The new director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Kathrin Rhomberg, presents Florian Pumhösl from Vienna, winner of the big CENTRAL art prize for 2003, which includes a six-month residency and the production of an exhibition and a catalogue. She knows the situations in Vienna and in Cologne, where she has moved into a post-war building,1 the former British Council »Brücke« (»Bridge«). It was built in 1949 by Wolfgang Riphahn who, like almost no other architect, left his mark on Cologne during the last century. Riphahn, a pupil of Taut, conceived Hahnenstrasse as an ensemble consisting of a row of shops and residential and »cultural« buildings such as the »Brücke« set back from the street. Following renovations by Viennese architect Adolf Krischanitz, a presentable exhibition space has been created in the form of a bright, cubic hall. The building, which has been remodelled several times, used to be impractical and stuffy, but now makes a bright, clear-cut impression. Krischnatitz calls it a »reversed design process«: taking the building back to Riphahn’s intentions in order to make visible again the architectural quality, »which is indebted to modernity«. The hall on the ground floor, formerly used as a library/reading room and already designed as an exhibition space, has been »returned« to its basic structure. And it is here that Pumhösl’s exhibition, stringently structured in black and white – visible from outside as well through the windows – unfurls a similar modernity, problematised just as positively, but completely different owing to its not having been glorified.

»Historical practice« was the name once aptly given to this approach in this journal, and Florian Pumhösl was called a historian – and not a historist – among contemporary artists.2 The first, white space, a very precisely arranged four-part »Hauspinakothek« (after Moholy-Nagy), is already significant. The two facing partition walls, covered with Canson paper, display two (positive/negative) photographs of the head of Henry Moore’s »Palaeolithic Woman« (1956), a text on a work by Moholy-Nagy next to an abstract picture of two circles, and two black photograms of white strings of particular lengths. All of this already tells us about different frames of reference, such as original image and copy, positive and negative, text and image, nominalistic and formalistic semantics, media and means of reproduction, methodology and analysis, myth and enlightenment, truth and form. The combination of figurative symbolism in Moore’s head of a woman and a return of symbolism in Moholy-Nagy’s »Birthmark (Salome)« or »Mother Europe Looks After Her Colonies«, which appears as a wall text in a letter addressed to Florian Pumhösl from the Bauhaus archive, is almost abstruse. Next to it, a pictorial commentary of two circles as an abstract, yet barely formless image of two »heads«. The parallel existence of documentary and aesthetic discourses, faces and history, brain and memory, archive, model and system, language, world language, abstraction is as fascinating as it is inconsistent. Thoughts begin to turn and revolve in one’s head, and form an image at whose centre the self-invention of a modernity and modernisation threatens to become concrete, while always seeming to relate back to the architecture as well.

Montage techniques everywhere. The second space is black; only the narrow entrances let in some light. In the middle runs a half-hour colour film or, rather, a »film study« about the behaviour of threadworms. These worms have the habit of growing together; that is, fewer and fewer large tangles are created from a lot of small tangles made up of individual worms. Organic structures with very abstract characteristics, which bring to mind early experimental films and remind one of Oskar Fischinger and Hans Richter, or Malevitch and Suprematism – movement and light. The third space, white and neon-bright, presents four photograms »without title (Danse)« on a wall, concrete, functional compositions made up of various rectangles. Next to them lies a mystical mummified falcon from 300 B.C. in a functional glass display case. Opposite to this there are five photograms »without title (clock)«, whose string arrangements (as in the first space) remind one of hand positions on a clock face. Time as the measure of form?

The last, black space does not reveal itself, as its back wall is sealed with endless blackness. Here, as a direct contrast to the first film projection, there runs a second, disturbing sequence, nearly twice as large, but only four minutes long, with fades to black (»Without Title [Mixed Exhibits]«). It begins with cement backdrops, archaic/modern, somehow plastic, surreal details, then an interior like that of a botanical garden house, artificial nature, undergrowth. An apple is peeled slowly in a circular motion, we see the man doing it – a Cyclops -, first from the front, then more of the room, and finally the man from behind. Once more, we run through the conflict between prehistory/myth and modernity, for the exhibition is (like the latter) also a dead-end.

The distance between the prehistory and early history of humankind and today, and the cultural interconnection of prehistory and modern art is important, as »the relicts of prehistory became an important inspiration for the radicalisation of aesthetic modernity, a challenge to its concept of art and artistic practice«.3 Both of the black »film spaces« make a fluid coupling of both phenomena from archaic and classical and from primitive natures to cultural abstractions that have their beginning and end in the two elucidative, bright rooms with montages. The visible in art is only every conveyed through media – and the Cyclops thus becomes the medial gaze, the monocular eye of the camera, that needs the difference to the space in the same way the mummy, or death, needs time, form needs contour, art needs viewers. Art is primary utterance, realised Siegfried Giedion, and Florian Pumhösl adds: modernity is an illusion and enlightenment a myth.

The coupling of ornament and crime is also more relevant than ever at the moment: simplicity and substantial function dominate the debate on the informational units existing beyond the cultural and symbolic space of language: bits. In contrast with real space, they are not form; from an aesthetic point of view they are pure content. Classical functionalism in the era of electronic media began (particularly in Vienna) with the question of whether the ornament has not always been functional. In Florian Pumhösl’s work, the question begins here, and is extended to include the problem of spatio-temporal representation in general – here is the montage procedure of the »historian«, a bridge, a brilliant modernism that is very good for the »Brücke« as well.

Kölnischer Kunstverein, 11 October to 14 December 2003

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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