Working on Skulpture

Werner Fenz

„Is the world falling apart into mere images, is identity exhausted in repetition? Through images, the world seems to have closed in on man more than ever. Our open or secret longings for eradicating all distances count on a cancellation without fracture and rest. But the ability to see the world in images relentlessly creates new differences between the real and the symbolic. Between repetition and renewal the artistic form of cultural models has its stage. The somewhat negative connotations of imitation on the one hand, the fragile hope for mimetic ability outside instrumental action on the other, mark the two ends of a spectrum that comprises a basic anthropological interest and its effect on the current development of culture.” [1]

Images closing in on us – this aims at the core of the question: How do we experience reality today? It is more than a conjecture, it is a fact, that art has provided an essential foundation for the recognition of such perception processes – that the decisive discourse takes place in art as a field of visual culture situated precisely at the intersection of lines coming from various directions. Principally, this phenomenon has existed ever since we have talked about art. Explanation patterns are being provided by various scholarly disciplines. In our day, the situation has been condensed by overlaying visual information levels that have become practicable, as has been most conspicuously demonstrated by the electronic media. But the responsibility does not only rest with artificial intelligences and their virtual realities and almost unlimited potentials of generating and linking data but also with the various transmission standards and habitual patterns of usage. This may be demonstrated by an example from everyday communication: „ On July 15th, 1980, a round-table discussion televised in the German and Rhaeto-Romanic language areas of Switzerland was to open a dialogue between the political authorities of Zurich and the autonomistic youth movement of the city. The two ‘authentic representatives’ of the youth movement with their assigned role as figures of radical negation appeared in the studio as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Müller’, with a perfectly bourgeois outfit, outwardly as well as inwardly. The strategy of unflinching affirmation of even the crudest attitudes of the enemy not only lead to a collapse of the discussion situation but also to a lingering disturbance of mutual trust between a mislead public and television as a contract partner who, after all, is expected to provide calculable, apprehensible information. “[2]

If one had expected the everyday language of images and symbols, even in its procedural, cinematographically documented form, to always enable unambiguous interpretations and classifications, this example proves one’s expectations wrong. Even the forms and attitudes of everyday communication and their documentation may require the same parameters of distance, alienation and model character as artefacts on various medial Levels. The authority of reality is at least relativised, so that Hartmut Skerbisch could use not only the title „The Monitor Speaks Its Language” for a work in 1976 but also place next to it Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that „in order to recognize whether an image is true or false, we must compare it to reality” and Oswald Wiener’s statement: „The comparison of a model with reality is the comparison of a model with another model.” To Skerbisch, the certainty of the TV image is also the physically-electronically realised image construction that has, in consequence of international resolutions, existed as the CCIR standard since 1950. „Like all appearances, those of the TV image are ever provisional cues in our project. By themselves, they can only convince us of their own existence.” Again and again, mimetic principles play a role in the artist’s conceptual strategies, appearing, flash-like, as visual arrangements, while being, in the final analysis, paradigmatic elements for the construction of structural principles, specific and general, of art as well as aesthetics at large. Art’s potential of representing the real, the symbolic and the imaginary run like a red thread through the various groups of works. It almost seems that Skerbisch widens the distance the closer the images move in on us. One of his distancing operations is the protection, through various filters, against demands of and occupation by art. For example, in „Spatial Arrangement” (1969) the element of directional irritation could be employed meaningfully as „the situation … [which] is also the essential message”. The changed reading directing with the disappearance of a moving object at the center, that is, at the starting point of the replay, does not look for a manneristic image loop as an impression; it centers on the demonstration of capacities and conditions of the electronic image – neither as a multiply reproducible artefact (something media art has been absolutely willing to provide, as many examples have shown), nor in a form and manner that alienates everyday aesthetics or exploits art. The methodical approach aims at the respective situation, yesterday (in the ‘net-work’ of electronic media) as well as today (with a certain habitual form as an occasion to identify certain perceptive situations as vis-á-vis). The example quoted is more than a flashback on the history of a development: the temporally limited use of a specific view may well be classified as a reaction to changing fields of research, pointing, however, beyond this „stylistic” feature. It seems that Hartmut Skerbisch, in self-restriction, has always eliminated from the vocabulary of his work presentments and identification patterns – the possible result of repetitions and stereotypes. Seam-lines with reality art, contextual strategies, interpretations of visual utilities, that is, any general reference back to world images and images worlds have been given a wide berth. The goal is concrete object, even when or precisely because the concrete seems to be inaccessible. The question of the art-work ‘s status lies at the center of methodical considerations. Such considerations are subject to real-time encounters with the fund of artistic practice and art theories. Time and again, an art work’s reality value is thrown into the debate as a question: Symbols, emblems, ready-mades in their varying mimetic, autonomous or concrete fields of reference of delimitation form the seemingly inexhaustible description patterns on the functional Level of past and present art. The fact that an art work must not exhaust itself in being unavoidably caught in such a constellation seems to be a motor for Hartmut Skerbisch’s artistic practice. Reception – or discourse-free space was never his ideal. On the contrary: Positioning in reality as reality and in the present as present has been enormously important. Positioning does not necessarily mean uninhibited distribution in an undefined space. Rather, it means occupying one or more points within a defined system. The (mental) spatial system defines the points, and the points feed back into the various spatial values. Again and again, there arises the question of the character of imagined and formulated arrangements. The properties of these artefacts seem to require a vis-á-vis. This vis-á-vis is not, one-on-one, the visitor of an exhibition, nor is the connotation of reality. None of them takes the form of direct readability, although readability is an essential tool of production and reception. In Hartmut Skerbisch’s oeuvre, the so-called vis-á-vis has, in shades, if not principally, changed in the course of time. The observer as a constant can be „viewer and main protagonist in one”. He can complete the installation by his presence. From the sculpture’s position he perceives the sculpture’s vis-á-vis. He faces the situation „Openness is kept open”. These seemingly distinct constellations generate a fall-out of principal things, including, as pair of terms, the visuality and the conceptuality of art. What impression does the art work leave with us, how real is it, how is it different from reality? From a reality which we juxtapose, as a model and a given fact, with the model and the given fact of the arrangement? On the conceptual Level, on which Hartmut Skerbisch often uses literary representations of given facts, this interstice between the instrumentalisation of art and its mimetic potential is fixed – also in the form of translation work – argumentatively on the factual Level. It is the factual that can be achieved by signs, arrangements, as material language here and now as the eyes’, the mind’s and viewer’s vis-á-vis.

