The Czech word, ‘sjezd’ can mean many things. It could describe congress, a conference, perhaps a ride or a trip of some sort, but it’s often political and sometimes going down. Whatever it means it doesn’t quite translate, in all its complexity, to English. It’s a word that Berlin-based artist Martin Kohout chose to name his recent exhibition and video, recently shown at etc. gallery in Prague from December 11 to January 12, where he presented a single-channel video at high volume featuring a phone being dragged across surfaces of tourist spots in Ticino, Switzerland. Its names is inspired by the banal titling of skate videos and it carries through the same scratchy close-ups of metal hitting metal that these videos often show, the silhouette of the film maker only sometimes being seen. Looking, interfering.
‘Sjezd’ (2014) does a similiar thing, only Kohout’s own TOLE project is soundtracking, the urgent, endless, accelerating progress of this six-plus ‘skating’ video, as well as Jahmiga’s swaying track ‘Whiskey Bar‘, while a radio stream intercepts across feeds with “radio global warming”. It’s an expression of an inanimate object that’s animated into a visual-cum-physical experience that Kohout describes as “a continuous scrolling online and watching a movie after a movie, clip after a clip, endlessly”.
To add another dimension to this inter-spatial piece of art that once presented ‘live’ at etc. gallery, Kohout – along with coding help from artist Claire Tolan – presents its online manifestation you can access through the linked images below (watch full-scale, and listen loud), as well as an accompanying text written for its launch on aqnb. It takes words and their meaning beyond being just a symbol of representation and into being a form and subject all its own. ** Click below to watch the video:
SJEZD
[the newsreel excerpt transcript train ride free stuff {try this on computer speech}]
[ altos, country ]
Dhis khakki gu?. [G]
[ bar, deep doom choir [O] chemistry ]
Mvng inn 25FPS. [G]
Tlkng inn 128kb!p!s. [E]
R-Ee)(dng inn 50M!B!p.l. [L]
Knovving thouse shit and chaos.
{ [ now, all together now ] } * echo(3,4,6,12, 36, 216 ) Badam-pa-dee-badamm.
– but sudden+ly —
[ bjürk && (clant eastweed / phul elvyrum) duet ! ] Right into black waters. A golf car spins over the cliff of ice. Following a bunch of horses. — Some witty a ribbon.
(8 )
25F!P!S. AM brthng.
H.264 D pttrn off meye poor_S.
{ NØW! Dt’s wheye! Dt’s wheye! } * 3.45
I wondered at first whether it wasn’t one giant art world joke. The final show of Exile’s Berlin manifestation required that guests RSVP by email, print their confirmation, and face the bouncer at the gates. The idea of a printed RSVP was the first thing that irked me. In these hyper-digital times it seems impertinent to require a hardcopy of anything.
In the courtyard of the unknown Kreuzberg apartment building where we gathered, there were people milling about outside of the pop-up bar. It occurred to me – and not just for a second – that maybe we’d been duped. Maybe the so-called “imaginary” collection of Mr. Kempinski was just that: imaginary. I was already skeptical of a show with 60 participating artists and it all seemed to make perfect sense that they would give such a mysterious aura to the event, only to enhance the spectacle when we all showed up for nothing.
Das stille Leben des Sammlers Kempinski, installation view. Image courtesy Exile.
Happily, my suspicion was wrong. An elevator took us up to the top floor of the apartment complex where we were ushered into the main ‘gallery’ space. It was something like a showroom for luxurious condo living – a kitchen, bed, couch, and coffee table were all in place but in an eerily artificial way. More like the set design of what an apartment should look like.
In the entrance hallway, on the balcony, on pretty much every surface, there were works of art. With the exception of a handful of videos, the show was remarkably paper and canvas-heavy.
Not being able to fully absorb all the works was invigorating. It made it easier to take in the whole atmosphere. After feverishly trying to match names with pieces I settled down in a corner and looked at the room as a whole. Paintings, sculptures, and photographs were leaning against walls, some propped on the floor or on windows. The accompanying exhibition write-up, divided the space into 14 sections – kitchen, balcony, living area, south wall, etc. – but the titles of works were omitted. Whether it was an intentional commentary on the cult of the Artist or not, this unease at identifying pieces was a welcome change from the usual format.
Das stille Leben des Sammlers Kempinski, installation view. Image courtesy Exile.
