Closer

November 5-December 31, 2005

Curated by Kerstin Niemann
Tjorg Douglas Beer (Hamburg), Gabriela Jolowicz (Leipzig), Kora Jünger (Hamburg), Herlinde Koelbl (Munich), Norbert Schwontkowski (Bremen), Juergen Staack (Düsseldorf) and Jörn Stahlschmidt (Hamburg).

In the year 1980 the English band Joy Division released their second and last album “Closer”. The music on that album mixed elements of Punk and Rock with to that date unheard abstract sounds out of synthesizer and bass, establishing an influence on other forms of music. Borrowing its title as a reference to the potential influence of an experimental combination of elements, the exhibition Closer focuses on the different artistic positions of seven German contemporary practitioners on the general concept of social space.

Space can be seen as an elastic metaphor that alludes not only to architecturally determined areas. Arising from the social requirement to balance the need for security and unrestricted, unobserved freedom of movement, spaces serve as elements of a system. Security is simultaneously thought in abstract and concrete terms. On one side there is financial wealth, on the other power, social status, health, or freedom; all apply as forms of security.

The different artistic standpoints in Closer invite us to gain an insight into the complexity of social space and its conditions. A subject of discussion is that of security in social spaces, and its required means of exchange. Prerequisites for a spatial condition, in specific the social space, are communication and power relations as important operation tools. For that power can be the motor for the regulation of a transformation process, as far as certain power ratios find recognition. The artists in this group exhibition work with different forms of representation, such as painting, drawing, printing, film, photography, sculpture, or mixed media installation. Their works approach the limitations as well as the freedom of movement in social space through (de) construction and abstraction.

Tjorg Douglas Beer (Hamburg) puts a landscape of desolation into the limelight with his mixed media installation. The arrangement of the small showcase consisting of plastic and wood, and the labeled plastic plan intervene into the exhibition space. This installation occurs like a test laboratory, in which different forms of manipulation technologies encounter each other.

Gabriela Jolowicz (Leipzig) generates figurative woodcuts. As an observer of her environment she contextualizes the encounters with people and their spirit of life. Her twelve represented motives, nevertheless, leave the spectator with sufficient latitude for interpretation. In her figurative drawings of the series Youme and Meyou, Kora Jünger (Hamburg) emphasizes the positioning of the single in a group. The series represents group hierarchies that may restrict movements through different constellations or constitute new forms of coherence. She derives her subjects from the mass media, however, her representations of the individual is faceless.

Herlinde Koelbl (Munich), photojournalist and filmmaker, introduces her new video work Goldmund (Gold Mouth) for the first time to the U.S. American public. This three-piece film projection focuses exclusively on the mouth of the interviewed persons. Being asked about money, the interviewed subjects think out loud their dreams powering the imagination. A quote out of the film: “I’d try to purchase time. Though you can’t buy it with money, but after all, maybe you can.“

The painter Norbert Schwontkowski (Bremen) leaves his impressions on canvas. Alle Sehen Alles ( Everybody Sees Everything) and Vorstadtkirche (Suburb Church) are situation paintings on which nothing much is happening, however, the objective images serve as a hint for the life that is concealed.

Juergen Staack (Dusseldorf), a student of Thomas Ruff, works with the medial construction of the criminal in his photo series Duplex Crime Series. By technically opposing surveillance camera photos from robberies against each other, the artist conducts a play with the ratio of culprit and victim.

Coinciding with the opening of this exhibition, Juergen Staack intervened the public space in the city of Boston with an installation that became part of his “left behind / missing-pictures“ project. “Left behind” installations have taken place in

Palermo (Italy), Eisenhuttenstadt (Germany), Vilnius (Lithuania), and in Kaliningrad (Russia). The installation in Boston was the largest installation to date, measuring 8-9 square meters in total (visit www.missing-pictures.net).
The works of Jörn Stahlschmidt (Hamburg), a student of
Pia Stadtbäumer, bustle with inquiry into the occupation and the activation in space. Expressly for Closer, Stahlschmidt creates a large wall drawing titled the wyrm, the wild and the waever, a symbolic fairytale of working and living in urban areas.

