Status 

Lars Bent Petersen, Olafur Eliasson, Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Frans Jacobi, Jes Brinch, William Anastasi, Joachim Koester, Dove Bradshaw, Peter Rössell, Hans Petersson, Peter Neuchs, Ian Schjals, Henrik S. Holck, Lars Bent Petersen, Torben Ebbesen, Chuck Collings, Andreas Vind, Ian Schjals, Ciancarlo Savino, Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen, Bo Pepke, Jörg Immendorff, Morten Nielsen, Lars Marthisen

Stalke Kunsthandel, Vesterbrogade 14A

1995

Review:

Investigations of Significance

The status exhibition at Stalke Kunsthandel marks the venue's openness to conceptual art and a broader expansion of the exhibition space.

Stalke Kunsthandel has long demonstrated a relatively high degree of openness towards Danish and international artists working at the intersection of the breakthroughs of the 1960s, such as Fluxus, pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art.

This interesting position also dominates the current exhibition, which offers a brief presentation of the venue's various artists. Here you can see two works by the American artist William Anastasi, who was also featured in Stalke Kunsthandel's exhibition a couple of years ago with works by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Marcel Broodthaers. Compared to those artists, Anastasi's works are less analytical. Instead, his "Blind Drawing" combines Pollock's all-over techniques with an ascetic, meditative minimalism, and his "Subway Drawing" shows in a double sense, his companionship with the composer John Cage.

This is one drawing out of a series of several hundred, all dated with the time, created by Anastasi and the train's vibrations during the journey between his and Cage's apartments, where they regularly played chess.

This meditative position does not characterize the exhibiting artists from and around the defunct Baghuset. Here, one often finds an effortless combination of pop art's extroversion with the conceptual art's almost obsessive focus on how meaning arises, is handled, and perceived in a social, institutional, or personal context.

A Refined Hint

Peter Holst Henckel exhibits a caricature drawing of himself, flanked by a text about the man who created it, a Turkish journalist forced to flee his homeland and now a street artist in Paris. Together with the drawing's shattered glass frame, the text provocatively points to the violence and complexity that can lie at the root of something as banal as a caricature drawing.

Holst Henckel's second work contains nothing other than the word "Bobbitt" rendered in neutral black letters on a white background. John Wayne Bobbitt is the name of the American whose wife bit off part of his penis because he had been unfaithful to her.

Holst Henckel seems to play on the word's varied character, from Bobbitt to "Bob-bit" (bitten) and further to its character as a "declaration of goods," particularly exploited by the news media and the pornography industry to draw attention.

But what does Holst Henckel want with Bobbitt, and what should we make of it?

The name, which otherwise spoke for itself and even said it all, here appears almost meaningless and neutral. The name is not used either as seductive advertising or as sensationally suggestive, but rather as something more descriptively revealing or perhaps simply stating facts?

Holst Henckel gives a single small, refined hint about how the statement can be understood and interpreted: in a discreetly humorous way, he has rendered it as a slender flower with a little bee hovering above, like the dot over the "i." Bob-bi-tt. With the flower and bee, Holst Henckel thus implies that the key to understanding his work, so to speak, first lies in finding the dot over the "i."

In this way, this work functions much like his characteristic images of various animals, where the overarching "scientific," chart-like appearance is broken by details that carry entirely different meanings. There, one finds an invitation to take a critical stance on what would otherwise appear self-evident—a critique of the idea that one could map and categorize things in this one-dimensional way.

The Personal Perspective
A similar position characterizes Joakim Koester's works, which, though expressed in a completely different form, explore the very conditions for interpreting and understanding images and messages in our complex information society. Koester's series of images combines two different photographs with the same sentence, slightly offset below the images: "The night was spent in ways we cannot even begin to imagine."

Through this, he explores the often fragmented and disjointed nature of meaning, rather than linear and firmly grounded characters. Which of the images matches the sentence? Who are the people in the images, and who even utters this sentence? Koester's juxtaposition of images and text provokes these questions in the viewer, crossing the boundaries between the private and the public, between documenting reality and fictional construction.

A clearly personal angle can be found with Lars Bent Petersen, who exhibits an excellent selection of pages from his "Diary 1994," or with Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen, who, in his characteristically surreal, ironic, or humorous uncertain style, expresses a confident overview of life or makes a fumbling attempt to describe one of its deeper, present moments.

At the Formal End
Lars Buchardt's black-and-white painting belongs more to the slightly more formal end. It is named after the film Last Year at Marienbad. The film's leaps between past, present, and future are mirrored in Buchardt's repeated, slightly displaced exposures of white human silhouettes on a black background.

A minimal yet quite complex image whose composition is not easily unraveled, much like the film, which contains a narrative sequence that is never entirely completed, a puzzle that is never solved.

There are several excellent works in this exhibition, which, even though it does not include installation art, provides a quick overview of the trends of contemporary conceptual art.

Similar positions. Additionally, works by Olafur Eliasson, Peter Rössel, Jörg Immendorf, Torben Ebbesen, Peter Neuchs, Frans Jacobi, Lars Mathiesen, Jes Brinch, Dove Bradshaw, Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Morten Nielsen, Hans Petersen, Helmut Middendorf, Chuck Collings, Ian Schjals, Andreas Vind, Bo Pepke, and Giancarlo Savino.

Status, Stalke Art Trade, Vesterbrogade 14 A. Tue-Fri 13-17, Sat 11-14. Until September 2.

by Andreas Brøgger

Information 30.8.1995