Remarks on Spaces in between
by Ann Lumbye Sørensen

For the past few years, space has become a keyword in diverse fields of theory and a central occupation for artistic practice. Space has long since left the secure frame set by the Renaissance as the ideal construction for mirroring the world following the rules of the central perspective as a pendant to the hierarchical order of both secular society and the spheres of heaven. Society, the sciences and artistic orientations, however, have undergone profound changes since the 15th century. Nonetheless, the notion of space has come to be a vital field of investigation. According to Michel Foucault, one reason for this might be that while the notion of time had already become secularized in the 19th century, space has retained in our times some of its mythical aspects.

To formulate the problematic in another way, you could ascertain that negotiations with earlier notions of space are put to the fore to articulate new points of departure in order to gain other insights in the ways society, life and relational circumstances are constituted. In the arts, space has always played an important role, which can be conditionally specified with terms like territorialize, deterritorialize, destruct, deconstruct or construct. The avantgardists of the sixties, such as the minimalists and the artists working with land-art and installation art who were exploring sculpture in the “expanded field”, were extremely conscious of the relations between object, spectator and space. Their endeavors encompassed ways in which the artwork interacted with the spectator and space, in order to perspectivize reality. They did not mirror reality but interfered with and questioned reality. Phenomenology as formulated by French theoreticians like Maurice Merleu-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard, who wrote his Poetics of Space in the 1950s, constitued one point of departure. New linguistic insights into the ways language is structured, as formulated by Roland Barthes and Ludwig Wittgenstein, constitued another and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ new approaches to reading the codes and symbols of different cultures were all inspiring points of discussion for the artists.

Today, these artistic and theoretical conquests still constitute a point of departure, but new and other challenges call for new approaches and other discourses. We are now living in a globalized, mass-media world. Society has replaced the word as the pre-eminent means of communication by the use of the image, to the extent that we now talk about a “pictorial turn”. Another issue is put forth by Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard in his analysis of post-modern society in the late 1970s. He outlines some of the consequences of modern technology, where only that kind of knowledge and information which is suitable for transmission through the world-wide electronic networks will form our horizon of understanding and comprehension. But exactly this new situation challenges art with an important assignment, Lyotard asserts. The artwork has the capacity to put a mark upon reality and thus constitute other places and other kinds of knowledge. Art has the potential to offer a resistance to the flow of information streaming through the electronic networks or television’s narrow girth of program making.

Still, what kind of space are we talking about? And maybe the term ought to be spaces,  in the plural, and not merely space, as though space could still be defined in a universal way as it was in the Renaissance. These are some of the questions Lone Høyer Hansen wants to raise in the company of the seven German artists whom she, working as an artist-curator, has invited to the Centro Cultural Andratx in Mallorca. This project at the Centro sets up a kind of laboratory for the exchange of ideas and notions on space transpiring among the artists and the author of the present text, forming a prelude to the exhibition. The exhibition articulates its own visual and textual spaces within the space of the kunsthalle. The artworks and the present text function as possible points of departure for the spectator to reflect on these spaces and also other spaces: public as well as private spaces, outer as well as inner regions. 

Discussions
As a sculptor, Lone Høyer Hansen thinks – not only in artistic matters but in every context – in terms of forms, volumes, materials and space; this is a phenomenological notion of being in the world that is always already there, an interaction between you and your changing surroundings. “Sculpture is everywhere”, the Danish sculptor and theoretician Willy Ørskov once proclaimed. Any object, being or thing demands attention. Sculpture is like the body in the world, creating space and formed by space, but this exhibition and investigation occupy themselves with relations between figure, placement or displacement and space in an expanded field. To return to Michel Foucault and his text, Other Spaces, he points out that space in our own time can be characterized as a net that conjoins points and interweaves its threads, where the elements appear coordinated as a precondition for each other. We are living within a myriad of connections. Space is not single-valued, but rather polysemantic; the possibilities for articulating space are numerous, he says. In the artistic work-process of the present day, we can observe that a network of physical, phenomenological and perceptually gazed vantage points is challenging the many fields of significance. And these investigations are finding their visuality in a wide girth of mediums and artistic practice forms. It is exactly from this interdisciplinary field that the artist curator has invited her seven colleagues, whose works present different approaches to diverse mediums, artistic practices and perceptions. Perception of reality is being put into play and as a consequence, polysemantic spaces are created.

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As space is no longer to be understood as one unified and universal space, reality, too, cannot be perceived from one point of view; we have to operate with realities, as will be evident from the works in “Between Spaces”. In much the manner of peeling an onion, layer after layer of spaces and realities reveal themselves within the work of the individual artist.