Gamaliel R. Herrera and Kerstin Niemann

Social Spaces

“Closer“ is introducing work pieces by seven German artists. The individual artistic positions are contextualizing relationships in social spaces in a different way. Space can be seen as an elastic metaphor that alludes not only to architecturally determined areas. The works open the options to understand social space as socially constructed fields of action. One can also view them as relation constructs to think in the form of networks, such as virtual spaces.
Social spaces serve as elements of a system. Different strengths and power relations work in such spaces. They try to keep a balance between the need for safety and absolute, unobserved freedom of movement. Prerequisites for a spatial condition, in specific the social space, are communication and power relations as important operation tools. Network relations, which constitute themselves, due to social relations and constantly change by movements in the space. The different artistic positions of “Closer“ focus on the complexity of social space and invite you to think conditions differently.

Power relations

For that power can be the motor for the regulation of a transformation process, as far as certain power ratios find recognition. After the French philosopher Michel Foucault there is not only existing one specific power. Power is seen as an open system, a coordinate bundle of relations and power ratios. His genealogical approach and analysis methods serve as a tool for breaking the marginalized power systems open. Systems or spaces in which permanent competition is determining the hegemonies. According to Foucault the plurality of power isn’t localized in state apparatus and institutions. These are only resources of help and merely serve as instruments in a power system. Power is a construction which is not controlled from one specific point nor owned by anybody. It is a practice that is enforced by institutions or people in specific situations.

Limit in movement / Freedom of movement

The effects of power don’t primarily speak as oppressions. The resistance of existing power relations are of great importance in a space. It can use the strengths of the power without being taken over by it. Hereby power and knowledge are narrowly obliged to one another. At the same time every point of the exercise of power is a place of the knowledge formation and reverse. In the same connection one can say that power and liberty do not exclude themselves. Power relationships need to stay mobile in social spaces. Therefore power and the competition for the supremacy in which changes and corrections are possible any time can be considered as productive relation networks in social spaces. Looked positively the power discourse can be a productive net of actions and relations in social spaces.

Security

Disciplining techniques, like the supervision and control of space, generate power and hegemonic relationships. Power applies to it as a form of safety, on the one hand for the relation networks existing in the social spaces and for the power receipt. Without having to go into the continuous public security debate[1] in greater detail one can watch that both individual, political and economically an ubiquitous security intellect is spreading. Movements in the social space are specifically controlled by techniques of discipline and supervision.[2]

Surveillance

Every form of surveillance doesn’t only have protecting features but controlling ones. Published in the year 1949 the scenario of uniformity and control of George Orwell in „1984“ is relevant as never before. The phenomena of the Panoptic has spread enormously. More and more public spaces are constantly under control of surveillance cameras. Particularly electronic observation techniques, such as CCTV cameras are the continuation of the Panoptic principle of the 18th century.At that time the philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed a new form of a prison, which created an architecture for control of the prisoners. The creation of a permanent visibility of prisoner controlled them, because the controlled ones couldn’t see this whether they are watched or not. Under these circumstances the object of observation is the information of surveillance never the subject of a communication. Foucault took the idea Benthams and saw its architectural considerations as an expression of new political power forms. Forms that use the progressive technological development of surveillance. The product market for surveillance equipment is increasing. Through this the generated technological progress receives access to the society and into social rooms.

The facilities of surveillance cameras and the electronic panoptic conveys the feeling to be watched possibly or actually. A result of the visual supervision could be that the individual tries to behave as unobtrusively as possible to not get into suspicion, complying with the movement norm. The results of this technique limit the behavior, the freedom of movement, the watched individuals.

Supporters of the observation technologies signal, that surveillance technologies simplify everyday life, contribute to safety reasons and make living easier in society. The application of these methods isn’t absolutely promising contrary to the police files. These empirical values show that surveillance cameras in public spaces do not necessarily promise successful effects.
So reports prove that a video supervision also can lead to the superseding of crime of single foci in not monitored areas.[1] A shift and moving of the potential dangers, but not fighting the causes for the prevention could be the results of a permanent video supervision. These and other discipline- and control methods disregard the causes of the unauthorized use. Solution trials of social conflicts are deferred. Instead of this one the production and further development of new surveillance technologies and instruments of control become more attention.

(De)construction

The relation with security and its necessity in the social space prove to become more than one of the decision making factors in the constitution of the construction of identity. The artistic prospects in Closer indicate in style and content on the experienced balance between the need for safety and liberty in this regarded spaces. With different representation techniques, like painting, film, photography, sculpture or Mixed Media installations their works approach the limits of movement as well as freedoms of movement in the form of (De)construction and abstraction in social spaces.

