FOLLOW ME OR DON’T (FEET WITHOUT FACES AND DIFFICULTIES IN ORIENTATION) BLAZENKA PERICA
FOLLOW ME OR DON’T(Feet without faces and difficulties in orientation)
“How fine it was to exhibit one’s works – this is not about the exhibitions themselves, exactly, rather about the interpersonal communication that is created in the process.” Geismar in this claim takes us into the basically determining features of his approach to art, and there is no surprise that it is actually communication that, in the many reviews of and references to his work today, is the key concept in the reception of his work. What gives pause for thought however is the gap between the simplicity of the statement, and the complexity of Geismar’s work in art, which is not based just upon the diversity of the media, actions and installations in which he works, but above all on the manner in which his projects achieve concordance between their re-presentative functioning and the process of their production; how the private and public aspects, the artist’s intentionality and the institutionality of the world of art permeate and inform each other. That the world of works of art and the world of life, at the latest since the time modern art came into being, have no longer been strictly separable areas is not only not a novelty but a commonplace in the reception of art today. But to interpret the visible form of it today, as being in general sense in gas-like-condition, by the condition of “the end of art”, in which everything can be beautiful, everything is art, would seem to be questionable, somewhat over-impetuous, and confusing, particularly in an encounter with strivings such as those of artist Jårg Geismar. Paradoxically, this seems to me to be so not because in Geismar’s work I can see that he is against what is said for example in the quote from Yves Michaud, i.e., advocating some form of non-beautiful art (ultimately identified, once again, with life) or something that would define art (ultimately, once again) in an ivory-tower self-referential isolation from life. This seems to me so be so rather because in Geismar’s approach I can see a reflective dimension of art that in the working, not in the final results, draws attention to the need for attending to quite often painful discrepancies, a disorientation in the current state of affairs, not giving up on the unknown future and hence accordingly to art as possibility (existence).
I cannot begin to explain why I think this with a description of the work to be performed in the PM Gallery in Zagreb; not only because, as I write this essay, for me too this work/installation exists only as a prescriptive promise, in some future form, even if it is the actual concrete occasion for such meditations. I would justify my supposition about his exhibition by many years of acquaintance with his work, but I can describe only what has already been, and not the given, work-in-the-future, however much clear we made the plan for it. Here I could, backing up the just mentioned discussions about the relationships of “art-the beautiful-the moral”, start with some descriptions of Geismar’s appearances at Venice Biennales. Yet my purpose in this brief review would be still better borne out by the fact of Geismar’s appearance at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which was held under the watchword of “Less aesthetics / More ethics”, in his action called Future by Feet, for I can connect this yoking best of all, not surprisingly, with Geismar’s basic premises. This I would name the primarily active attitude to the space in which he works and exhibits, in which there is a constant relationship of interchange among the specific features of the social environment, the vital component and the universally tinged institutional determination of art, in accord, that is, with Geismar’s statement that art is communication. This can be tracked from as early as 1985, when Geismar founded the ATW – Around the World – association, the purpose of it being the general idea of encouraging communication among people all round the world, and also in all his individual projects after that, which are temporal, segmental and phenomenal forms of the basic principles of his work as artist in general. The project Living, Loving and Doing, 1999, thus developed from considerations about the concrete situation in which the artist, called upon to take part in a given project, happened to wind up in the little Swedish town of Gävle. There was so much snow that traffic and general conditions of life were rather difficult, and Geismar came upon the idea that the snow should be taken to Africa, and the sun should be transferred thence to Gävle, thus initiating cultural exchanges between this outlying town in Sweden and Lusaka, capital of Zambia, a programme that is still going on to this day. What the exact cultural connotations of this act are, apart from reserves about the occident-centric dictate about the attitude of centre towards the edges of the world need not be written out here. But this project, like projects such as Future in Mind in Bangkok in 1999 or We Meet In... in Yamaguchi in 2000 are just some of the examples in which Geismar projects, with their points of departure in the as-found givens of the real-life situation, become the starting points for some further events, for the