Nadine Rennert is a sculptor but she also creates animations. Although there are threads that combine these two different practices, her sculptures and her animation offer opposite qualities or, to apply Foucault’s term, different placements. The sculpture articulates a unique event. As the artist puts it, it is both an object in the world and becomes a subject in its own right. Herein, there is an implicit analogy to human beings, who are also objects for others’ gazes and concrete selves in their own right. Nadine Rennert’s explorations of the relations between nature and culture and between the mechanical and the organic concern her choice of form and material. There are dualities between artificial materials like plastic and other synthetics that “look like” marble, fur, and other “natural” materials and the very artificial looking pink, blue or red fluffy sculptures which evoke associations with organs and unidentifiable body parts. The presence of the sculpture is crucial and what is also important is the meeting between sculpture and spectator; a psychological space embraces this event, oscillating between respect and compassion, emanating from the form and the way the sculpture is structured. In the work entitled arme reichen [poor rich/arms reaching out], a cone is placed on a carpet with openings in the four corners. A small-scaled wooden cone is placed in one of the corners lifting the carpet. The surface of the entire arrangement is a marbled plastic cover, garnished with fur-like brims, puffing up here and there. Details of importance, changes in scale and metamorphoses of materials destabilize the solidity of the traditional notion of sculpture and also accordingly, the mental space; the ground becomes insecure. The animation called ANISLANDISANISLAND is a narrative with small people floating around New York – they are floating on small sculpture-formed islands above the river, under bridges and other terrain vague-like places of the metropolis. It is hard to tell whether the people are men or women, or whether they are old or young. They are in between object and concrete selves. A recurrent sign is two hands meeting which calls to mind the two hands that arecut out from the carpet of the aforementioned sculpture. A phenomenological approach to the world reveals itself in her works, with very different strategies each time ariund; nontheless, the spectator is drawn into an intimate space of otherness. 

The painter Gerhard Mantz, on the contrary, is inclined to generate new and other spaces, which are infinite and difficult  to classify. “You can only imagine things stemming from your own experience. The unexpected always comes from outside”, he declares. With this statement in mind, Mantz explores both the limitations of our perception and our other capabilities. However, his work also points toward the potentials that art offers the spectator. His points of departure in creating the art works are very concrete, but in the process of preparing the abstract and concrete image on the computer screen, new and complex images such as videos, “paintings” or monochrome objects emerge into view. The video, Labyrinth, is an endless sequence of ever-new constellations, insertions and unfoldings of architectural spaces. Starting out in grayish tones, it turns into increasingly clearer colors; mirrorings and subtle changes of what you perceive as solid floor turn into voids; nothing is what it seems to be, and you are forced deeper and deeper into this unbelievable ever-changing and never-ending abstract, weightless and perfectionized progression of spaces and spaces. You surrender! The music, composed by Ignatz Schick, exerts its subtle effect on the experience of the work. The titles of the three paintings tell us a lot about the existential and philosophical orientation of the artist. Computer-generated, they present themselves at a high level of perfection with no trace whatever of “human” interference. They are called: Auf der Suche nach Vergessenheit [Searching Oblivion], a labyrinthine image; Vorbestimmter Weg [Predestined Road], a romantic landscape and Platonische Tradition [Platonic Tradition], an abstract image on the Idea of Plato’s famous cave with the shadows representing reality and thus questioning the relations between Idea and the physical world of phenomena and the corporeal. Gerhard Mantz pursues notions of perfection, clarity, reflections and mirages for purposes of gaining a non-corporeal aesthetics; spaces are not his concern, but in pursuing his concepts, multi-semantic spaces are articulated and visualized. 

Kathrin Böhm, is also a painter, but neither does she deal with painting in the traditional way: using oil and canvas. Böhm’s work is twofold: one is community-based work, often carried forth in collaboration with other artists, designers and archotects. These are frequently temporary projects, with a social focus: a contextual praxis marking a certain site and exchanging experiences with local people and residents of the specific area. Commissioned site-specific projects in various communities form part of her body of work. You could say that these public markings deal with both real space and real time and accordingly strike up an objection to reality and effectively change the notion of the space. The other part of her work is “private” in the sense that she works on her own, creating what in principle are never-ending projects. The precise and very telling title of such a project is and millions and millions and millions. She herself calls the single image a “poster” in order to signal a low-key aesthetics and implicitly, she formulates a critique of the conventional notion of Art as unique and precious. and millions … consists of a variety of prints and posters, from where she collages cut images from other posters or photocopied photographs. A room-scale montage covering a corner-space in the kunsthalle extending from floor to ceiling, interrupted by an opening in the wall, continues and also presents itself at other places inside the exhibition space. Playful and colorful and millions … dissolves the discrete walls pertinent to the idea of the white cube and she temporarily transforms part of the kunsthalle’s identity. Kathrin Böhm asserts that she does not want to construct meaning; instead, she hands over to the spectator her or his own experience. Although she remarks that a contradiction exists in her art practice, she offers in both the the community-based and the “private” projects the proposition of exchange. and millions … is an ongoing project whereby transformation, time and recollection are constituent parts of the work with a sharpened awareness in the face of private and public spaces. 