„Franz Kafka”, says Hartmut Skerbisch in his description of the work „Statue (Light Sword), 1992″, could not „ignore the weakest moment of the form in terms of spatial plasticity … , [so he] replaced the torch with a sword. Only then a sentence like the following became possible: Her arm and the sword were raised like in recent days, and free winds blew about her form. What Skerbisch wanted to achieve, he goes on to say, was to make present the consistency of Kafka’s unwavering life-long struggle to view any phenomenon in its very essence. Consequently, a 1: 1 replica of Gustave Eiffel’s bare support structure was built: Hartmut Skerbisch made a steel construction 178 ft high, in affinity to Kafka’s life-long struggle „to view any phenomenon in its very essence”. In this artistic approach we find a key position that can inform us about sculpture and the form of existence related to it. In the eighties, the time of „Transavantguardia” and „new sculpture”, Hartmut Skerbisch initiated a markedly autonomous approach to the three-dimensional art work. It would be all too hasty to connect this approach exclusively to a new conception of material and its effect on appearance. Even though it may be dominant in terms of substance and work in the sense of a „retina-stimulating art”, the connection lines to works of the late seventies and to those with electronic image arrangements are not cut. Of course we should not ignore the material references to zinc, iron, aluminium, copper, silk or plywood. It is striking how Hartmut Skerbisch seems to turn to a heretofore unfamiliar materialisation of archetypical signs and elementary conceptuality between 1986 and 1988. If we can at all speak of a narrative element in his oeuvre, it is to be found in works like „Spot X”, „Zinc Shelf”, „Substance Breaking In” or „Attik Work”. In „Spot X”, the sculptural elements are factors of „story”, that gives a potential visual form to a situation described by consecutive words: „His shackles were undone, he paid, and everything was settled.” Literary sources as an element of the artwork appear from the very beginning in precise, succinct form. Apart from Marquis de Sade, the author of the above-quoted passage, the language material is taken from Robert Musil and, above all, from James ]oyce. Reference to this author who has variously served as dialogue partner in the fine arts, is not surprising, due to the consistency and imagery of his language. Even in language, Hartmut Skerbisch looks for elements of sculptural construction, that is, he has explored texts that essentially involve space and the body. The plasticity of such a language is congruent with real phenomena; the point, however, is not their degree of reality but their representative potential, for a language or an art with representative powers in the sense of precise contours can achieve what Hartmut Skerbisch demands from a vis-á-vis in the moment of confrontation. The question of the reality value is not raised in terms of comparison with reality but as an independent value. This approach can also be observed in his earlier works on electronic image and space. Many of them involve the exhibition visitor. „Leafy Speafing” (1978) is a „Piece for exhibition visitors”. The view of a life-size photograph of a person (the artist) is to be conferred on the viewer of the image process: „the piece begins as soon as the viewer relates the section of the breathing chest on the monitor to his or her rhythm of breathing.” In the same year, an installation titled „Toward the True Vision of Reality” is set up; it cannot be seen until one leaves a Piet Mondrian / De Stijl exhibition. Truth, vision, reality – elements of the title of the Dutch artist’s memoirs -have been and are today decisive factors for the positioning of artistic acts or objects, for their functional process and appearance in Hartmut Skerbisch’s sense. An artist’s (in this case Piet Mondrian’s) stated claims and entering into such claims in the real time displayed on the monitor bring together spatial-temporal distances in certain moments. In this way, there is no claim of a new thesis, but the formation of theory by a transition through various levels of reality is overlayed by real facts. This overlay can happen at any time and is exemplarily concentrated in one point and within a limited time. At this point it is made clear that the vis-á-vis of such arrangements and installations is not submerged in a view of the world that is either phantasy-born or theory-laden; it feels the confrontation with a certain form of appearance in a certain place and meets the other that is not constructed from a specific form of context (in whatever direction it may point or to whatever fields of perception it may relate), nor from emotional artistic counter-worlds. Even if the arrangement is based on reduction and therefore on easy visualisation of a given situation, an additional Level of meaning – either elaborated or succinct – cannot be excluded. In „Scepter and Gleaming Stone” (1977), the emblematic Level is intentionally brought into play, since the „presentation of a Vidicon recording ray tube and the standardised data that define the TV image process is arranged in the style of insignia. Another type of everyday iconography is the subject of a series of works developed together with Michael Schuster under the title „Scene from the Play of the Same Title”. The other – the vis-á-vis – can be experienced through the tautological component of the scene from the play of the same title, through the quasi self-referentiality of the statement, through the breaking up of the space-time continuum, through its being anchored in the now, here and today, through presence as presence. These photo works raise a question about the information value of images, the question itself representing the information value. In the version „Schauspielhaus, Vienna, Porzellangasse 19″, the emphasis seems to be on contextuality. The numerous other parts of the series make clear that the leitmotif „All have seen all” takes precedence over the question of context.

