The Weather in Fred Sandback

Ariane Müller, September 2022

Contents:

FENDE PRITING IS VERY QUIER 14
1HISTAPBORS TO READ BY 36
STIC VION

This exhibition has started slowly with us thinking about Andrea Fraser’s text: Why Does Fred Sandback’s work make me cry?
We took this title sentence/remark as the main message of her essay, even when it was only the title, replacing Andrea Fraser’s me for our us, and questioned our sentiments. So why are we affected or deeply touched by a work, that is so minimal, and thus so impersonal, not hinting at an author but relational between the spectator and the artist, and so non-textual? In our reflection the answer was: Because one as a spectator is so touched or liberated by the own possibility to see. One is affected/delighted or wondered by one’s senses, comparable to the sentiment expressed in the image of the deaf person who thanks to electronic means hears something for the first time—pure delight.

Andrea Fraser links her emotions to the psychoanalyst moment of object loss (and the remembrance of object loss)—a notion we again took literally (and also with a vivid image of the empty spaces of Fred Sandback’s exhibitions—devoid of objects, citing them merely). We didn’t go deeper into the significance object loss has as the Freudian term of excessive desperation of feeling lost, because the main object that links one to the world is not there—But in the simple meaning: Object loss—the world has lost its objects—a world with no things. Seeing the object not as the signified, and not as target, but in the definition of objects as material parts of the world, produced to be in the world as objects (Gegenstand = literally: which stands against us).
And we followed Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s thoughts in „Il bene delle cose“ The good of the things—A world without things is a world without morals, without ethics.
Emanuele Coccia argues that things, goods, come with ethics, with a moral about what is good (!) or bad. Their advertisement shows us how the world should be handled, how it should be used, providing us with an ethics of everyday life.
This can be seen, following Coccia, as a positive move, since it re-grounds ethics to materialism, decisions made on tangible grounds, replacing non-materialistic, idealistic sources of morals and ethics (religion, a higher meaning). This ethics and morals that comes with things in the end shows us that we live in a deeply secular society.

So, we wished the exhibition to be a space without things—thus with no ethics—with no morals. In the definition of ethics: the way the world is handled, or morals, the way the world is thought. A space devoid of these rulers and guides.

Fred Sandback says (in an interview) his work is about the real space (even when he is only doing his works in interior spaces), he calls it pedestrian space because it comes on the foot level (is not exhibited or mediatized). We later learned from Michèle Graf and Selina Grueter that pedestrian also means dull (but this hints again to a moral of things, and the good in the good, the car).

Our thinking turned to the real (as in real space). If we here follow Lacan’s definition of the real as the part of our perception that is independent from our endeavors to grasp the real, it would be something resisting symbolization, and consequently it would be not-verbalizable, hence not-remember-able. And Freud said to the topic of the not-remember-able that it has to be repeated, and will be repeated (= is haunting us, because we can not grasp it, symbolize it by words or images, verbalize it).
Which also means the real is fleeting, since we immediately try to symbolize whatever appears, whatever we sense. The real is a resistor to this effort. It is beyond sense and nonsense, while being solely linked to the senses.

Basically we come here to the effects of Fred Sandback’s work again. It can be seen as the connection to the real in an illusionistic space—even when he says rightfully what he creates is not illusionistic in itself. It triggers our possibilities to be illusionistic but remains calm vis-a-vis the effort.

So how to make an exhibition out of this.

We are interested in work that is somehow beyond the space as a spatial category. It does not place itself into the space it moves somehow parallel. Maybe this can be called hauntology, a research on ghostly spaces, where we get in touch with the real without having the possibility to tell them—haunting as in returning, and in necessarily perfromed again, and again, and again.
These ghostly space can be seen in the haunting parallelism of real space in its supervised counterpart, doubling, mirroring, within the surveillance camera. We saw it in Julia Scher’s absolutely hilarious attempt to fill it up again with people (this non space). We saw it in a hint towards a space, like in „Pedestrian“ the performance by Selina Grueter and Michèle Graf, where a space is only created by movements meant as well to communicate as to assign. It is about customs (regulations regarding the space between people.)

But at the same time the exhibition is also simple. We think that albeit efforts to privatise and rob, there is still so much space, and one has to hint to it. The unspeakable space of the real, uncanny because we cannot verbalize it, when we encounter it, and when we have found words for it it is gone, is the main meeting place for artists. (It is basically everything, the whole world, but alas so difficult to encounter once symbolization and again the imaginary, seen as a sort of Über-Ich or morals, steps into place, this shady fleeting space of the encounters with the real is where art dwells.)

Insert Rationale: Object loss:

Basically the object is the thing (symbolised outside entity) that is necessary for self constitution because it reacts, and helps us to self constitute.
Her object—the thing that stands against us.

Whatever got lost.
I think there is something interesting in the specific video work of Julia Scher, or even more so in the whole work, to make something visible, which is not there. Namely surveillance, and there to condition people, and to subject them to behave under the conditions of consumption and capitalism.
Something is described that is not obvious to everyone.
What we see is a change in behavior patterns and moments of identification with symbolic things and ethics. This is a state of change. Society changes, which means the relation to things is discussed anew.

de-identification

data anonymity

The lost object is not the reason for mourning and feeling abandoned, but maybe a step into a dis-identification with the promises that we connect to things. It’s maybe connected to a Berlin specific feeling that there was not much to be gained by contributing to a public sphere of the city, and that it had – in the meantime – worked on its realisation in things (buildings, streets, holiday houses and government buildings, representational spaces), seemingly unadvised by a usage of the city, that had taken place.

Chapter 2, George Maciunas

Negociando la colectividad, negando la subjetividad. George Machinas, el travestismo y los debates fluxus sobre el cuerpo
Dealing with collectivism, rejecting subjectivity. George Maciunas, travestism and the body debate in Fluxus.

George Maciunas, not only the father of Soho, but also as Billie Maciunas has told us:
Madame George
alas:
Madame Bolduc
Madame Edna Gallmo Cooke
Madame George
Madame Humtata
Madame Mayhem
Madame Mercury & Dj Whatt
Madame Monsieur
Madame Moustache
Madame Rita
Madame Tussaud´s Dance Or
Madame Wu