Quite another sensibility of space is constituted by Gerold Miller’s rectangular high-gloss painted aluminium frames. Traditionally, the frame frames the picture and guides the spectator’s gaze into the painting’s own world – separated from its surroundings. In Gerold Miller’s work, the painting is the frame and consequently activates and captures space situated between frame and wall. Like a magnifying glass, the frame intensifies the wall behind, which has been transformed into being part of the artwork. The gaze moves back and forth between the one frame and all ten of them, mounted on the wall as a horizontal band, stretching for several meters and thus constituting in its ensemble yet another artwork. In this way, the entire wall turns into an artwork - the perception of the solid white wall is altered into something else. Only some of the paintings are individually titled. However, they do have a joint denomination to stress their character of sameness. The title is hard:edged, appended by individual numbers such as 67, 78, 81, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94. Much like the minimalist object’s capability to propagate endless multiplication, Gerold Miller’s art practice contains this same possibility, although the individual “painting” possesses its individually conceived monochrome. The experience is structured by a dualism between singularity and multiplicity, or you might say detail and whole, and puts forth a challenge to optical reality and perception.

Lone Høyer Hansen’s art practice takes its mark in a phenomenological approach to sculpture and to the world around her. A sensibility about detail, material and the spaces that come into being between forms unfolds a multiplicity of points of view. Movement, she says, is essential to experience, whereby she understands both bodily movement and the exchange of gazes between individuals, objects and surroundings of all kinds. On a par with Jacques Lacan, Høyer Hansen heralds the idea of the ever-existing condition of simultaneously being looked at and looking upon, looking back in an ongoing process of watchful awareness and presence. Flowers Cannot Be Ignored is the aphorism-like title of a poetically conceived work, consisting of 139 stylized flowers cut from sheets of stainless steel. These flowers constitute an artwork which takes on new formations in new places; the piece has the potential to change depending on the way the artist chooses to structure the delicate and small images on the floor. As reflection points, they attract the attention, thus loosening the concept of solidity; the floor and space above them turn into a dream-like space of lightness. ROOM VIEW I-V works in another scale. Comparatively small photographs present views of unidentifiable rooms. Fragments of recognizable objects, like a Venetian blind, the frame of a door, a window, a picture or finely ornamented cloth offer the spectator points of orientation, since we need to meet likeness in order to be able to navigate in the world. The photographs are shots from one of Høyer Hansen’s installations, a fact that brings the notion of time and recollection to mind. However, the strategy also reveals a process of an unfolding within her work in pursuit of possibilities for change of meaning and sensing. The series of photos proposes concentrated folding-ins and the folding-out of a multiplicity of spaces and suggests other and imaginary spaces quite remote from what she calls categorized spaces. In a more superior sense, her artistic pursuit concerns everyday experiences in a dialectic between conformity and awareness of other ways and other possibilities. 

In the manner of an anthropologist, Susanne Weirich is conducting investigations and analyses of selected disciplines, institutions and other places and spaces in society. It is the special discourses that characterize the many domains which she as a conceptual artist is deconstructing and re-ordering according to her own conception, with the result that the view of reality or truth these systems represent is transformed and comes to be manifest in the form of new improbable realities. Language is one of these powerful systems that claim truth or the order of Law: a system Susanne Weirich investigates in her installation work entitled The Word Wolke. 81 transparencies – 14 of them with text in a speech bubble – represent her cloud archive. The 81 shots of clouds are projected onto a translucent curtain in front of the wall, thus generating an illusion of depth – like real clouds; a ventilator, from time to time, sets the whole curtain in a state of turbulence. Every picture by Susanne Weirich is unique – as is the case in nature, no cloud appears twice.
Accordingly, reality situated beyond indubitably plays its part in the work. On the other hand, the word “cloud” does not appear in any of the small texts in the speech bubbles, hinting at Walter Benjamin’s gesture of erasing the printed word Wolke and replacing it with his supposedly “unique” handwriting in the manuscript on his memories of his Berlin childhood. In doing so, Benjamin questioned the complex and impossible likeness between the word Wolke and a cloud, or clouds, because no word and no conception can ever grasp the infinite multiplicity of clouds. Clouds are not things; “There is no word”, and a classification system is impossible. The artist borrowed the title of the artwork from the title of a literary scientific article and uses its discourse in her own work. The same problematic of reality and improbable likeness serves as the structure of both her short video, Das Kleid (The Dress), and Busy Body a series of six photographs showing a montage of details of a body, where each image bears a short text such as: “She can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several. She could waste her life that way and never touch the truth”.