Further blurring the easy reception of the works, some of the artists who were well-known to me, like Hanne Lippard and Martin Kohout, presented uncharacteristic pieces in the show (alongside some of their more well-known works). Kohout showed ‘hot glue drawings on mesh’ and Lippard a small watercolour drawing of birds. The show also featured one of Lippard’s characteristic voice-driven videos and will later present a one year anniversary celebration by Kohout on the evening of June 13, to commemorate his Gotthard Tunnel Runin Switzerland during LISTE Basel last year. Polish artist Katharina Marszewski exhibited one of her collages under plexi glass, which tied seamlessly with the aesthetic of the show as a whole. Marszewski’s minimalist works reflect the kind of subdued yet dexterous pieces that would make up a private collection (whether fictional or not) on view in a home setting.
Das stille Leben des Sammlers Kempinski. Image courtesy Exile.
There were few loud works in the show, pieces that took all the attention. But the playful sculpture by Aggtelek was eye-catching in this cluttered context. It stood on the floor across the room from a detailed costume by Nadja Abt, the two seeming to respond to each other in their performative stillness.
The ‘collection’ presented in this show is defined as fluctuant and the curators – Exile Berlin’s Christian Siekmeier and New York-based curator Billy Miller – ask viewers to reflect upon the relationship between art and collecting. Though the exhibition was far-reaching in terms of content, the curators managed to ground the show with a central display table presenting books of published works by many of the artists. The ‘library’ provided a space amidst the works to make sense of their authorship. But ultimately, I found the relative anonymity of the exhibition refreshing. **
Keeping true to its name Exile gallery in Berlin is closing its doors to Kreuzberg and moving after February 15.
Announcing they’ll be re-opening in New York in early September this year, people in the German city will have one last chance to see the space and view Martin Kohout‘s 5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation in the meantime.
A space for reflection: on the artist, their medium and our modern condition. To clarify, that’s ‘modern’ in the mode of Nadine Jessen’s “technologically advanced colonisers”, where the patriarchal drive to conquer has gone as far as penetrating our very minds; through a ‘progress’ that’s almost reached that Singularity of man–made devices superseding human intelligence. That’s planned obsolescence care of things sold to people as a necessary tool in the mundanities of daily life. Books are read, bills paid and idle chatter conveyed through these pixelated oracles, where information can be withheld and data surrendered to the Greater Will. So then, how much control do we have over these tools of convenience? More importantly, if these iPads and tablets are imbued with our thoughts, becoming embodied with our consciousness, then what else are we surrendering?
“(pause) Focus Inside (on hold)”. That’s a quote from thelimited-run litany supplementing Eloise Bonneviot’s group presentation, The Meditative Relaxation Cycle. It sounds like the language you’re more likely to use on the phone or watching a DVD but in this scenario, you are doing at least one of those things. In the sparse curtained space of London’s Arcadia Missa, you’ve got one flatscreen, one remote control and 11 artists on the Main Menu to choose from, each one producing six drawings, rendered on an iPad or tablet and administered via the divine guidance of Surrealist automatism. This is a psychic exercise, an expression of the very “materialisation of spirituality” the exhibition leaflet alludes to, as revealed through a commodity.
The Meditative Relaxation Cycle. Installation by Eloïse Bonneviot. Image Courtesy of the Artist & Arcadia Missa, 2014.
As a gentle nudge to interaction with the 66 on show, images move forward one-by-one, zooming in from micro to macro, before diffusing and making room for the following. It takes time to view every series; 12 precious minutes to properly engage with the image in front of you. There’s the suspended motion of Anne de Boer’s vivid PaintShop swirls, glitching briefly at points, Ada Avetist’s disheveled default toolkit compositions, violently shuddering when they get too close, and FourfiveX’s white-on-black geometric patterns, becoming more intricate and expanding well beyond their frame. Digitally generated and captive to the grids and pixels of its artist’s chosen program (‘chosen’ insofar as being limited to the catalogue of software and computers they have access to), every image is a rendering of its creator’s character, an expression of their subconscious –their very personhood.
The results vary wildly in terms of approach. Hrafnhildur Helgadottir’s candid sketches use shape presets as for their gestures and Aude Pariset’s flat coloured strokes stand in stark contrast to Ilja Karilampi’s slinking, shaded ribbons and Sæmundur þór Helgason’s solid spheres. Already, it’s apparent that the aesthetic language, the creative lexicon has been set out by the tools used, even the dimensions of the frame, as Helgadottir’s light–blue tempest of circular scribbling demonstrates. Its rounded edges are slashed at the sides, being incompatible with the sharp 45-degree angles of the box it’s supposed to sit in.
