The Secession Talks - E-Book (EPUB)

Moritz Küng
with Ferdinand Schmatz and Gabriele Mackert

September 2011

GM

We're sitting here in the exhibition, and it's as if we form a new object around the exhibited object. Moritz Küng felt that it was important for all of the exhibited objects to remain in place and not be moved aside. That seems to me to be a first indication of his understanding of positioning oneself in the space. But I'd like to begin with Ferdinand Schmatz, about whom I read something lovely, which is that his understanding of language is very corporeal. It has to do with breathing in, inhaling, and exhaling, with where it makes you look, where something is deposited or condenses. Another reason I'd like to begin with Ferdinand Schmatz is that in this case the curator has taken up a position that doesn't normally belong to them. Usually, the curator interprets what the art says, and the artists pass on the task of speaking for them to the curator. But Moritz Küng has delegated the task of thinking about what «the fifth column» might mean to Ferdinand Schmatz. So this gesture immediately swaps the roles around. I think it's no ordinary job, but-even setting the bonds of friendship aside-perhaps a very appealing one. How did the text emerge and how do you approach a brief like this?

FS

I wasn't asked to provide a theoretical explanation. I was at a party with Heimo Zobernig, and this wonderful invitation was extended to me. Moritz told me that there would be an exhibition entitled The Fifth Column and that my task would be to devise a textual contribution; I could do anything I liked. And that's how I approached it. The topos of «the fifth column» immediately awakened my interest. Usually I have a particular theme, so in this case «the fifth column,» but in working poetically I don't then prepare substantive elements so much as wait until a sort of sound appears, a tone or a rhythm. Joseph Brodsky once said that there are these inner forces that emerge; he spoke about a roaring in the head, like the wind, that goes looking for the words, and centers the poet's state of being, opens it, pushes it outward. And then there's the thematic material, which is of course there too. If I write food poems, for example, then I already know that I want to write a poem about butter, for instance. In my work, the poem is there, but I don't completely know where it will lead me. In this context the idea of processuality is very important to me, feeling things out, groping my way toward the meaning that the words generate inside me, words that are in relationships of reference to the objects. The play involved in observing these very processes somehow gives rise to the poem. In an important essay that he wrote on problems of poetics, Gottfried Benn said that the poem is already finished before the author knows it. I can only confirm this, but it often sounds as if everything came down from on high and we only needed to surrender to it, like a medium. But it's important to create certain boundary conditions and to stake the whole thing out. That was on my mind while making this text, although it didn't end up being a poem. For want of a better idea I called it a tract and approached the theme from the idea of topos. And there two rhetorical figures immediately come into play, which are essential to writing poetry: metaphor and metonymy-inauthentic speech, speaking by way of substitutions. And I tried to generate movements inside of myself that on the one hand initiate a poetological process and, on the other, tend to draw the text nearer to the theme.

In this text, which you'll be able to read once the catalogue is ready-it's lovely that right now, in its unfinished state, it still contains these empty pages-I've also tried to draw in certain representationalisms that, linguistically, seemed to be on offer, for example, as implied by how the German word Säule (column) is used in literature and proverbs and turns of phrase. On the basis of this scaffolding I've attempted to exhibit these expressions, to implant them in the text sculpturally and then to add certain reflections around them.

That basically seems to me to encapsulate the spirit of the exhibition. And for me it's of course incredibly exciting. I worked together with Franz West and Heimo Zobernig a lot, I was always in close contact with the artists, and it was a challenge to investigate the relationships between image and word, to consider what generates this relation and how we perceive things in the representation of these inner states, where text and object very often have a deep significance and especially where the object is almost linguistic. Images and objectivities arise for me and often the words only appear after that, or I seek out words and then look for the objects-that was basically the process. And I think it's similar in many areas, in Joëlle Tuerlinckx's work, for example, or also here, with Dora García's Die Zukunft muss gefährlich sein («The future must be dangerous»), which immediately presents us with an intact sentence. In the rooms downstairs, this gets incorporated into the way in which the boundaries of the arts are eroded-with what Adorno called their Verfransung, their «fraying» or «confusion.» In Peter Downsbrough's installation we again witness the emergence of individual words, such as «shift» and «but,» which one can also read anagrammatically, which are installed on the floor, and which seek out contact with the paint on the walls. An objectivation of concepts is brought into play, the dead concept is not the stopping point as was the case, for example, with concrete poetry, in its final, ideological phase. For me it's very important that concepts retain both a secret and a clarity. And that there is more of a shift into action at this level of the argument. And that is of course the huge positive about an exhibition like this one, that people can walk around and, while taking it in, open the whole thing out into a space that itself refers very powerfully to the space that's present here. Something quite similar occurs in the production of poetry.

GM

Let's return to the fifth column, which is of course a fiction-there are only four columns in this room. I also understand the exhibition to have emerged from research that made use of photographic records. The invitation was followed by your looking through a series of old exhibition views, an overview of the spatial possibilities that the Secession has embodied. At the same time, as Ferdinand put it so well, «fifth column» also conjures up something concrete and yet also something possible, utopian, the future, while also raising the question of what this addition might look like. Because of course every exhibition amounts to an addition in space. Now a really lovely story has emerged, such that we know that these columns exist: at the opening yesterday, we met people who can indeed remember the original condition, designed by Adolf Krischanitz in 1986, with highly polished columns clad in sheet metal affixed with rivets. Others didn't have those memories, but it immediately made present an entirely different history of the institution and the exhibitions here. How do we go from that to saying, «Okay, I have these four columns now, they're also the columns of my exhibition, of the building»-how does the fiction then become more concrete?

MK

It doesn't at first. To explain very briefly: having received an invitation to put on a group exhibition, I came and had a look at the space and immersed myself in the history of the Secession. That's when I noticed this fait divers in the Secession catalogue Secession 1898-1998 where there's a two-page spread with an exhibition view of Sol LeWitt's 1988 murals, in which you can see these reflective columns. It was one of the first exhibitions after the renovation in 1986. Then there was a photo of Joseph Kosuth's 1989 exhibition, Wittgenstein: The Play of the Unsayable, where the columns were now covered with plates, the lower half painted a silvery color, the upper one left white. As far as color was concerned, Kosuth approached the exhibition by treating all of the walls in such a way as to establish a continuous horizon line, which is presumably why he also had the cladding put on the four columns. After that there was a depiction of a Daniel Buren exhibition from the same year, where the columns, apparently still in the wrapping Kosuth had selected, were now given striped motifs, with each side in a different color. And then there were again images showing the silvery columns. Beginning with a Tony Cragg exhibition in 1991, white paint was applied to the columns directly, without any cladding. Then for twenty years they remained white and were continually repainted and freshened up. And I found that strange, but also inspiring. Especially since I'm interested in how we might link an exhibition directly to a site, inscribe it there, and not just...