Hordaland Kunstsenter

There is no reason to beat around the bush about this. Stian Ådlandsvik and Lutz-Rainer Müller are onto something when they join three locations, three different formats, and three manuscript pages: three drops of blood in the snow in Snow White; three steps in the dialectic; the Trinity of God the Father, the Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Three is where two meet; it is the other, which sets things in motion.

The two artists have known each other since their days at the Academy in Oslo. Their fondness for spatial explorations, their fascination with breaks and their conviction that space is created through movement has led to several artistic cooperations. While sensitivity and a talent for organization are characteristics of Ådlandsvik, what is striking about Müller is his intuition and open-mindedness. In addition to their common passion for thinking artistically outside the box, they share a weakness for mustard, Hamburg, and dance.

In their four years of study, they got to know one another well enough to accept and respect their differences; but above and beyond this, they have come to trust each other blindly. They communicate with each other in three languages. And sometimes they simply use gestures, play darts at their studio or hatch ideas. Most of their ideas arise casually and associatively; some are spelled out and put down on paper, and only few are turned into models. They all have one thing in common: it is an attitude that keeps turning up, saying, “Everything is already there! More important than adding is digging.”

Other than enjoying developing ideas, the artists take great pleasure in performing as a well-practised team, acting out the roles of the laughing/struggling/sleeping artist. You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk is their third larger joint project. Certainly their complementary personalities come to bear here too. Equally present are their probing into the relations between normed architecture and individually experienced space, their carrying out of necessary planning, and their acknowledgement of contingency.

One look at history tells us that truly innovative, experimental art does not constitute an exclusive antithesis but an individual difference. This is a difference that the two artists in their joint works render productive largely through their willingness to engage in not knowing. The unpredictability of the different developmental stages that their current project has passed through is something the artists not only affirmed; it is a quality they found interesting as such. They structured this dynamism by setting You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk, from the beginning, on an open-ended conceptual footing.

When it became known that a modest residential home on the island Askøy, dating from the not-so-glamorous fifties, was going to be torn down to make room for a profitable investment project, Ådlandsvik and Müller saw the opportunity to use the house for an art project. The challenge for them was to explore the space-creating power of space itself: one of Martin Heidegger’s mottos reads, “space spaces.” And he adds: “Spacing means clear-cutting, freeing-up, opening up something free, something open. Insofar as space spaces, frees up something free, it grants only through this the possibility of areas, of proximities and distances, of directions and limitations, the possibility of distances and sizes.”

Placing objects in a space, accordingly, does not mean to fill a space with objects but instead – with things and their locations as the starting point – to open up and to think space. This appears to be precisely what Stian Ådlandsvik and Lutz-Rainer Müller are doing with their transformation of the house into a temporary, non-walk-in sculpture. They do not let themselves be pulled in by the maelstrom of bizarre intimacies and eccentricities harboured in this house that was inhabited until recently; instead, the placing or rather freeing-up that happened here is a deconstruction of the house. To this end, excavators were instructed to open up parts of the building’s architecture and structure in such a way that the spatial arrangements and implied parameters of habitation come to light, their normative construction exposed to deliberation.

With this intervention, the artists suspend the idea of the house as a home (Heim), something that offers protection, laying open another side of the domicile: its fragility and its “homelessness,” as an element of the uncanny (das Unheimliche). They do so without nostalgia and sentimentality. Because the interior is neither visible nor accessible, one spatial aspect remains out of reach. The intriguing question that results is: considering the circumstances, how do place, space, and sculpture relate to ideas of autonomy and participation?

A further thing that is interesting about this project is the fact that the way in which the house was transformed into a sculpture was not so much determined by the artists as by others. Friends of theirs were given the task of creating photographic documentation of the ever changing state of a model of this exact house. To begin the process, the artists sent the model – packaged inadequately – to friends in Beijing, who sent it on to Sidney, and from there it went on to New York and Paris. When it arrived back in Bergen it had sustained various kinds of damage.

To enable a reception of the artwork with all its aesthetic, participatory, and cultural-political aspects, the Hordaland Art Centre and the artists decided to use an adjoining garage as a space of mediation. The project is presented here showing the entire course of its artistic process and will be contextualized with talks and images. Since every perception of a space is tinted, i.e., is a perception accessed via a particular sensibility and knowledge, the effect of this format will be felt immediately.

Within the institutional exhibition space, the artists attempt to bring to light the individual nature of some objects they found in the house’s wreckage. In choosing these items, they decided predominantly in favour of objects with sculptural properties. In case the transformational excess of these “readymades in progress” would not materialize despite the objects’ regrouping and the art context, the artists thought up a kind of safety net: a type of “dispositif,” which would invariably change the perspective on the other exhibited artworks.

Ådlandsvik and Müller began constructing a glasses frame two weeks before the exhibition opened, using some remains from the Askøy house. The frame, its design following 50s fashion, is around four meters wide; its scale places it somewhere between the model they mailed and the original house. With this choice of motif, the artists hint at the fact that glasses can improve vision and help to perform delicate work but, as history has shown, glasses can also inspire the invention of miniature tools. Also, the refraction of two different visions which people who wear glasses take for granted – one blurred and lacking orientation, and the other with clear contours and depth of field – is mirrored here for the viewer. In this way, one might say, visitors can draw on a familiar optical aid and an instrument of discourse analysis when viewing the institutional exhibition.

This device guarantees an encounter of two levels of reality: one is the reality of appearance, marked with found objects; the other is the reality of art, which lies beyond the first and can only be viewed with sophistication – as Nietzsche would have expressed it: this is a metaphysical or aesthetic “Hinterland.” What exactly will happen in this hinterland is anyone’s guess until the exhibition opens. After all, Ådlandsvik and Müller do not only permit experiments but integrate them into their works. In this respect, they share Robert Morris’ critique of a static conception of art, “where art is a form of work that results in a finished product.” What art achieves with a turn toward anti-illusionism “is transformable material that does not need to arrive at a point of spatial or temporal finality.”

The act of sending the model of the house to their friends readily illustrates that, like Morris, the two artists are concerned with drawing into question the dominant conception of artistic work – art as a shaping transcendence of matter via a single artistic idea. What is emphasized here is the intrinsic value of each material, the spatial and temporal context, and the collaborative process of creation. This is their intention and it corresponds closely with their giving precedence to experimentation over procedures that incur no risk, and which for this very reason, because there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong, are so boring, hollowing out the entire art discourse.

This project by contrast, with its mawkish melancholic title You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk offers leads that can be followed, relics that can be probed, and thought processes that

 

Translated from the German by Kennedy-Unglaub Translations

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Petra Reichensperger (1966, writer, lecturer and curator based in Berlin) has curated exhibitions both within and outside of the art institution, such as Hilka Nordhausen: Montags Realität herstellen (2002) at Hamburger Kunsthalle, SYSTEM (2009) at M.1 and Berlin Alexanderplatz. Urban Art Stories (2005) in public space. From 2008 to 2009 she was artistic director of M.1, an exhibition space and grant-making initiative, and is currently responsible for the Goethe-Institut project Raum für Raum taking place in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Her publishing activities mainly focus on the relationship between spatialisations and temporalisations, art and publics; her current research explores the relationship between exhibition format, gesture and authorship. Reichensperger’s books include Eva Hesse – Die dritte Kategorie (2005, Silke Schreiber Verlag), The Making of Alex (2005, Revolver Verlag) and never trust a curator (2010, Textem Verlag).