Photography as a witness to the truth and as a mirror of reality has been assailed from several corners – especially by Barbara Probst, who in her own special way calls attention to photography’s paradox, positioned between fact and fancy. In her photographic series, we – the spectators – see, not through a single lens but through many, which simultaneously and from different distances and angles see a person, an action or a situation extended over an interval of time. In this way, the artist undermines the picture’s illusion about a securely contained present moment; instead, the photographic image’s problematic reality-status is rendered thematic. The title of the two series indicates the setting: Grand Central Station and a street in New York, the dates and the exact time of the shots, much like the manner in which a scientist marks the material with exact data for purposes of being incorporated in a classification system. But Barbara Probst’s project is more speculative: she questions the notion of time, space and identity in the two series entitled  Exposure #9, Grand Central Station, 18.12.01, 1:21 p.m. and Exposure # 21,N.Y.C. 545 8th 05.019.03. 5:o3 p.m.. The two series of, respectively, five and six pictures articulate different approaches. One sequence shows people photographing each other; the cameras more or less cover the faces with the result that their identities are being decomposed. One more albeit unseen camera is situated someplace else. The procedure the artist chooses follows a principle of chance. The participants are free to move about and take their shot; the artist decides only the instant. In the other series, the artist is more in control. She is the one who has given the instructions to the model, who is seen inside Grand Central Station and Barbara Probst also gives the instructions to her photography assistants with respect to from where and at what exact moment they should photograph the model. Each camera’s caption of the scene forms the single picture of the series. A web of gazes – to look and to be looked at – decomposes a notion of stability and sameness and challenges the assumption that photography has a direct relationship to reality. The subject of these series is, however, time, an instant which – like the cload - never occurs twice. Stefan Schessl notes: “The nearly utopian possibility of contemplating the same moment from different perspectives is somewhat intoxicating.” The identity of the persons involved was not the issue, but it touched indirectly upon photography’s history as the most eminent medium for portraiture. One small work Exposure # 20, N.Y.C., 122 Duane Street, 05.12.03, 4:37 p.m. shows two women in a room. A double-portraiture of two dark-haired women, dressed in white and of the same age: are they twins? It seems that Barbara Probst’s issue is not so much the portrait genre as it is the question of identity and sameness. A soap-bubble floats above the two women – a well-known symbol of transitoriness – but in the Probst context, another way of visualizing time and irrevocability seems more plausible.

Andrea Geyer, in quite another way, is absorbed with questions about how identity and gender are constructed within a social context. Investigations within the compass of this theme have taken the form of video sequences with fiction’s embossed narratives. This is what we see in her video Interim. Images and text run parallel, the one does not illustrate the other. Instead, they form different spaces: the text registers a woman’s doings and thoughts in a very everyday way. We are told that she takes a shower, lights a cigarette, gets ready to leave, walks on the street carrying a suitcase, gets on a bus and arrives at another place, gets out of the bus, nearly stumbles over some garbage, etc. somewhere in the United States, apparently. This monotonous horizontal narration, with no beginning and no ending, no identification points – very much in the manner of a minimalist registration of observations – has the quality of slowness, questioning how little is needed to construct identity. The visual part has another dynamic through some towns: we do not see a bus but a train, etc. But at the end of the video, the space of text and the visual space overlap: a dismal street, deserted except for some overloaded garbage buckets. Throughout the video, only street sounds can be heard. Another work of Andrea Geyer points at her occupation with space and time: “My eyes follow a line that marks two adjunct edges. They are bound to exist only in relation to one another. Slowly, I start walking. No distance is more awesome than those few feet across.”

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It is interesting to note that the artists of “Between Spaces” all harbor a recurring interest in such abstract notions as the infinite or the moment that you can’t grasp or touch. Even so, they succeed in visualizing these abstract concepts in a muliplicity of ways, forms and figures – as each contribution raises and engenders spaces of individual character. The only common denominator is one of negation: they are never perceived in mono.