formed a stretched torso to which long extremities were attached that reached far into the galleries. Here, the visitors of the museum were confronted with seemingly discrete parts all belonging to one and the same artwork. Too large to be perceived as a whole, it could only be grasped in the form of its fragments, an experience that in turn aimed at captivating the audience. Not only in terms of their form, the extremities of "Valkyrie Rán" have to be considered tentacles. [...] "Valkyrie Rán" plays with the phobic imagery of the shipwreck stemming from the 19th century, applying it within the context of the contemporary art museum. By so doing, the representation of a disaster at sea is transformed into one of a disaster of the sea, the implications of which go far beyond the metaphorical. This reversal is possible due to a duality of the motifs of the net and the tentacle and with it of drowning and fishing. It is this motif's history that will be explored in this chapter. First, the trail of the tentacle is to be followed, starting with "Valkyrie Rán" and placing it in the context of a practice of merging mythology and science as it can be found in comparable works of contemporary art. Then, in a second part, the tentacle will be confronted with the net and its particular visual history.

Klaus Werner beschreibt in seinem Beitrag die einzigartige Mehrschichtigkeit und Tiefendimension künstlerisch bearbeiteter 'schwarzer Bücher' in Li Silberbergs Installation "Bibliothek", die als unzugänglicher gläserner Raum entzogener Lektüre mit der Einrichtung von Regalfächern und Schreibplatte zugleich subtil die materielle Bedingtheit des 'Prinzips Bibliothek' ausstellt.