Are you looking for a present for your arts-oriented relatives? How about a Damien Hirst? A Tinguely? Or maybe a Pollock? Can’t afford them? But of course you can. All you need is eight euros, or six for reduced rates. That’s the entrance fee for Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle. They’re currently showing the exhibition »Art Machines – Machine Art,« with take-away art for free: delicately chased geometric drawings by Olafur Eliasson, brightly colored »beautiful drawings« by Damien Hirst, timeless stamp prints by Tinguely. Or Pawel Althamer’s polyethylene bottles, white with a turquoise-colored cap. While they look a bit like Mister Clean dolls, they were modeled after the artist’s nude father; in any case, they look good placed on a windowsill. Only Pollock isn’t an item to-go, he has to ordered on the Internet. You see, there’s a hitch: you have to make your own Hirsts, Tinguelys and Althamers, or have museum employees make them for you. They make sure that people don’t misuse the art stars’ reproduction machines. Used correctly, the Drawing Machines and the Bottle Machine spit out works of art that clearly carry their creator’s imprint, but which the artists didn’t actually make by hand.

Enter Michel Foucault: What is an author? Even more difficult, Foucault 2.0: What is an author in the era of digital omni-availability? The Frankfurt exhibition takes a closer look at these – admittedly not new – questions, and the curator team’s answers are much more unequivocal than the material they’ve gathered would suggest. Ironically, a good part of the art-producing machines beams the visitors back to the era of Ford’s assembly line production. Inspired by Detroit automaker Henry Ford, the artists have created machines that follow the rules of industrial precision on the one hand, but claim a certain contingency for themselves on the other. These machines produce objects – to a certain extent, products – that carry the machine inventor’s signature. Complete with an »official« stamp, you can take your Hirst or Eliasson home. At this point, Karl Marx bites his own tail: the relationship between the exchange value and the practical value tends to the polymorph perverted. The F-question doesn’t fare any better: What is an author? What is a female author? For the Frankfurt exhibition’s curators – Katharina Dohm from the Schirn and Heinz Stahlhut from Basel’s Tinguely Museum – »the combination of art and machine implies a renunciation of the traditional and static definition of art.« In machine art, they see an active criticism of the traditional »idea of the artistic individual as a creative genius.« This criticism, they say, is so important especially today, with art-genius millionaires galore; the names Meese, Rauch or Richter didn’t specifically need to be mentioned.

Jean Tinguely has been dead for 16 years, Foucault for 23. Meanwhile, the creator genius has been pushed from his pedestal, the author has died many deaths – but both have always managed to recover. In the case of Hirst, the machine still multiplies the creator’s fame, the queues are long, everyone wants to have an automatic Hirst of their own. Business as usual so far, but the exhibition poses still further questions about the relationship between art, the machine and genius. Criticizing the genius cult is as old as genius itself; each can’t exist without the other. Are we then dealing with a cyclical movement? Is a phase of questioning artistic genius always followed by a period of adoration? Both modi operandi in dealing with art and artists seem to be so timeworn, with antagonistic figures as familiar as Don Camillo & Peppone, Bush & Bin Laden, Techno & Rock, Boom & Backlash.

»Artist turns machine turns artist« – that’s how Justin Hoffmann entitles his catalogue text. Hoffmann is the right man for the job, a founding member of FSK (Voluntary Self Control). For about three decades now, the Munich group has been dabbling and experimenting in the complex area of conflict between man and machine. Continuity in change, »from station to station.« A constant point of reference in FSK’s work (and that of its individual band members Michaela Melián, Thomas Meinecke, Carl Oesterhelt and Wilfried Petzi) is Andy Warhol. His wish »I want to be a machine« is the dictum hovering over all debates, and of course the Pop genius produced his works in The Factory. He created Andy Warhol’s Superstars in his factory. The Manchester firm Factory produced records, mainly by New Order and their predecessor band, Joy Division. Their lead singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide in 1980 and, although it may sound paradoxical, became immortal because of it. His life has just recently been filmed. Machine and genius are thus by no means mutually exclusive, not in art and not in pop music.

Which is where lately the star and creator cult have been attacked in the name of Techno. With a never-ending stream of new alter egos, the Techno producers tried to get the author to disappear. Record sleeves didn’t give their creators away, certainly not what they looked like. A Techno musician’s job is more like that of an engineer or mechanic than an extroverted rock star on stage. But by no means were they able to get rid of the genius in such a manner. On the contrary, the secrecy surrounding the authorship of certain Techno albums really fired up the public’s demand to be informed: we want to see the face, the body behind the machine! In the end, the producers had to give in to consumers’ wishes and the Techno scene experienced its »pictorial turn.« This can be traced back to 1996, when Wolfgang Voigt smiled from the cover of the magazine »SPEX.« Under the name Mike Ink, the head of the Cologne-based Kompakt label had just advanced from unknown to pop star. For the »SPEX« photos, Voigt chose a mixture of wax figure and man-machine pose, a direct reference to the Düsseldorf Techno pioneers Kraftwerk, who also liked to send dummies on stage and who turned machine art into a pop spectacle. With the »SPEX« cover, Techno’s photo taboo had been broken. Ever since, the genre has been producing stars according to the rules of Pop. Of course, there’s also a movement in the opposite direction: denial, anonymization, withdrawal. For instance, last year the renowned Frankfurt club Robert Johnson no longer announced its monthly program. They wanted to send a signal against the »hype surrounding larger-than-life DJ names« and against »branding.« On their website podcasts of the DJs who performed on that particular day can be found instead of their names. But the fact that everyone still knows when Ricardo Villalobos or Richie Hawtin will be at Robert Johnson shows there’s a specific dialectic between hype and »Don’t believe the Hype!«

In the catalogue, Justin Hoffmann points out that the formal aspects of Minimal Art »are supposed to have an industrially-produced look.« It’s similar in the case of the Minimal sound aesthetic, which has become the dominant type of advanced Techno. Here, too, dominance has produced a contrary movement. »Minimal, Berlinal, scheissegal« (who cares), rhyme the brothers Teichmann (their real name!) to a rough rock sound, while Alter Ego (sic!) like to make fun of Minimal’s laws of being cool. Alter Ego are responsible for one of the past years’ most popular and listenable Techno hits. The track with the telling title »Rocker« made it into the British Charts. And became a ring tone too – in itself a kind of machine art.

Did Pollock really drip here? This question arises in the »Pollock Matters« exhibition at Boston’s McMullen Museum of Art. The museum is showing 25 of Pollock’s drip paintings, which Alex Matter – his parents were friends of Pollock’s – is said to have found in storage on Long Island. Whether it was really Pollock who dripped is a wholly irrelevant question considering that not too long ago a Pollock changed hands for $140 million. At the Frankfurt Schirn, it wasn’t Pollock who dripped, even if Miltos Maneta’s interactive website installation jacksonpollock.org seems to indicate as much. Pollock-like drippings are projected onto a wall and visitors can finish the painting using a computer mouse. My first Pollock! Of course you want to take it home. Press the right mouse button, and print! But nothing happens – a museum employee explains that you aren’t allowed to print. This is only the presentation for the press and the mouse has to be exchanged for the show’s opening. They have to have a mouse without the righthand button.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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