Catalog publication for Genius Loci 6 Present Progressive, with Michael Dopp, Mark Flores, Pearl C. Hsiung, Pamela Jordan, Raffi Kalendarian, Michael John Kelly, Rachel LaBine, Emily Marchand, John Mills; July 5 - August 24, 2018, Setareh Gallery, Duesseldorf Germany.
Present Progressive
The difficult thing about spirits is their indeterminate form. Spirit, similar to the concepts of dark matter and energy in astronomy, is a term for something of which we do not have an altogether precise idea, or simply many different ones. The German word “Geist” alternatively corresponds to the English words ghost, spirit, mind and intellect, and herein describes phenomena that are located between scientificity and spirituality, between ratio and faith, or better yet, which are located in the broad field of cognition proper. Contained in the title of the exhibition series, this spiritual extent is spatially condensed into the spirit of the place. And just as dark matter and energy determine the movement of the universe, of which we perceive only a fraction of visible stuff, we may see in this exhibition, the workings of a Genius Loci, albeit not that very thing, because it never shows itself directly, but only through what it moves. The determinant of a culture eludes our grasp. This is the ghostly within the spirit, that, at times, inspires.
But in order to get a little closer to the Genius Loci of this many-faced place, whose detailed description is omitted here, because it can only turn out to be either too brief or too extensive, and of which the reader will have their own idea already, I would like to merge some anecdotal evidence about the Angeleno with a dimension of the English language, so to speak, with the Genius Verbalis. The Present Progressive, also known as Present Continuous, the proceeding present, fascinates the German native speaker, who begins to learn English, as it finally puts them in a position that allows to legitimately express what they are currently doing. “I am at the write”, or “I am write thereon”, are respective approximations, clumsy attempts to explain to the English ear what the German hears. As of yet we Germans can do this in colloquial language at best, that lower linguistic form in which everything that is not canonized as per Duden (German’s Merriam-Webster), finds expression and makes itself heard.
In 2015 Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of Linguistics and English at Lancaster University, and his team published the results of several tests they conducted with German and English speakers. One actually does see the world differently, the conclusion, depending on which language one speaks. Simplified, the arrangement of the experiments looked as follows: The team played video clips of events with a motion in them, for example, a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards a grocery store. If you asked monolingual German speakers what they saw, they described the movement and also tended to describe the goal of the movement. For example, “A woman is running to the car” or “A man is cycling towards the grocery store”. English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “A man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action. Athanasopoulos concluded that the world view of the German speaker is a holistic one in which an event is perceived in all aspects – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus primarily on the action. This is due to the fact that the English speaker is required to grammatically mark the ongoing processes with the Present Progressive. Further tests, this time with German and English second language speakers, showed a relationship between the frequency with which speakers mentioned the goals of events and the linguistic competence in using the Present Progressive; The less a German native speaker was able to use the proceeding present, the more they included the goals of a movement.
Coincidentally, and interestingly, these findings are reflected in the way the Angelenos pursue one of their favorite pastimes, namely hiking. The state parks located in the hills between Malibu and San Bernardino offer plenty of opportunity to do so. Naturally, and especially, the Germans are no strangers to “wandern”, but they do so holistically. And therefore, the German trail, the “Wanderweg”, usually leads in a proper loop through the terrain to be traveled, ideally interrupted by at least one roadhouse, where one can freshen up over an “Almdudler” (herb lemonade) or a “Radler” (shandy). In contrast, the hiking trail, rough and little maintained, that leads for example, into the Angeles National Forrest, is usually the same path one exits on. By the way, far and wide there is no inn to be seen here. Hiking is, to a greater degree, about being in a certain mode, being somewhere, instead of arriving somewhere. Without wishing to continue the polarization of the currently already battered German-American friendship by denying the Germans the ability of being-in-the-moment, this example, cited with a wink, is intended to indicate a fundamental attunement of the Angeleno that is often translated into German with the word “Lässigkeit”, which for lack of a better term we will translate with laxness.
Thus, in the image of the proceeding present, there is a tendency to single out, to release the moment by seeing it outside its purposefulness. In contrast, we see a larger issue that leaves the German holistic comprehension of situations, perhaps expressed with care or thoughtfulness (both approximations to “Sorgsamkeit”) as a counterpart to the Californian laxness, far behind, namely the urge of our time or society to, in a senseless efficiency frenzy, want to have an application for everything; to want apps.
The released, purposeless moment, which at some point (in the Romantic era) in conjunction with another wanderer (above the sea of fog) had something to do with the word leisure, starkly contrasts the availability of forms of expression that from the point of their conception have been de-contextualized into an empty shell. Examples of this inner emptiness are the plethora of visual effects provided by digital photo and video editing or sounds imitated on the computer using emulated synthesizers. They aim to provide a phenotype that is decided in advance, broken down into its component parts and atomized, reassembled and readily available for purchase and immediate use. The utilization of once vital artistic forms of expression, which now appear as pure effects outside of the original context, could be called kitsch – the opposite of avant-garde. A Taoist would probably add that if the outcome of an action is absolutely certain, this action is already in the past. Herein we recognize the same worldview that shapes the global economy, political landscapes, and so-called social media. And we find it applied in the field of art, which in the sense of a continued modernist utopia, represents the exact opposite of the precisely quantified and standardized product. However, we see flocks of artists far removed from their actual mission, the discovery of visionary and surprising forms of expression, now working in supposed industries to rearrange prefabricated components. But the notion that in opening the computer loaded with apps, we would open a toolbox granting access to a world of boundless expressive possibility, is erroneous, since the box itself is the only tool to work with.
Are the artists in the exhibition examples and illustrations of the opposite state? And what kind of condition would that be? Should I throw away my computer? Maybe after I’m finished typing this text... – Of course, we can not and will not turn back our digital clocks. Standardization begins long before we turn on the computer, and long before industrialization.
The works of the exhibiting artists, however, are found in a dialogue with the materials used, which is characterized by a behavior that is oriented towards the material and recognizes its qualities as well as the artist’s own. Bodies do this in space. The procedural acting-in-agreement-with lets the creator and his reference material be active participants, who are fully present in the unfolding and becoming of the work. This is substantially different from the generation of a predicted effect and points to the possibilities of a development over time and the notion of surprise as positive values, whereas in the presently prevailing view these qualities are seen as obstacles to be overcome. We are thinking of words like (profit-) maximization, streamlining and efficiency; terms that also increasingly describe forms of contemporary art practices. While we can access and manipulate an infinite number of records of past expressions in a kind of master-slave relationship, we are also fundamentally disconnected from everything by largely ruling out our corporeality and its entanglement with the world and all of the reverberances that this can have in our art.
In addition to the place of creation, the works in the exhibition share the dimension of a working method that recognizes material and object as independent aspects with their own effective force. The artists seek in their movements a dialogue with the material, in which expression and form mutually create and accept one another, and in which the relationship of the artist to the work is constantly rediscovered in a sort of acting-towards-which. The creative process takes place in an open, reciprocal loop, as an interaction between creator and material, and the respective malleability of the participants. On the basis of predominantly non-representational approaches to painting, the exhibition raises the question of the relationship between ideas and their alleged translations into material, against the omnipresent background of a digitally portioned lifeworld, determined by hierarchies and efficiency thinking.