Giving and taking, grasping and grabbing, clutching and displacing: the bodies depicted in G�gel's pictures are enfolded one within another, not in an unfounded manner, but with a lack of consciousness. These ominous alliances, however, must not only be accessible on the material and corporeal level, but can also present themselves upon the mental plane as a psychological-social compulsion. The constellations portrayed by G�gel are in all likelihood those pictorial statements of the artist which are most able to bear an expressive load. Pictures such as Feuer bitte (2006), Schuhe und Stiefel (2006), Frequenzer (2005), Komponist (2006) or Sauger (2005) present a world which is full of dependencies, tensions and involuntary role-distributions. The simple gesture of offering a light among smokers is transformed into an act of expectation and projection and presents the striven-after advantage on the part of the giver and the aggressive smugness of the taker. The scene in the shoe-shop is more complex. The depersonalized salesman, whose face disappears behind a stack of shoeboxes, is obliged to show each and every shoe model to the vain dandy. Blind with regard to the hierarchical constellation, the buyer is attentive only to his own vanity and overlooks the fact that the entire collection of shoes consists of only one single style. The exaggeratedly large shoe in the window symbolizes the everything and nothing at the heart of the fetish: shoes, shoes, shoes! In capitalism even the most banal object is charged with energy, instrumentalized and made to express eroticized fashions and attitudes. In the picture Komponist, G�gel even goes a step further. All spruced up and full of tension, the pianist attempts to achieve as excellent a performance as possible, scrutinizes the keys of the grand piano with full concentration, taps his feet rhythmically, and has in front of him a miniature bust. But it is not Wagner or Beethoven who is portrayed, but the pianist himself. He alone represents the history of music and displays his inhibited struggle with art. The music remains inaudible; we see only the tensed body, the mannered figure of the musician who under no circumstances may be allowed to disappoint himself and his audience. The thought of not achieving this standard and thereby making public his supposed failure embodies in a symbolical manner not only the perversion and bourgeois conventionality of the demands made by the artist upon his own work, but also the idea of the significance of his own person. Finally, Der Auftrag (2006) gives evidence that the principle of give-and-take also means violence. In this case the instructions are quite clear: slaughter and murder. G�gel presents a soulless monster which recalls the mechanical bodies of Richard Lindner. In the case of G�gel, however, we do not see alienated inhabitants of a metropolis but rather a blood-smeared, hideous face sitting upon metallic body armor and aiming two revolvers at the viewer. The killer has duplicated himself, is quicker than his shadow, and is accompanied by a no less aggressive and murder-crazed miniature version of himself. The futuristic cyborg-cowboy sums up the latent violence which is depicted in many of G�gel's pictures: in case of doubt, self-defense always means attack and conducts the principle of give-and-take to deadly disaster.
� Maik Schl�ter, VG Wort, Bonn 2006 Translated from the German by George Frederick Takis
Maik Sch�ter, born in 1972, works in Weimar as an author and curator for contemporary art. From 2003 to 2005 he was active in Hannover as a curator for the kestnergesellschaft, and during 2002 as the recipient of a DAAD grant, he was an assistant curator at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. Exhibitions: Candida H�fer, Cindy Sherman, Fischli/Weiss, Hanne Darboven et al. Free exhibitions: "Trial of Power" in Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin 2005, "Not Now!" in Kunstraum B/2, Leipzig 2003, b�ro spors, Berlin 2001-2003.