Without forcing it, Hartmut Skerbisch’s current concept of sculpture can be extended back into his own past. Evoking it against the backdrop of the developments of the nineties and the eighties, one can see the development of a counter-productive friction surf ace in relation to the familiar movements and attitudes. As late as 1985, Annelie Pohlen could to resume that „art seeks to sow into niches and unoccupied spaces the ambiguous, the iridescent, the intangible and unmeasurable, increasingly using things that have dropped out of the circulation of use or deforming still usable commodity fetishes”. She did, however, anticipate a turning point: „In recent time, there has been a gradually growing interest in the artist’s constructive preoccupation with the material outer world and its effects on man as a social subject. Social developments become relevant as points of reference. In the work of art, deficient outward experience and the vagrant inner wealth of mentalities are crystallised into a provoking design of artificial worlds that may well compete with the material world … “. [3] Naturally, our verdict today can and must be a different one. Particularly in sculptural thinking, the spatial component has gained the upper hand as a defined, given system of coordinates or as a self-developed map manoeuvre. Contextual references, not exclusively but primarily to the „Processing system of art”, determine approach and use of material situations. If one assigns the design of virtual worlds with an „artificial will” exclusively in the field of media art, there nevertheless is another, frequently used track of intermedial arrangements beside the first one. The longitudinal and cross section observations of Hartmut Skerbisch’s work up to this point does not allow a promising docking manoeuvre, a switching of points to „mainstream” tracks. This may be surprising, since the conceptual approaches and material realisation spatial reference and surface structure take a similarly prominent position as in the line of development already addressed. Although we have spoken of an approach to social components and contextual references, cross connections seem possible on first sight. Particularly since the artist himself speaks of „the effect a work of art exercises in the present environment, what relation the message of a work of art has to all other messages that are daily produced, what criteria are at all decisive in this context “. [4]

The precision of verbal and visual-spatial diction, if taken into account in sufficient measure, brings the differences to light. The concept of sculpture, developed in the video world by observation and analysis of vehicles and transferred to the partially monumental form, aims at a mentally highly differentiated substance that exists beyond all patterns of use in the field of artistic creation and in its everyday run-up. „Its is not the artist”, says Skerbisch, „who sets the pace for others to follow”. [5] Thus „All have seen all” and „Presence as presence” are starting points of a redefinition of sculptural thinking. This is not the classic neo-dadaistic „sculpture in the head”; it is the possibility, in a time of déjà-vu, to make sense of spatial formations – in other words, „to view phenomena in their very essence”. This very essence is not always the reference to social systems or conditions, not always the connotation of a real object, but also the shape and texture of a polished disk; likewise the delimitation of a portion of space through common architectural measures like the erection of two metal walls place the existing sculptural stock, for instance of a candelabra, into the right spatial light. Or „the confrontation with a vis-á-vis, triggered by a vis-á-vis which makes this very confrontation its theme” is at the center of an idea and its realisation. Finally, translated into the diction of „Presence as presence”, the spatial body becomes a sound body. As a massive, space-filling volume it provides an imageless moment. This reading creates our „common substance wherein we dwell” [6], in a time when the world seems to close in on man, through images, more than ever before. Thus the thought potential of Hartmut Skerbisch’s work is „Working on sculpture for nothing else, not even art, and no-one else, except ourselves “. [7]