MARC WELLMANN: ANDREA PICHL – ES KÖMMT DRAUF AN. / THE POINT IS. IG METALL EXHIBITION SPACE, ALTE JAKOBSTRASSE 149, 10969 BERLIN
Andrea Pichl’s installation Es kömmt drauf an. (“The point is.”) was created especially for the IG Metall exhibition space. As a conceptual starting point, the artist chose one of the most significant examples of Russian Constructivist architecture: Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club, built in Moscow in 1927–29. Andrea Pichl scaled down the layout of the third floor of Melnikov’s building and transferred it to the exhibition space in the form of a chalk drawing. The work creates a formal connection to the architectural context of Erich Mendelsohn’s “House of the German Metalworkers’ Federation” of 1929–30, designed in the same vocabulary. There are also thematic parallels between the union building dating from the Weimar Republic and the series of Soviet cultural clubs of the 1920s, in which a distinct architecture for the working class manifested itself for the first time. Both are examples of architecture parlante (“speaking architecture”) which explains its own function by means of its form. Mendelsohn’s building is designed to resemble a fragment of a gear wheel, while Melnikov saw his three cantilevered projections – which are theatre auditorium seating areas – as “tensed muscles”, conjuring up the power of the spirit.The inscription of the floor layout of the Workers’ Club is, on a second level, an outline in which Andrea Pichl constructs a distinct, artistically motivated architecture. She uses various concrete elements from a DIY store that are normally used to edge flower beds, along with windows, door frames, paving slabs and banisters that she secured for the exhibition from an abandoned GDR-era prefabricated building in Storkow. Collecting and combining elements of standardised architecture in new ways is one of the artist’s central themes, around which she constantly pursues new angles. She perceives her installation – which also includes the existing work Weg from 2012 made out of papered plasterboard with holes, complete with preserved rubble – as a physical engagement with the architecture of the exhibition space. She deliberately contrasts Mendelsohn’s iconic architecture with an extremely banal vocabulary of structural forms that we have developed to suit our own needs.
The artist’s title for the installation also gives an indication of her working method: Es kömmt drauf an is a phrase from the 11th Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx, in the handwritten version of 1845. More widely known, however, is the version resulting from the work of Friedrich Engels which was engraved on the wall in the entrance hall of Berlin’s Humboldt University in 1953: Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”). Engels not only altered the outmoded spelling of kommt in the original German, but also gave a decisive new twist to the wording of the text. The insertion of aber (“however”) between the two parts of the sentence engenders an opposition between thought and world, between reflection and action, that was not evident in Marx.
Marc Wellmann, artistic director, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin