Jonathan Monk Souvenirs from the East 24.10.2008 - 23.12.2008
For the first show at our gallery space in Berlin we are very pleased to present a new site-specific work by artist Jonathan Monk. This showroom allows the gallery to expand, adding to our space in Karlsruhe, which we have worked from since 1997. Using the location of the gallery, on Friedrichstrasse close to the former border crossing point Checkpoint Charlie, the conceptual artist Jonathan Monk had a series of portraits made that refer directly to Martin Kippenberger�s painting series �Lieber Maler, male mir� �(Dear painter, paint for me..) from 1981, in which Kippenberger is portrayed standing in front of a souvenir stand by the Berlin Wall in one of the twelve paintings.
Monk siezed on this scene and commissioned reproductions by seven Chinese painters, unknown to him,whose advertisements he found in an internet forum. FANG, HUI, LI, MEI, TING, XIAO and XING � the names of these painters � generated a series of seven identical views, which Monk joins under the title �Lieber Maler, bitte male mich noch einmal� (Dear painter, please paint me once again�). The name of each painter functions as an indexical reference, signifying the individual painting, but other than this not classifying it and instead registering it within a series of repetitive images. This way, the series is made for a limitless expansion, the numbering of which only begins when the first painting is sold, therefore standing in direct proportion to and dependence on cultural and economic prosperity.
Jonathan Monk�s painting cycle is a boundless configuration of an artistic commentary by Martin Kippenberger, who commissioned photo-realistic paintings by a company for movie sign painting in Berlin. By delegating his own painting to others Jonathan Monk demonstrates a multiplication of the duplication that Kippenberger arranged: while the latter had his paintings copied from photographs that he had taken, Monk�s paintings exist as images of a secondary order, preceded by the generation of Kippenberger�s paintings. While giving the methodic attribute priority, Monk mediates a self-promotive form of art as a recording, borne by concept and carried out with illusionist means, which is polemically introspective within the context of a political affront.
The series �Lieber Maler, bitte male mich noch einmal� consists of a system circulating within itself, by narrating art as art, therefore speaking of itself, without incorperating the concrete self-expression of the artist. Where Kippenberger retains a reference to his own person in the form of the paintings� subject, in Monk�s case it is merely the action which remains as a trace in his work: This conceptual artistic stance is counterposed by an action as a service and � due to the unlimitedness of the series� edition � reduces the relationship between original and reproduction to absurdity. Monk thus subverts the originality of a painting beyond the process of creation by a reduplicating the negation of authorship and so creates a radically constructivistic double negation, in which his person only appears as a phantom in the form of his name ( and the Chinese painters� names) in the caption. The artist uses a self-reflexive and yet simultaneously self-disappropriating language that undermines the attribution of substantiality and veracity as an autarchic system.
Cleaving to self-irony, with the exhibition Souvenirs from the East Jonathan Monk presents an artistic, art history-based strategy of exaggeration, in a multiple process of recollection, as experimental as it is paradigmatic � including repetition and variation of a gesture which is critical of society. As a repitition-based form of a �conversation piece�, Monk caricatures Kippenberger�s satiric-realistic depiction of a delusion. Jonathon Monk takes on the role of a commentator who ultimately paints art�s portrait with his work from a �bijective� point of view. Christina Irrgang (Translation Zoe Miller)
Eva Kotatkova I do it because they taught me to 24.10.2008 - 23.12.2008
We are glad to present the young artist Eva Kotatkova, whose artistic position is analytically concerned with possible forms of perception, using methods based on drawing, sculpture and performance. The focal point of the exhibition �I do it because they taught me to� is normative behavior patterns as well as being subject to manipulation respective one�s own body. With the aid of a deconstructive practise, in which Eva Kotatkova explores the discrepancy between a past or given condition and its imitation, the artist pursues the endeavor of declaring irritation to be a moment of insight. In the process of definition and transformation as well as the questioning of conventions and traditional rules, Kotatkova explores self-conditioning and expounds a coincidentally and didactically characterised method of education as an artistic and socially analytical study.
Starting from her own person and her immediate environment, Eva Kotatkova performs a kind of reenactment by imitating and reviving specific situations (from her childhood), whereby she generates alternative paradigms in the process of observing, documenting and challenging. The long-term project Walk to School, for example, forms a basis for the revision Kotatkova undertakes: the artist takes on the role of a schoolchild in a performative act, and in pursuit of this state, reconstructs her perception of her own former way to school and life in school. By re-entering a condition which defines itself as distinct from the initial situation Kotatkova utilises a system-theoretical point of departure, which appears in her work as re-entry into a non-reflective, preconscious state of existence.
A fundamental point in Eva Kotatkova�s work is the pervasion of form and content: Drawings, objects and actions always bear reference to one another through a superordinate context, they form points of intersection and cross-references within the framework of her recurrent model-theme. The video projection, for instance �Sit straight with your arms behind your back� shows documentary shots of posture apparatuses, which are supposed to instil a normed way of looking and body posture into a group of schoolchildren. Here Kotatkova ventilates the relationship to one�s own body, which is declared a puppetlike object by this manipulative and forced imposition, and continues this exemplarily in her sculptures: In a synthetic-operative process of remodeling, body parts become prostheses made out of objects from life at school, often acting as a substitute of the (Freudian) subconscious through a theoretical-surrealistic process of transformation. Paradigmatic for the process of corroding a situation or a condition is one of the objects, which is a reproduction of a wooden rump, which Kotatkova has dressed in her red child�s jacket of wooly bowels. She offsets the autopsy and digestion of the self in another piece; the miniature reproduction of monkey bars, this marks the retrospective view upon one�s own past in a shifted perspective, defined by association.
Finally, a reality constructed by imagination is proclaimed by the diaristic drawings that Kotatkova has been producing with various types of pens and paper, echoing childrens� book illustrations, over a long period of time. Formulated in a dadaistic pictorial language that invites free connotation, these fantastic and surreal artworks are mirrors of inner sensitivities, therefore they oppose the rigid apparatuses as expressions of an inner attitude, in the expressive style of ��criture automatique�.
Eva Kotatkova leads the viewer to an exemplary analysis of the self in her exhibition �I do it because they taught me to� by revealing a revision founded on staged appearances, with her own person as its point of departure. Using an oneirocritical method, the artist evokes the penetration of an interior inhibition, which - in the process of exaggeration - amounts to an appeal: to approach the (inner) barrier and to overcome it. Through the technique of questioning traditional values, Eva Kotatkova�s works manifest themselves in a didactic light � instead of instructions, however, they offer the results of such � and thereby outline the efficacy and character of externally imposed norms as well as the question of the existence of free will. Christina Irrgang (Translation Zoe Miller)