development of a certain auto-dynamics, which is no longer fully under control. On the other hand, whether we are talking of Restorants Mes Amis, in which he got lunch for acquaintances, Fish Dinner or Table Talk, which have in various versions for a dozen years by now accompanied his installations, whether we are speaking of Geismar’s interest in basic human needs in the sense of social gatherings and behaviour, or, rather, their deliberate induction in the light of the cultural determination of the rituals of dining, socialising, debating, the organisation of which is deliberate. By way of mobile framework for indeterminate formats. In Kiel’s Kunsthalle, 1997, one of the five Geismar installations in this institution, Fish Dinner, partially consisted of the video documentation of dinners held previously in various local restaurants, where speeches of welcome were made by various people from public life like a pastor, a lady opera director and the minister of culture at tables seating 20 people. The cutlery at the otherwise festively laid tables was fixed onto washing lines from the ceiling, which ultimately was a visual and motoric disturbance in the way this equipment could be used. However, it did provide for completely certain communication of a fairly unusual content, which could also be partaken of by visitors at the gallery, equipped with two 35-metre electrical cables hung tenuously in parallel in the background. Also shown that time in Kiel was the installation Low Budget, without about 30,000 coins deployed around the wall with a sign for a smiling or gloomy facial expression, which does not tell only of the diligence of this artist, but practically illustrates the ever-present idiosyncratic sense of humour described in the previous works that is an essential mark of his work. Nor is it missing when he introduces sound as mediator of the experience, which was clear in the courtyard of the Hallwylska Museum in Stockholm in 1998 when he hung an amazing number of bells on steel wires; yet instead of their familiar ringing, the sound in the background is the barking of dogs.
The electrical cables, like some kind of trademark, are the object that are most frequently observed in Geismar’s artistic language, in a large number of his installations, which deal with joining, links and networking among individuals and symbolise the introduction of social energy into art. His films, however, most vividly show his interest in the reading of the emblems in the urban milieus of life, focusing on their everyday mobility and anonymity. In a work entitled By Feet Geismar shot (screening part of it in 2006 in Berlin’s 7hours Haus) a number of all-day-situations, widely apart in space and time, in New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Shanghai and Dusseldorf, carefully choosing and reducing the motif to movement, to steps that are visible only through legs up to the knee. In shoes. These artist’s records with the camera render the epic dimension of walking, the persistence of pedestrians, whose walking experience could have been recorded almost at the level of the boring and the trite, a coincidental tourist clip, if the quick cuts, changes in rhythm and directions of camera movement had not turned the anonymous experience of walking into a drama of precise observation and recording. This drama of observation in film, or visual notation of movement “in the crowd” strangely invokes in some certain literary reminiscences like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”, or the melancholy like that of the daydreamer, Baudelaire’s “love at last glance” or the dawdling of the dandy. This is possible. What is certain however is that Baudelaire died in 1867 and that it was only in the later 1880s that a suit was fought about the patents for celluloid film. It is thus unclear to what extent the then not even new experience of the cinematographic recording of events is comparable with the influence of the media characterisation of life, of the kind that we have today in everyday reality. In any event, Geismar’s monitoring of the steps of unknown passers-by ensures us, in spite of the paucity of the visual data, at least some hints about the social identities of the persons filmed, as rich or prosperous, lonely or social individuals. What seems to me even more important here is that Geismar incites us with the movement of his camera to the logic of observation in which it is entirely recognisable and beyond the realm of conjecture that the shots from above, the almost vertical views at the tips of the shoes, the pavement, the ground for the movement, must derive from the person holding camera. This same view, belonging with a certainty to the author alone, is the same that introduces the greatest feeling of the destabilisation of our own position, particularly when we look at it frontally positioned on the surface in front of us, a feeling arising that if not actually that of vertigo is at least disorientation. If with his films he proves himself as a narrator/chronicler of the big city, it is in the first person. He is certainly not some blasé, tedium-driven lone stroller in some 19th century mood, he is not the post-modern, observer, motiveless in his own indifference, who finds it all the same. For him art has not come adrift, for the general triumph of aesthetics rules.