Kerstin Niemann

Notes:
[1] According to this is the increase of the privatization of formerly public spaces as well as the constant arming of security sanctions and the growing consumption of security technologies.
[2] In his publication Jochen Becker examines and criticizes the consequences of the entrepreneurial city, the existing municipal discourses, like the pushing away in peripheries as well as excellent alternatives actions.Becker, Jochen (Hrs.): Bignes? Size does matter / Image/Politik/ städtisches Handeln Kritik der unternehmerischen Stadt. Berlin 2001
[3] Video surveillance in social space; 21.03.2002
http://www1.bdihamburg.de/bdiv42.nsf/f5b2cbf2a827c0198525624b00057d30/a020742ac7aec060c1256b870057b1a4?OpenDocument [05.10.02]

Literature:

Becker, Jochen (Hrs.): Bignes? Size does matter / Image/Politik/ städtisches
Handeln Kritik der unternehmerischen Stadt. Berlin 2001.
Foucault, Michel: Überwachen und Strafen. 1976, Frankfurt/Main
Foucault, Michel: Der Wille zum Wissen, Frankfurt/Main 1997.
Orwell, George: 1984. London, 1984.
Schulzki-Haddouti, Christiane (Hrsg.): Vom Ende der Anonymität: die Globalisierung der Überwachung. Hannover 2000, S. 105-122.
Whitaker, Reg: Das Ende der Privatheit: Überwachung, Macht und soziale
Kontrolle im Informationszeitalter. München, 1999.


“If wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of the ‘stranger’ presents the synthesis, as it were, of both these properties. (This is another indication that spatial relations not only are determining conditions of relationshipsamong men, but are also symbolic of those relationships.)”

Georg Simmel, The Stranger (1908).

Reflecting upon the justification of an experimental art project in late capitalism, the so called fifth dimension of spatial relations defined by Georg Simmel [1] takes germane specificity. This dimension of spatial relations has to do with the now increasingly common phenomenon of changing locations, such as by whole groups (e.g., nomadic tribes, Gaza residents, hurricane Katrina victims), travelers, or individuals with particular functions (e.g., artists, curators, art dealers, collectors).

For some the image of the stranger is that of the migrants and marginal members of an urban ecology. In Simmelian terms, however, “the stranger” is a form of sociality. Both mobile and fixed, “the stranger” is a synthesis of two properties in which many “contents” such as desires and instincts gain a recognizable social shape.

The idea of “the stranger” or of “the other” as an identity for an art project emerges as a position of confluence of spatial proximity with others from whom one is also socially distant. “The stranger” or “the other” is both outside a group and confronting it. “The stranger” is geometrically but not meaningfully close to the group to which he is strange.

This emphasized position of “outsiderness” is a chosen formal structuring of personality, an operation carried out under variable conditions in an attempt to discover or provide the opportunity for engagement with the relationship between a geometric and metaphoric distance.

Space Other is proud to host the exhibition Closer, curated by Kerstin Niemann [2]. Closer presents the works of seven emerging German artists featuring the (de)construction and abstraction of social space in society. This exhibition is inserted into a modest independent adventure for insight, by tracing the course of a critical concept in the works of these artists. The selection attempts to highlight the importance of the comparative perspective and the urgency of adopting such an approach to gain awareness.

Georg Simmel wrote about at least five dimensions of social space. [3] Kora Junger’s Youme & Meyou Series 2004/2005 may be approached as a small coherent body alluding to the so called normative dimension of social space, defined by the position of each individual with regard to the application of social controls, in specific, the ability to move freely within the group. The central figures in her drawings have a low position within this dimension, and are usually surrounded or literally under those helmet wearing occupants the privileged or empowered space. An approximation to the deceivingly innocent complex arrangement of simple lines in these drawings pushes the viewer to a physical journey akin to that of those with criminal records, enemy combatants or law enforcers.

The so called vertical dimension of social space, defined by the distribution of material wealth, is may be addressed in the series of woodcuts on paper by Gabriela Jolowicz. Dislocated, however recognizable members of society are the sole inhabitants of heterotopic locations such as clinics, supermarket alleys, bar corners or street gutters, environments where transgression easily blurs with sociation. Gabriela Jolowicz captures images that belong to an incriminated medium, exposing (borrowing an idea from Henri Lefebvre) an error or illusion concerning the social space. “Where the error consists in a segmentation of space, moreover – and where the illusion consists in the failure to perceive this dismemberment”.[4]

No two bodies can occupy the same space. Nothing is allowed and nothing is forbidden. Vorstadkirsche (Suburb Church) 2003 and Alle Sehen Alles (Everybody Sees Everything) 2001, by Norbert Schwontkowski, are paintings of architectures that are foci of fetishized social interactions. These works may propose that social space varies by the configuration and exclusivity of the groups occupying it or not, such as within or outside the universal churchor the video booth. “Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes or no, which decides everything.” [5]

The so called horizontal dimension of social space, defined by the distribution of individuals in relation to one another, may find resonance in Jörn Stahlschmidt’s elegant work Schleppe (Drag Piece) 2003 . The viewer-participant interaction with the piece establishes primal connections of bodily intimacy, shelter and integration. The so called symbolic dimension of social space has been defined by differences in the amount and content of culture.