But there’s also disruption. Juliette Bonneviot‘s coiled scrawl quivers as it magnifies, giving the illusion of spiralling ever-downwards while staying suspended in motion. Luca Francesconi’s thin, inky black line, not only trembles in response to its own contrast with a bright white background, but also conjures a whiter-than-white residue appearing as a silhouette in hue-less space, as visual focus flits across the screen.
Gregory Kalliche. The Meditative Relaxation Cycle. Installation by Eloïse Bonneviot. Image Courtesy of the Artist & Arcadia Missa, 2014.
To a degree, artistic response to the brief appears highly gendered. Karilampi, Helgasonand Gregory Kalliche fortify themselves against the perils of contingency, establishing order by creating depth, texture and tangibility to their CGI sculptures. Kalliche’s abstract scenes from his psychic depths, a procession of moulds that operates on textural juxtaposition, are overwhelmed, attacked and torn apart by an even more brazen image to follow.
But as stunning as they are, it’s as if there’s less, not more, depth to Kalliche’s renderings; their structure and stubborn substance blocking out the incidental behaviours that make the cookie-cutter sparseness of something like Helgadottir’s drawings far more dynamic. It’s an unruly energy that only briefly slips through a fissure on the crumbling surface of Helgason’s heavy, rounded orbs in the form of a flickering electric line buried in a crevice. Mostly, though, it’s in the space around his images where the fault lines of a pixelated fallout appear.
Actively confusing these formal distinctions, the blurry, feathered edges of Martin Kohout‘s strokes presented in high definition, mirror the nature of these images as a whole. As each one comes closer, blurring and sharpening at intervals, while its form imperceptibly dissolves into a grid-like skeleton, it becomes impossible to distinguish where an image ends and where it begins. All the while it reveals itself as both construction and imagination –its real world effect as actual as it is abstract.
American Psycho: Bret Easton Ellis’ bleak portrait of modern capitalism is a world populated by high-powered male ‘hardbodies’ who, essentially, do nothing. It’s the performative affect of their jobs that features, the accoutrements and status symbols thatdrive them as they navigate their own corporate malaise with a psychotic twist.
That’s an idea and an aesthetic that seems to come through in Berlin-based Czech artist Martin Kohout’s work, especially prevalent in his current exhibition at Exile, 5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation. Among other pieces, the show includes a series of “Daylight” lamps –used as a remedy for the depressive symptoms of Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) –displayed in the main room of the Kreuzberg gallery. This kind of light therapy is supposed to enter through the retina, so the lamps are usually constructed to sit on a desk. Ideally, you would absorb such light from directly above, in the morning and at a close range for the best effects. Kohout’s presentation of them seems to counteract this intended use; they’re placed on the floor and covered with clear plastic. Additionally, the windows of the space are pasted with a modified version of the “Daylight” instructional manual –since published through his own TLTRPreß –which blocks out the real, natural sunlight that would otherwise flood in from the courtyard.
Kohout tells us that the first edition of this project, ‘Boosted MCK24.OG’, was designed for the Frankfurt offices of corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Invited to create a piece for their workplace, he used the opportunity as a testing ground for the show at Exile. “At first”, he says at a café near the gallery, “I wasn’t sure if I should do it, if I wanted to be associated with these people. But I had been reading about it a lot, sociologically, and I realized this is the only chance I can get so close to them, and not just read about it.”
Martin Kohout, 5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation (2014). Install view. Image courtesy of Exile.
The McKinsey contingent of this so-called Boosted series (not open to the general public) will stay in the office for a year. The lamps are timed to go on for two hours in the morning, but Kohout says the office employees usually unplug the timer and sit in front of it on their coffee breaks to absorb the euphoric rays: “I do appreciate this little hack they perform to the piece,” he adds later via email, “breaking the distance between an artwork and a functional contribution to the space, potential advice to the advisers.”
The show at Exile investigates these absurd consumer items that seek to make life under capitalism easier, that help you not only to survive but also to produce at a higher rate.The Boosted lamps and Kohout’s Survival Guides –a series of ‘self-help’ book covers masked in “privacy foil” and also exhibited there –share a common thread with his wider aesthetic interests. The lamps are devices imbued with the optimism of its bright light but often referred to as SAD lamps, while the automatic, gestural pencil drawings of the Survival Guides are presented among the black walls and distanced cold perfection of the Exile space. It’s that contrast of personal spontaneity and industrial precision that underpins 5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation –the human face behind hardline productivity.
Not surprisingly then, an interview with Kohout is as conceptually loaded as his work and creative interests. From here, correspondence extends well beyond an initial chat in person on a typically dark January afternoon in Berlin, to an email back-and-forth of ideological expansion and factual clarification on his ideas of hibernation, productivity and the absurdity of corporate branding.
