Take a Breath - Atem Holen
Group Exhibition
November 6 - December 18 2009
MKgalerie Berlin/Germany
Willem
Besselink
Ina
Viola Blasius
Gabriel
Braun
Mike
Bourscheid
Amir
Fattal
Wanda
Stolle
Britta Thie
Matthias
Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf
Rommelo Yu
During this exhibition I am showing 8 Stunden Atem holen
„Take a breath - Atem holen“
Did you ever face a piece of art, which altered your breath?
Faster caused by excitement or arousal, lighter and irregular because
of tension or slower and deeper in contemplation of beauty? „Take a
breath – Atem holen“ presents a collection of those kinds of works.
Works, intervening your breath, through either the dramatic atmosphere
of film, the extraordinary materiality of painting or the dominate
presence of sculpture or installation. Even with regards to content the
focus is on the conditions of human body (breath) confronted with an
extraordinary situation (rhythm), which the protagonists as well as the
observer cannot but sense. He becomes a fully integrated part of the
artwork.
The works have been selected from the personal favourites of the
curator Stephan Köhler. All of them are favourites of the last years,
and have been created in a young Berlin scene – or they are completely
new works, set up exclusively for this exhibition. There is no doubt,
that this kind of selection bears a specially subjective conception to
the observer: it poses clear questions. Which objects and situations
move us – effect aura or a struggle for air – and how and by what do
they achieve that? Are there collective structures of experience, which
consciously or subconsciously are fundaments for similar perceptions in
opposition to a work of art?
The peculiar, inner instance meets the reality of the piece; sometimes
they merge and result in a breathless or even long breathed
restlessness. Then nothing could be more pestering, than the need to
take a breath.
For Breathing
"Breath" is one of the deliberately overlooked plays by Samuel Beckett. This is not due to its anonymous première in 1969, nor to the fact that the playwrights kept asking themselves whether it would be at all worth performing. This fate was decided rather by the brief duration of the piece: 35 seconds. It fits easily on one single page, whose reading lasts much longer than the duration of its performance. The play is quickly summarized: Lights. A stage with rubbish, the scream of a newborn. Then the sound of inhaling and then exhaling. Lights lowered. Curtain. There are no actors, only the movement of the light. Whoever blinks or coughs while watching has already missed it. The short duration of the piece demands a prior warning to the observer. One should concentrate, pay attention, observe carefully, hold one's breath out of tension – because in the end, nobody wants to have missed the "Breath".
To exhibit 'breath' finally becomes paradoxical in the most literal sense: What is hoped to be exhibited or played in front of the spectators is in fact dis-played and turned off inside them. The scene that acts out breathing cannot be inhaled, although it is citing exactly that breath which led to it. That same night the spectator had left the house and went out to see the breath. Beforehand there was a discussion with a friend about what might be presented later on; one gets more and more reserved regarding all that 'art' dealt with in the past. "I just want to put on record that I thought the whole evening was completely bogus and pretentious" said a specator of Beckett‘s play. And indeed it is disconcerting to hear that breath is being announced. To get a gulp of air, one walks in the park, hits the seashore, jogs, or does yoga. But this is about a different kind of breathing. It is exactly about the paradox of breathing. One who breathes in realizes it only right in the middle of it. One who plans to inhale immediately halts shortly or rather holds his or her breath, before his or her chest lifts and the lungs get their draw of fresh oxygen through the trachea. Nothing can run without this drag: preconscious, undirected, purely corporeal. Even emotions, "the wrath of the heart", as Plato writes in the Timaios, are bedded into the lungs by it "as into a soft pillow". Amidst the body breath finds its bed, so the heart "receives cooling in order to be able to accompany its wrath to reason with less effort". Hereby heartbeat and pulse become breath's closest relatives, its constant companions, and even more, as they are singular signals of it. Two fingers put to the cervical artery or to the inner side of an ankle, everybody knows this touch; but to touch breath? Breath does not let itself be touched or grasped. It only appears vanishing, on a window glass in winter, it is like an aura. Stop – It is unintelligible. One cannot get closer to it than by letting it name itself. 'Like an aura', airy, fleeting. Metaphorical, therefore inconceptual. That is what the spectator 'wanted to put to record'. Understanding that you do not understand. Very clearly. The breathlessnessesses of thinking /…/ without proof. /…/ The gaze unable to be blurred by anything, as Paul Celan noted. One who bears life enjoys breathing. One who wants to bear breath loses it. – Until its re-entry to life. 35 seconds.
Art should be thought of originally here in the sense of the ancient poíesis. It is the artistic 'un-technique' of the individual to withdraw oneself from the technical-deadly environment. In view of the age of air-conditioning, this constantly humming air-machine of lifeless concrete holes, art always stays ahead of the threatening excorporation of inconceptuability. Art ties the unintelligible to the body, is clincal, disgusting, cutting. Inside of it there are hidden tactics of touch, as it is tactile, where you don‘t understand it, in the middle of it all, in breaking the breath prior to reflection. To outsource this risk of breathing would mean however standstill. The drilling of your unintelligibility is your artistic medical ventilator. Nimm dir den Atem – Take your a breath.
Florian Fuchs, October 2009