Why is this crucial? Because in the relation of these filmic annotations and Geismar’s drawings, projects and exhibitions of his that are on the whole less pushed, irrespective of the uncommonness of the materials that he usually employs as a basis, a comparison necessarily arises, particularly with respect to the installation announced for the PM Gallery. This comparison, I would think, enables an indication of the manner in which Geismar, co-thinking-through social relations, as artist does not lead art into vapidity or aesthetic triumph, but refers to the premises of other possibilities. Mentioning this comparison, I am not only talking of the cellophane, regular, but because of the nature of the material and their purpose, very flimsy box-formed wrappers for cigarette packs, which Geismar intends, painted in three basic colours, to put in the circular ambulatory of the PM Gallery in such a way as to follow the arrangement of the lighting fixtures and bring out the unpredictable (and indeed hardly visible, noticeable only the highly sensitive observer) play of coloured shadows. The minimalness, concentration and fragility of this set-up and above all the decision to reduce the whole “story about communication” to this installation in which there is no reliance on literal identifiability (even and only) of the used and banal “object”, bring out the importance of the drawings, with two departures. Firstly, the objective concreteness of previous installations is reduced to the very edge of the materiality of the object, heightened by the transparency of the support on which he draws, yet not all the way to the total absence of objectness. Secondly, the abstract lineament talks of those features of the drawing that do not have the common – in the meantime, for the world of life and art, quite everyday – attractiveness of some film projection. Still, the manner in which Geismar draws, which can be checked out in the exhibition in the video-biographic clip Almost All About Geismar, is driven by the same restless of hand that holds the camera in his films, and certainly puts the stroke, the line, the shortness, the length, the breaks and continuations very close indeed to the rhythm and movement of his filming, which takes on the character of sudden wit in the change of the angle of vision and/or the direction of movement.
Links, connection, communication. From what has been described previously I think it can easily be concluded why Geismar is constantly referred to the tradition of social sculpture of Joseph Beuys, even without any special asides about his having studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and then at the NY New School for Social Research. And yet he does not belong to the Beuys tradition, seeing the role of the artist as that of the shaman, himself as charismatic medium for learning about the Higher Truths. He is an artist of this time, his time, aware of the ineffectiveness of stances radically against the mainstream, ready for the not even slightly naïve enthusiasm of the socially effective, aware and responsible individual of society, as initiator and catalyst of social events, perhaps close to the definition of the role of artist that Nicolas Bourriaud formulated in his “relational aesthetics”. Geismar’s installations and the whole of his artistic activity are not motivated by an avant-garde / critical enthusiasm, rather by a need to define here and now in what way he, as artist, and hence art, can and should exist, which has less of a political and much more of a human dimension. Neither institutions nor beauty are foes to this dimension – the one is too slow, the other too superficial a dialogue partner, which is once again close to the early position of Marcel Broodthaers, which rather than with radical critiques operated with smart humour. Thinking through the social and institutional relationships constantly anew he finds reason for the contemporary impendence of art, instead of getting lost in them. The moral and the aesthetic in art for Geismar are not determined by theoretical instructions or modernist acceptances or avant-garde refutations as much as set off by the lively experience of general disorientation and the vital wish to have a positive stance towards this, drawing attention to the fact that we have perhaps mixed up certain things in the endeavour to be perfect. And so we have perhaps lost our orientation, among the multiplicity of ways (of theories, life and art styles) and ideas about achieving some one and only end (the end of history, the perfect society).
Dr. Blaženka Perica
Translation: Sasa Stubicar