THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF SCULPTURE BY CURATOR ANNA KROGH
The recent series of sculptural work by Benny Dröscher is comprised of one major installation (I’m so Sick and Tired of Having to do Everything Myself) and three voluminous wall objects (There Must be More to Living than a Mortgage and a Lawn to Mow, With My Head Bent Auspiciously over the Centre and Abducted by U.F.Os– Purged with Hyssop). Add to this some ten drawings (A Goofy Picture of a Magic Moment) all of which tune into the recurrent experiments with visuality that Dröscher has played out again and again in his work. He is dealing with the specific challenges a contemporary sculptor faces in regard to (symbolic) images, rethinking classical virtues within the media, and the artificiality and illusionary reality of form.Dröscher explores the materiality of sculpture in order to find a metaphysical language that matches that of painting. In two dimensional media we uncritically accept that a ray of light, say, (as in Abducted by U.F.Os– Purged with Hyssop) can have religious overtones. If sculpted, however, we automatically begin to relate to form, to the form’s interaction with the surrounding space. In other words we are less concerned with the sculpture’s symbolic level of meaning because we focus on its materiality. Dröscher seems to insist that sculpture maintains a symbolic level, albeit expressed in an artificial language bordering on kitsch.
One thematic thread that runs through all these recent works has to do with magic – on several levels: the magic of spirituality, of religion and of the experience of art. He plays – not only with our willingness to accept just about anything – but also our need to believe in something larger than life, be it God, nature or spirit. The forms that he builds and constructs all have an underlying symbolic meaning, and more specifically a religious meaning. Dröscher makes no distinction between a catholic reference or an alternative, non-established mysticism on the one hand, or a nature-based spirituality in which God resides in all nature’s elements on the other. We may not be familiar with the content or reference in each form, but respond intuitively at a symbolic level.
Dröscher’s use of humour (explicitly present in the titles of the works, but also in the clashes between material and form) and his references to extreme pop culture make the artist’s ironic distance to the issues fully apparent. Whether divine beams of light come from a U.F.O or whether the religious belief is lived out in the world of Tarot cards, Dröscher visualizes the many different faces of religious belief, not with an artistic hierarchy as a starting point, but openly and curiously.
What remains is a progressive experiment with sculpture. Putting together seemingly incompatible materials such as foam, fur and natural elements like branches, plants, leaves and crystals, Dröscher creates artificial universes that in a sense go against what is possible – heavy trunks hanging from the ceiling as light constructions, seemingly heavy objects placed on the wall appearing massive and solid. In a sense he works as a classical sculptor, but he sets up the rules of his game to turn the impossibilities of the sculptural relationship between form and symbolic content inside out.
All of this challenges what is ‘acceptable’. All that is natural is here made unnatural, and everything that could be artificial becomes ‘the real thing’. Dröscher presents an illusion – of both religion and sculpture. Nothing is what is seems, the world is tilted upside down in a sculptural project that tests the physical laws of form. This project could be classified as ‘bad taste’ - kitsch balancing between pop and the baroque, but in such an extreme manner that it works.
There is a tendency in contemporary art praxis to return to form, to ‘the thing’ itself. Artists like Dröscher have in fact always insisted on the currency and potency of sculpture as a means of relating art to reality. His recent series can be seen as an attempt to redefine the impossibility of sculpture. Dröscher’s artistic concerns are thereby taken a step further, moving towards the conquest of the symbolic level for sculpture.
By Anna Krogh, curator.