Martin Kohout, ‘Survival Guides for Ballroom Dancers, Renovators, Softball Moms, Working Parents and Troubled Folk in General’ (2013). Image courtesy of Exile.
What’s the thinking behind the Boosted series in your Exile show?
Martin Kohout: When I got the lamps for the first version, the booklet said “Daylight Manual” on the cover. Then I noticed that the manufacturer is called “Zero Plus Limited”, the street address is New Territories, and the article number 123. I thought: “Is this a joke?” It was all too good.
The show is super seasonal in a way. The lamps are used mainly in winter, when there is a lack of daylight exposure. And it was also weirdly fitting for the last Exile show at its current location. I was really interested in the lamps because what you get from them is what we all already know. Because people use them to substitute going out into the fresh air.
Humans still do hibernate to a certain extent. If you look back centuries, in the winter there was a big scarcity of food and sources of energy. If you’re a bit depressed, you eat less and sleep more in order to survive it better.
The late-night culture in Berlin means you have such a small window of daylight hours, waking up so late…
MK: What fascinates me about the lamps is the broader idea of how you can calibrate your body. A part of the ideological background is ‘productivity’. People don’t want to be depressed or sleepy, called lazy. They want to be productive.
Most of us in the western world are working at a desk facing a computer, physically performing very much the same activities, mentally doing various sorts of managerial jobs, connected to others randomly around the world and around the clock. Which radically blurs time zones, distances etc. So let’s bring the daylight to yourself!
The lamps should be used in the morning, to simulate natural cycles and affect your circadian rhythm, because your body listens to outside signals called Zeitgeber —from German: literally, the ‘time givers.’ Those can be for example the rhythm of your day activities, or, more importantly, the times you get in contact with natural light, from when, and for how long. So the trick is to simulate early sunrise and make your body assume it’s Spring or Summertime.
Martin Kohout, ‘Daylight Manual’. 5006 years of daylight and silent adaptation (2014). Install view. Image courtesy of Exile.
Yes, it is natural to feel this depression that’s since been identified as a ‘disorder’ that we have to cure, in order to maintain productivity levels.
MK: It’s a little unacceptable to even complain about these kinds of things, when you have devices and drinks to help you with it. The most effective of these lamps is the one that literally wakes you up.
We should just have the SAD lamps built into our computer screens directly.
MK: Have you heard of these things like f.lux or EasyEyez? They’re an application that change the colour temperature of your screen throughout the day. There is a lot of artificial light surrounding us constantly that can function as this background noise influencing your circadian rhythm, that prevents you from calming down because our body is a kind of a clock as well, so this helps you to ease into sleep at night.
This is an interesting trend in your work, dealing with the absurdities of corporate branding aesthetics, as well the hand modeling in your piece ‘Skinsmooth’. They are so disturbing in a way…
MK: I don’t want my work to function as an extension of corporate branding. The ‘Skinsmooth’ piece came from my interest in the topic of hygiene, which later connected with interest in the conditions of work, in Western capitalism in particular. There is not much time schedule in the workplace now, in this kind of precarious and mainly cognitive labour. There is an expectation to always be available, via email, phone. You don’t request emails to be sent to you but yet you are required to respond in time. It’s a forced dialogue with a pretty fixed expectation.
Everyone is assumed to be attached to their devices and non-response is near impossible.
MK: Yes. At McKinsey I talked to people who experience these conditions in an extreme form – working up to 70hrs a week and often being abroad 4 days a week, Monday to Thursday. You’d need a handbook on how to deal with jetlag. The lamps aid the process of putting you in this structure, as part of a machine, because your metabolic clock is usually out of sync with your local environment. Well-oiled bodies…
I saw your performance at Exile. Is this performance or music element something you do regularly?
MK: It was the first time I performed as TOLE live. The music helps me to approach my work differently, in a more intuitive way. There’s also a recent series of videos called ‘Cocoa’ that are kind of abstract animations developed from videos on my smartphone camera. I started approaching them in a similar way to making my music.
You work with a lot of different media… lots of text as well.
MK: I have a short-fiction text, which is in the Exile show, about these 24/7 work conditions that is excerpted on the window covering.I studied cinematography before I came to Berlin in 2008. I think a lot of things I do I understand as scripts or instructions. Sometimes I just give instructions to be executed, or just show the scripts of things that have been realized without my presence, but the logic of these instructions you can repeat informs most of my work.
