JUTTA KOETHER PAPE R N°2 WTF

These days many people are talking about liquidizes her work. I want to do so using a painting’s performative dimension, its ability set of painted planks exhibited under the to act within certain contexts as opposed to title Mad Garland between 2011 and 2013, merely transmit or represent content within a along with a number of related canvases, frame. With this turn to action, and the in cluding Black Garland (#1: WTF) proliferation of time-based strategies that (2011), w hich was on view at PRAXES accompany it, artists are presenting painting Center for Contemporary Art during the first as a malleable form—one that relies heavily of Koether’s three exhibition modules there. on external relations to bring forth the In keeping with their unstable and evolving medium’s potential. Rather than mourn its identity, these planks go without a precise death, painters like Jutta Koether would prefer categorization (including their role in the to let it bleed—not only beyond the stretcher, market: most are marked “not for sale”), and but also quite materially into bodies and their various installations take on a number of things. In these destabilized sets of relations, formats. At Campoli Presti gallery in Paris, the painting subject, and even painting itself, they were hung on the wall like canvases; in becomes a site whose borders are constantly New York at MoMA, they were tossed around negotiated. This renewed attention to borders like props; at the Center for Curatorial Studies, brings art’s regulating functions—specifically , they appeared as fragments in a the market—into question, and yet it also large sculptural pile; at Zach Feuer Gallery suggests that to be committed to the conceit they were a desk and also stuff to dance with; of painting today, one must account for an at Dundee Contemporary Arts they were an Jutta Koether object’s entanglement with other entities architectural blockage. Using strategies of Black Garland Berlin (#1: WTF) , 2011 across time and space, as well as what those duration and mutability, Koether presents Cold glaze, silver metal brackets, black gesso, and various metallic individuals bring to bear on an object’s these works as indeterminate forms. They are paints on prepared linen; 160 x 220 cm. constantly renewing subject formation. fluid and delirious. And I must confess that Installation view “Viktoria” So as a starting point I’d like to think they have induced a way of talking about them PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2013. about Koether as an artist whose work deftly that feels entirely non-linear and fluid to me, Photo: Elmar Vestner. performs the creation and dissolution of and so I present my thoughts on them in an Courtesy of the artist; Galerie subjectivity as she literalizes, materializes, and equally fragmented way. Francesca Pia, Zurich.

JUTTA KOETHER PAPER 2 PAGE 2 OF 8 PAINTING OBJECTS

“This is not a performance, nor a program, nor a lifestyle who was wrongly accused of treason. theory—it’s a struggle. Use them to get together After a harrowing death by hemlock, he was because you’re all singles!” Koether began her denied official burial in Athens, and his body was 2011 performance Mad Garland at MoMA laid to rest outside the city gates. In Poussin’s with a charge. To the backbeat of club muzak, the painting, a proper burial site is shown in the artist corralled a group of twentysomethings in distance, overlooking the funerary march, no the second floor atrium to use a collection of doubt a signal of the general’s unjust treatment. black wooden planks. Under her direction, the Forced into exile even in death, the picture mourns singles teamed up in pairs. One contestant Phocion’s departure and the noble restraint his gyrated on top of a plank, while another pair presence symbolizes. Poussin shared Phocion’s awkwardly attempted to grab one from either end stoic outlook, and so, some argue, his nod to the and form a threesome with it. At the height of the ancient figure may allegorize his own contention action, the artist asked the entire group to form with Baroque painting’s excess, as if the heap being “a rising-dying-subjectivity complex” by making carted into oblivion was Poussin’s painting itself. a snaking figure with the planks and their bodies, One of a number of Koether’s drawings moving across the floor in a syncopated rhythm. on tracing paper depicts the two pallbearers in An attentive viewer would spot faint bright red ink, focusing on the stretcher between echoes of ’s Bacchanalia (1631– them and the cloth bundle resting on top. In 1633) in the campy tableaux. Koether makes her picture, the sunlit hills of Athens have reference to Poussin in many of her works; what vanished, and in their stead, a leafy garland seems to attract her attention in the classical frames the scene. It seems to celebrate, or haunt, painter’s oeuvre is neither his astonishing the parade as it marches onward. As a motif of draftsmanship, nor the logical order of his impermanence, this garland may attest less to the compositions, but rather the way that Poussin death of Phocion—or of painting—and more so continually invests his paintings with imagery to the fact of being carried; carried beyond the that speaks as much to its own condition as gates, carried beyond the image, and through painting as it does the subject at hand. Koether’s retrieval, carried even beyond Poussin’s One work by Poussin that makes an painting itself. Adding her own retort to the appearance in Koether’s preparatory drawings for narrative of painting’s exile, Koether has scrawled Mad Garland is The Burial of Phocion, Landscape the lyrics to the Robert Johnson song “Me and Jutta Koether with the Funeral of Phocion (1648). The painting the Devil Blues” across the top of her drawing: (drawings) Red ink on tracing paper; depicts two men carrying the body of Phocion, “Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body 21 x 29.7 cm, each. an Athenian general known for his austere when I’m dead and gone.” Courtesy of the artist.

JUTTA KOETHER PAGE 3 OF 8 PAPER 2 PAINTING SUBJECTS

A month prior to their appearance at MoMA, as “a material problem in relation to painting. 1 Isabelle Graw, “Ecce Homo: Koether’s planks were used in another version of My method: literalize, materialize, liquidize. Isabelle Graw on Art and Subjecthood,” Artforum 50: Mad Garland at a conference entitled “Art Impermanent configurations. Irrepressible flux 3 (November, 2011): 241 _247. and Subjecthood: a Conference on the Return of compositions and reappropriations. …Desire of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism” at for painting as the medium to deal with [the 2 Ibid., 247. the Frankfurt Städelschule. Isabelle Graw, the ontological uncertainties of our times].” 3 As she 3 Jutta Koether at “Art and organizer, gathered a panel of critics to offer continued to speak, five assistants ceremoniously Subjecthood: a Conference on their thoughts on “the wide acceptance of presented five of the black planks at the front the Return of the Human Figure anthropomorphism” in recent art and asked if the of the room. Koether declared, “Coming out in Semiocapitalism,” organized trend was “a manifestation of the increasingly with a painting is coming out to go into a battle by the Institut für Kunstkritik (Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, desperate desire for art to have agency.” Using as with a totally inadequate material. To shove Nikolaus Hirsch), Städelschule, examples the sculptures of Rachel Harrison and materiality in everybody’s face. There it is.” She Frankfurt am Main, July 1, 2011. Isa Genzken—works that took up a Minimalist finished by calling her paintings “tools” and 4 Jutta Koether, “Mad Garland,” vocabulary with reference to the human figure— responded to Graw by saying that if paintings in Art and Subjecthood , ed. Graw asked the participants: Could it be that the do anything, they now create work for critics, Isabelle Graw (Berlin: Sternberg anthropomorphism in these works is a who mine the artistic semio-labor that brings Press, 2012), 41. manifestation of the increasingly desperate desire them into existence. This, she concluded, “is why for art to have agency? 1 a painting could and should say WTF .”4 In her talk for the conference, later Phocion’s image haunts this talk, in reprinted in Artforum, Graw answered her which Koether abstractly exposes painting— question in the affirmative. Citing art historians a “totally inadequate material”—to the battle Michael Lüthy and Christoph Menke, she of semio-capitalism. In her estimation, the argued that as the modern period wore on, inadequacy of the painting planks falls within the categories of subject and medium gradually their materiality: For how can an inanimate dissolved. This dissolution tracked the growth object—ostensibly exerting no control over of capital from industrial production to the its production, display, and dissemination current state of semio-capitalism, with its —possibly have agency? What part could it demands for affective labor putting not play to install itself as a subject? Is such an only the human body, but also its “personality, anthropocentric term even appropriate? emotions, and social relations” to work. Koether retains a desire, stated Graw concluded her argument by using an quite clearly in philosophical quotations she anthropocentric metaphor for post-Fordism, as inclu des on the planks (she cites Deleuze well as its art production: “where products and Guattari, along with contemporary become persons, and persons are themselves philosopher Quentin Meillassoux) to explore Jutta Koether Black Garland Berlin (# 1: WTF) , commodified.” Art’s desire for agency, in Graw’s the ontological uncertainty of painting anew. Is 2011 (detail) estimation, was tied to its compromised status as it an object? A subject? Something in between Cold glaze, silver metal brackets, a market commodity, just as the human subject the two? Perhaps it is like a canvas-covered black gesso, and various metallic 2 paints on prepared linen; nears death in the “grip of consumer capitalism.” body, or an empty cipher, or a non-, waiting to 160 x 220 cm. Koether was the final panelist, and be filled with an accumulation of the images Courtesy of the artist; Galerie she began by describing the topic of subjecthood and events that fall along its path. Francesca Pia, Zurich.

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The title of Koether’s project, Mad Garland , the role it continually played within any one of became the topic of (or decoy for) this series as these historical painting-contexts. The garland early as 2009, when the artist encountered could be described as a surrogate, a cipher, or an fragments of a Roman wall painting in the extra: standing in for the honored dead of Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art. The garland’s for the deities of the Counter-Reformation, or floating presence in these pieces— displaced simply for the capacity to transform a subject from their original architecture and repositioned from one state to another. In her non-paintings at a remove in the museum—resonated with the for Mad Garland , Koether uses this multiple motif’s ubiquitous appearance in all manner of form again, trading in the garland’s leafy bough cultural artifact from antiquity to the present. for glassy black planks, while hardware and Through its generic repetition in such diverse cheap accessories replace its traditional freight sources as Egyptian coffins, Flemish still life of flowers and fruit. The status of these planks, painting, and the images of Dionysian not unlike the garland in history, possess the intoxication, Koether saw the garland as ability to take on a variety of positions as they shedding its iconic status. And adding to the move from the frame of one exhibition to the non-ness of the garland as such a multiple was next, and become frames themselves.

PAINTING CAPACITY

In his most recent writing on the concept Koether’s paintings ask their viewers 5 Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze: History and Science (New York: of emergence, philosopher Manuel DeLanda similar questions. To begin to understand the Atropos Press, 2010), 105. introduces something he calls object “capacity.” capacity of Koether’s work is to follow the He uses this term to distinguish between the garland, so to speak, as it is recast under the 6 Ibid. fixed aspects an individual entity retains no aegis of painting proper. At the Gemäldegalerie matter where it goes—its properties—and in Berlin, there is a painting by the Baroque aspects of the entity that can only be actualized artist Jan Fyt called Still Life with Fish and Fruit through its relations with other things. The (1654) that Koether visits often. It depicts a latter requires a sort of contagion or coupling monkey toppling a bowl of dead fish on a table. between different individuals, or as DeLanda The monkey is barely noticeable at first, as he states, “a capacity to affect always goes with a mischievously grabs the edge of the tablecloth capacity to be affected.” 5 To demonstrate the in the bottom third of Fyt’s picture. A garland distinction, DeLanda gives the simple example hangs above the scene, which, in contrast to the of a knife. While in property it may be sharp, gray fish and the picture’s dull palette, is dotted long, and flat, its capacity consists of its ability with colorful fruit and bright green branches. to cut and be cut. The cutting of a piece of fruit, Fyt paints the sweeping greenery in far more for instance, actualizes the knife’s capacity as detail than the rest of the picture, causing the a discrete event: the cut. garland to move from its structuring function In thinking about Koether’s constantly and take on a starring role. Fyt’s garland shifting garland, what is interesting about performs compositionally, even rhetorically, to DeLanda’s understanding of capacity is how it make its presence just as central as the scene prominently accounts for the “contingent it supposedly contains. The garland, though coevolution” of things, in which various affectual ostensibly a borderline or supporting figure, couplings reveal new aspects of an object and exerts its capacity to hold the scene. In so give rise to different potentialities in different doing, it shows itself to be that very sort of configurations. 6 It is a term that sits close to object Koether herself produces: non-paintings performativity, because to exert its capacities, an or supports that demonstrate their capacity to object must act —as opposed to merely contain be something more. or represent—what it is. Understanding the In her 2011 exhibition at Campoli capacity of objects thus necessitates an Presti, Koether displayed a large painting on investigative or experimental mode, because it is canvas called Black Garland / Double Waterfall always about forming and reforming new modes (2011). The painting was flanked by five of assembly: When an object touches this, moves wooden plank-canvases shooting out in a line there, gathers these people, or those ideas, what across the wall, Mad Garland (Plank Paintings about that object is realized? What do we learn Set #3) (2011). As its title suggests, the painting about it in that very moment of the cut? depicts an abstracted double waterfall. Twin

JUTTA KOETHER PAGE 5 OF 8 PAPER 2 sets of fluid black lines, mixed with deep used the brackets to dissolve the hierarchy purples and magentas, swirled down the front of between painting and support. The link between the canvas. Where a frame would usually go Koether and Fyt’s works was rendered even more (running along its border, set in a few inches from explicit in the promise of the garland in the title: the edge), Koether attached brackets. The L- Black Garland / Double Waterfall. Even though shaped hardware, usually a hidden tool for the garland was noticeably absent from the center display and support, was repurposed as a of the canvas, to look again meant to see the decorative accessory in each of the painting’s four broken bough dispersed, dripping across the corners. Like Fyt’s use of the exaggerated garland canvas in a pool of liquid glass shooting out Installation view “Mad Garland” Campoli Presti, Paris, 2011. to suggest how a decorative framing device could across the wall. The planks were the garlands, Courtesy of the artist; Campoli play a central role in any given piece, Koether creeping out beyond the picture’s frame. Presti, / Paris.

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Koether did an iteration of Mad Garland in April beneath were frustratingly obstructed from view. 2012 at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard When I corresponded with Koether about the College. I worked with her on the show, which title of the work, I suggested Mad Garland (Plank presented the planks in a single sculptural pile, Paintings Set #2) (2011–), leaving its end date where they assumed the form of a sudden crash. open, with the intention to communicate the Planks jutted out in every direction and activated continuous nature of the project. Yet Koether Jutta Koether the composition, as if their action was stopped suggested it be dated simply 2012, “as this Extreme Unction , 2013 in mid-motion. There was a seductive quality to particular sculptural formation was done in the Installation view the crisscrossing arrangement, even though a NOW.” To be Mad Garland is to become Mad “Seasons and Sacraments” Arnolfini, Bristol; Dundee full view of every glassy surface was impossible. Garland , and with such a transformation, to Contemporary Arts, 2013. The planks supporting the structure from show when a painting can in fact be one. Courtesy of the artist.

JUTTA KOETHER PAGE 7 OF 8 PAPER 2 With this Paper, Curator of The Artist's Institute and Jutta Koether scholar and “WTF” confidant, Jenny Jaskey follows Koether's expanding series of Mad Garlands . Under © 2013 PRAXES / The author the title “WTF”—an inscription in a recent and related painting and a provocation All images Koether suggests paintings could and should say—Jaskey identifies capacity in the © 2013 Jutta Koether “non-ness” of Koether's works. A parallel is made between Koether's approach to Published by painting and the garland's longstanding cumulative usage—from discrete PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art decorative bough and framing device to endowed symbolic presence. www.praxes.de