Jörn Stahlschmidt’s wall drawing the wyrm, the wild and the weaver 2005, brings together otherwise independent elements: the popcorn machine, rows of houses, the cloth, the lamp, the wheel, the girl, a silhouette, the speaker, the animal farm. These fluid hyperlinks akin to communication technologies allow diverse flexible interactions and differences, raising unexpected questions about truth versus illusion, about beauty versus message, about the meaning of a spectacle and fairytales, about communication and networks.

Duplex Crime Series (4er Serie), by Juergen Staack inverts the social order configured by law inforcement by highlighting relations across boundaries. The found acquisitions of the surveillance camera fuse parallel scenes of the crime creating a sense of concreteness. These micro perspectives offer a fresh view of individuals and, then, relationships as crucial elements of the construct of social space, and a critique of certain of its hegemonic qualities.

Two works by Tjorg Douglas Beer may point towards the claim that space can be shown by means of space itself. Such a procedure of tautology uses and abuses a familiar technique that is as easy to abuse as it is to use. The interior elements of Uagh.ffff and the concauction of marks and juxtapositions of Keinbrain not only amplify or emphasize aspects of the production of spaces, but create a shift from the part to the whole, working by contiguity rather than similarity. Metonymy rather than metaphor, these works transfer a whole set of associations which may or may not be integral to the meaning. The map and the box echo the words of Henri Lefebvre: “It is pure illusion to suppose that thought can reach, grasp or define what is in space on the basis of propositions about space and general concepts such as message, code and readability”. [6]

“Our space has strange effects. For one thing it unleashes desires. It presents desire with a ‘transparency’ which encourages it to surge forth in an attempt to lay claim to an apparently clear field.” [7] Herlinde Koelbl’s video installation Goldmund (Gold Mouth) 2005 possibly attests to this rhetoric of desire, which constitutes another of the boundaries of social space. But desire encounters no object, and leaves us searching within the arena where relationships are constantly renegotiated.

Herlinde Koelbl’s video piece possibly also alludes to the concept of personal space. Blowing up the mouths of those interviewed results in increased physical proximity, and urban space emerges

in all its diversity. The idealizations and stereotypes of groups can begin to break down with physical nearness. The concentration of population in cities can result in
overstimulation, a cacophony of frequency and pace of interactions. However, nothing separates one pole from another, the beginning from the end, and an implosion of the boundary of desire occurs, an absorption of the model of sociality.

Social space is a successful concept of sociology that has permeated into the medulla of thought and of artistic production. Space is subdivided for social purposes and framed in boundaries. In contrast to architectural or natural boundaries, the social boundaries are made out of sociological facts that are morphed spatially, providing special configurations for experience and interaction. Overall, the selection for Closer attempts to articulate a fresh glimpse at this concept through a selection of artistic manifestations. The interplay between the selected pieces may begin to show subtle erosions in the security of the construct that regulates contemporary sociation. The exhibition aspires to offer the argument of the impossibility of a complete or even coherent understanding of the “text” of social space.

Gamaliel R. Herrera

Notes:
[1] Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Space’ and ‘On the Spatial Projections of Social Forms.’ From: David Fearon, Georg Simmel: The Sociology of Space (Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences: University of Santa Barbara, California, 2001).
[2] Kerstin Niemann is an independent curator based in Hamburg. Ms. Niemann’s curatorial projects in the United States include the exhibition ‘Insights/outside, an educational project for the Sculpture Garden of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami on February 2005. She is currently Associate Curator at the VanAbbemuseum in Einhoven, The Netherlands.
[3] David Fearon, Georg Simmel: The Sociology of Space (Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences: University of Santa Barbara, California, 2001).
[4] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (translated by Donald Nicholson Smith: Blackwell Publishing, Malden Massachusetts, 1991. Page 97.
[5] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (translated by Maria Jolas: Beacon Press, Boston, 1994. Page 211.
[6] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (translated by Donald Nicholson Smith: Blackwell Publishing, Malden Massachusetts, 1991. Page162.
[7] Ibid, page 97.