THE ORDER OF INTERFERENCE "...
The Order of Interference"A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's." This simple statement is one of 35 programmatic "Sentences on Concept Art" that Sol LeWitt formulated in 1969 and that have broken down the boundaries of all subsequent forms of art.
The statements were received into the workings of modern art, and today they still represent the intellectual propositions that conceptual artists evoke in the mind of the viewer. This corresponds to the basic tenor of a series of performative interventions in public space, which the Argentinian and Berlin-based artist Mario Asef calls Empirien. Using the subversive strategy of the "transposition of signs," he reorganizes certain components of the everyday. Without notice, he shifts the contexts of xobjects in public, urban space. In a warehouse cardboard boxes are restacked from plastic pallets to Europe pallets, and in London's Covent Garden they are used as an improvised shelter. Through shoveling earth on the property of the US military airport in Heidelberg, a bump is created on the German side of a bicycle path and thereby regulates the speed of passing bikers.
The users of the mentioned sites take their own initiative; they dismantle the works and reestablish the accustomed, ordinary "normal order" of things. Because of the minimal nature of the interventions, the events as such are barely perceptible. In order to create the relationship stated by Sol LeWitt and document the intervention as such, Asef uses the combination of text and photography as a traceable reference to his artistic idea. As Joseph Kosuth or John Baldessari did before him, he meanders along the border between language and image. He illuminates the problems of the interdependence between word and concept and prompts the question whether the real xobject is lodged in the visual ideation of the definition of the word or the thing itself. As an acute observer, he orders the serial sequence of Empirien, which have resulted over the period of six years, according to pseudo-scientific organizational criteria, so-called types, which are in turn categorized as an "xobject" or "event." Type K includes interventions that are related to the artist's part-time jobs (Brownie Ranch, Job Center, Europe Towers). Type N describes interventions in public space (Dead Policeman and Hole, Mudança), and Type L encompasses acts of donation (the fox fur in the display case of the Museum of Natural History, the walking stick in the Beuys Room of the Hamburger Bahnhof). Type D targets philosophical observations and concepts (Hröns). His complex text-image syntheses, which include the exact terminology of the place, action and date, protocol both the passage of time-with all its consequences-in the constructed structure of public space and also the process of dematerialization. The explicit use of the index makes reference to the art of the 1970s, and some of the actions themselves contain oblique art historical references. The 25-meter spanning of a thread at the Ferry Bus Station in Hong Kong recalls the famous spanned thread designed by Marcel Duchamp for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition and the work of Fred Sandback. Weaving a fine web of puzzling references, the image-text labels convey narrative content and allow room for viewers to draw their own associations despite given conceptual specifications.
Asef uses the photographic medium as a means to an end, both as a way of mediating an idea and a carrier of information. He is less interested in the immediate documentation of social mechanisms than in the fleeting and unpredictable. In contrast to the classical pretense of the xobjectivity of the medium, he questions the visibility of reality, inasmuch as the inconspicuous appears in view: the absence of people who reestablish order or people who photograph Asef's intervention by chance, since something else is taking place in front of it. Tourists photographed the street performer in London's Covent Garden. In the background were the homeless people who had "appropriated" the cardboard boxes that the artist had left there overnight. The function of photography as an omnipresent mass media of "appropriation" is called into question.
Empirie is a method that is based on experience and used to gain knowledge. The work Empirien by Mario Asef is an escape from Empirie, although it uses its method as a means of honing perception. The knowledge gained in this process is as individual as the viewers who decide to engage with the work.
Petra Schröck
1) Sol Le Witt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," Art-Language, no. 1 (May 1969), pp. 11-13.
2) Translator's note: Empirie is a German term that stems from the Greek word empeiría, which means experience. Although there is no comparable term in English, Empirien can be described as experiences that are primarily gained through scientific method (induction, analogy, observation and experiment).
3) Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America," (Part 1) October (Spring 1977), pp. 68-81.
4) Dieter Daniels: Duchamp und die anderen. Der Modelfall einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne, (Cologne: Dumont, 1992), p.132.