For example the piece called ‘The Script Involving a Language Teacher’ has been realized three times in different cities but I have not seen it actually happen, there is no record. It’s up to the teacher, whether or how he or she deals with the script.
Also my Youtube channel Watching Martin Kohout was developed from an instruction that I decided to perform myself.
It’s a project I like for the fact that I could not foresee how it would evolve and even though I stopped taking more videos, it’s still sort of growing. I recently read about these Samsung Smart TVs with a camera in them, that there was a security hole in the code, where people could actually hack in and watch others watching TV.
And what about these ‘Sticks’ that you do? I saw one at the V4ULT show last year. They seem beautifully made for a purpose but also simultaneously bizarrely anti-functional…
MK: There are two series of the sticks, Class A and Class B. They are made of aluminum tubes, various bike or sport grip tapes, leather lines for wristbands and painted at a professional paint shop. Each is unique as if made for a specific person as if ordered from a stick-maker.
The Class B are made of tubes I just found in a scrap yard, and spray painted them in the studio. Class B is for those who cannot afford to go to the workshop and so they make the sticks themselves in some garage. So there is a status related to these versions. The stick has a long history with a reference to power. **
Curated by one long-dead Soviet hero, Vasily Zaitsev, design and exhibit installation, M0N3Y AS AN3RROR, has been available to view at the M0US310n.net website since September last year.
It’s the first of what will hopefully be a rich and ongoing platform for supporting and promoting net and digital art on the M0US310n site and does what the title promises, which is focus on money. That’s from the perspective of some of the most exciting artists out there, including Nick Briz, Addie Wagenknecht, Martin Kohout, Jennifer Chan and many more, announcing “This is very EXPENSIVE”. The pieces on mon3y.us appear to disrupt a system of capital as a major glitch in itself because, after all, “*ONLY FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE, VIMEO & FLICKR MAKE REAL MONEY WITH ALL THIS”.
The documentation of completed art works is usually a closed affair. In the case of Breathing Kevlar, Perforated Skin, the documentationwas the content of the exhibition, which led to a series of bewildering encounters and borderline perverse scenarios.
V4ULT is a project space run out of a studio on Adalbertstrasse, one of the hippest hubs near Kreuzberg’s Kottbusser Tor. Billed as a “performative group show”, the exhibition’s description was otherwise opaque. The blurb read as an ad for Screen Ops Tactical Gloves –hand wear that allows you to use touch-activated electronics while working in “tactical environments”. The relation between the gloves and the show was never explicitly illuminated but the almost poetic perversity of the their description might provide the missing link.
Photographer Mikko Gaestel documented the artworks, for the two-hour exhibition. Several people –friends or benevolent assistants of the artists –lined up in a dark, bare room with the works in hand, ready to be photographed by Gaestel. In the far corner of the room, a one person-wide, brightly-lit closet served as the backdrop for the shoot. The objects were photographed in the hand of their guardian, while visitors could peer into from over Gaestel’s shoulder. The whole thing proved a curiously voyeuristic experience.
Mia Goyette (Klarer Geschmack / Aus 660 m Tiefe / 15.000 Jahre alt, 2013). Image courtesy V4ULT.
The objects to be displayed, though largely unassuming, took on a fetishistic character in the context of their documentation. Martin Kohout’s ‘Sticks: Class A’(2011) looked like a cross between a wind instrument, a weapon and a ritualistic divining rod. The ‘Based on Memory’(2012)Euro coins by Anne de Vries were exhibited enticingly in the palm of their bearer’s cupped hands, like a semi-religious offering. All the while, Hanne Lippard’s familiar voice filled the room, as her audio narrative ‘Dings (Horrorscope 2014)’ (2013) –a series of prophetic reflections on suffocating office atmospheres mixed with astrological truisms –emanated reassuringly from a laptop on a table. It was played on V4ULT’s website (where it can still be seen), the background pattern of Naja Ankarfeldt’s accompanying video, ‘Things’ (2013), meshing seamlessly with the wallpaper itself, giving rise to the V4ULT tag line that “the URL continues IRL”. The site becoming personified –in lieu of the artists themselves –as participant among the performers in the room.
Conceptually, the exhibition was excellent, which made it almost unbearable to experience in real life (conceptual art often only being recognizably good when reflected upon in its wake). There was no indication of how to behave in this strange domestic space, no division between visitors and performers, and seemingly no one ‘in charge’. Witnessing the documentation of an event –before or in the absence of the event itself –produces a sense of fruitless anticipation. This unrequited feeling lingered beyond the one night show, a sure sign of seductive success. **
