The iconophobia of the European left is partly to blame for its inability to organize itself. How else should one interpret the allegorical impulse that informs Andreas Siekmann's system of signs? Virgil and Dante take us through the corridor of the Salzburg Kunstverein - the so-called Ring Gallery - once around the main room, which is not to be entered, although it is open to view. A modernist honeycomb grille of cardboard, combining the familiar net pattern of wire fences with the model character of serial sculpture à la Erwin Hederich, forbids any access. But the scenery that opens itself to view here makes up for it with a theatrical display of communicating forms: small plastic soldiers arranged on an overhead projector join together, over a number of pedestals, to form a ballet of eerily enlarged shadows; some colourful honeycomb shapes lie on the floor as if thoughtlessly thrown away; under a line of table and chairs winds a miniature protective barrier with trees; and, finally, behind a little window, the big view: an airport panorama with a Technicolor sky. »The objects depicted here have to do with political things, and it is in our power to decide everything political. It is thus obvious that these objects and their depiction do not aim primarily at contemplation but at an activity ...,« Siekmann has one of his two guiding figures say. Is that really so obvious? And why is contemplation not an activity? For the time being, anyway, we are led through the Ring Gallery from depiction to depiction, from contemplation to contemplation - along the border fence between Mexico and the USA to Ciudad Juarez, the production location of large American firms, situated in an unlegislated area, then further into the airy planning floors of institutions beyond democratic reach, with their back rooms where the executives (the police force is called »Violenzia«) are busy working out how the resistance in the streets can be broken or neutralised or sublimated in NGO form; then down onto the street into the battle formation before finally arriving in the »camp«: in the sweatshops of this world, places of absolute added value production, copies of the factory model of Auschwitz; and in the prisons, which the inmates set on fire to avoid the threatened expulsion on »Deportation Airlines.«
We are shown this primeval landscape of political topoi in the form of computer-generated drawings. cut into the by now familiar honeycomb shape, the colourful printouts result in something more than rigid pictures: namely, dynamic elements of the sculptural display, that is, of the exhibition as a whole. The computer graphics - at least the way they are treated by Siekmann, who makes virtuosic use of the egalitarian moment of mechanical production - allow the production of an amazingly homogeneous pixel surface. On this surface, image and text dovetail into one another seamlessly and distance themselves as far as possible - that is, to the point of abstraction - from their reference point - the world to which they appertain. Of course, nothing is gained with the gesture of arbitrariness alone, even if Siekmann's medium exercises a magical attraction on all those who are keen on readings - that is, on all those who suffer from the ostensive relativism that pictures display as regards their meaning. Now, Siekmann's art, like Botticelli's, is saturated with readings. For example, »Die Exclusive« would provide an exclusive pretext for taking up Giorgios Agamben's theory of the camp as the 'nomos' [law] of the political space in which we live. (And also to allow the Salzburg Kunstverein to have a share in the aura of the state of emergency that has now become the rule.)
But we have gone beyond the moment of illustration and also of the binding of the world back to texts. For, the stronger the lure of the allegorical impulse, the more deeply it involves us in the picture, which does not just remain a surface on which words do not refer to »political things« but only to other words or pictorial symbols. As I have already mentioned, the drawings are not only static, a world in themselves, but also dynamic elements; that is, 'they carry something further.' »With these things,« says the figure of the seer - and he is of course again referring to »political things« -, »with these things, actions are not performed because of contemplation; on the contrary, contemplation is carried out with actions in mind, or at least with the hope of action.« With his plea for a form of contemplation that already has an intention, the figure of the seer would seem to speak for all those people who want to see a fusion of depiction and reality. (And there is much art that legitimates itself in this way.)
But one should not believe everything the guides say, even if they are called Virgil. Under the condition of radical arbitrariness, that is, in the true aesthetic sense, this precipitate gratification is just as unattainable as the projected separability of contemplation and activity. But by realising this fact, we have already long been involved in contemplation as activity.
Translated by Tim Jones