Arceneaux, Banner, Pepperstein, Schäfer, Stark, Stevenson, Taylor

KORREKTUREN

Edgar Arceneaux, Fiona Banner, Pavel Pepperstein, Albrecht Schäfer, Frances Stark, Michael Stevenson, Stephanie Taylor


Preview, October 17, 2003, 7pm - 9pm
Exhibition October 18 - November 29, 2003
Opening hours Wed-Fri 1pm-7pm, Sat 1pm-6pm


For the artists in the group-show “Korrekturen” (engl. „Corrections“), text as well as drawing plays a decisive role. Although the artists use varied approaches and methods for their investigations into the image/text relations, all the works are determined by a shift of ideas and perceptions of text and image, to create or put into question new connections. Because drawing allows faults and corrections more easily than other media, this medium is particularly suited to develop a complex and dense image, as well as narrative, and to simultaneously present this as a dynamic process.

For Fiona Banner and Frances Stark, text and language stand both formally and in terms of content at the centre of their work.
The text-works by Fiona Banner circle around a point where language is necessary for thoughts and emotions as a means of grasping them, but where on the other hand this is made problematic by the limitations of language. The fact that text doesn’t say what it originally should have said shifts into the foreground. “the corrections...” shows a text in its absence; what is left over are the punctuation marks, the architecture of a discussion without content.
In contrast, Frances Stark deconstructs and comments on texts that she admires. In the knowledge that these sentences have already been written by someone, she transfers them onto a visual level in order to draw close to the precious material in a nostalgic way. With conscientious precision, the artist reproduces with carbon paper letters and icons, forming them into a multi-layered, readable text /image.

Edgar Arceneaux and Michael Stevenson transport with text aspects of their complex thought constructions. In this way both artists use documentary text-material.
Edgar Arceneaux explores individual as well as collective memory by combining elements from his day-to-day environment and personal background with extracts from literature, history, film and music. The trilogy “Timetable of History” combines a historical listing of the events during the heyday of the library of Alexandria with a prophecy from the American Yellow Press. The lost knowledge of the library of Alexandria as a space of wish-projections of what may once have existed is mirrored by the desire to explain the future.
The installations by Michael Stevenson couple events in the Art-world with socio-political developments. The Installation “Revolutionary Degas”, links western Concept Art from the 70s with the consequences of the Iranian revolution for western Art: while in Iran after the revolution the dancers of Degas’ “Dancers practicing at the Bar” were removed from catalogue illustrations consequently lending the picture an unintentional contemporary component, Michael Asher removed the partition wall between the exhibition space and the office of a gallery in Los Angeles. In the way that Michael Stevenson combines the “contemporary” Degas with a review and a reproduction of the installation by Asher, a number of irritations start to emerge.

Albrecht Schäfer and Stephanie Taylor develop fictive stories, which are the basis for transferrals into the visual realm. While Stephanie Taylor uses linguistic strategies from which her stories result, Albrecht Schäfer’s fictions are orientated towards historical givens, focussing on the boarder between fiction and reality.
The starting point for Albrecht Schäfer’s “Malevich Museum Biberach”, from which the interiors and the history of the museum can be seen as drawings, is the true story of how the south German town of Biberach was offered pictures by Malevich. The town turned the offer down and the pictures were eventually sold to the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam. In Albrecht Schäfers version however, Biberach purchases the pictures and builds a new museum for them: the Malevich museum Biberach.
The stories by Stephanie Taylor result from a chain of phonetic analogies and anagramatical translations, which cause the narration itself to slip into the background. The drawings in the exhibition, in part made by an illustrator, have the titles “hawing” and “sawing” and refer to “drawing”. They are extracts from the story “Gutter Foal” which is at the centre of the exhibition with the same name in Gallery Christian Nagel. Stephanie Taylor confronts the observer with a systematic series of accords between form and content though simultaneously putting these into question.

At the centre of the artistic practice of Pavel Pepperstein, who is a writer as well as an artist, is the relationship between text and image and the infinite reference to further texts and images. Not only are images and texts from mass-culture quoted, but also their inner mechanisms and procedures are investigated through the visualisation of hallucinations and dreams. In his new works Pavel Pepperstein uses text as a matrix which remains hidden behind the images, but which determines the „illustrative“ content of hallucinations. The drawings presented in the exhibition have as a theme the interweaving of text and image, and consequently also demonstrate his working method.