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reviews Johannes Wohnseifer
JohAnnes wohnseifer:
emptiness & violence ii
Casey K aplan, neW yorK
10 January – 9 february
Theodor Adorno’s conviction that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is child’s face is partly obscured by different combinations of three brightly
barbaric’ may be read as the ultimate conversation stopper, although what coloured shapes forming a diamond, referring, as many of the works in this
the philosopher here indicates is the beginning of an endgame which must exhibition do, to the work of Blinky Palermo.
continually revisit the past and the atrocities that lie there. The title piece King of Kings, the exhibition’s largest installation of multiple works,
from Köln-based Johannes Wohnseifer’s exhibition Emptiness & Violence takes up the second gallery. The tomblike space is entered through a
II (all works 2007), however, features 13 found pastoral paintings made in large set of Plexiglas double doors, on which are printed a cover of Time
Germany during the years 1939–45 which attempt exactly the kind of idyllic magazine from 1930 featuring a portrait of Haile Selassie, Ethiopian
lyricism condemned by Adorno. Placed under a red-filtering Plexiglas of emperor and ‘King of Kings’. Beyond this door lies a wooden bar, with
the kind favoured by Judd, the images reference both the violence of a similar dimensions to a sarcophagus, over which hang lights in the colours
wilful turning away from genocide and the formal turn made by artists of the Ethiopian flag. A text piece, Pasadena 1963, reads ‘Chess Ace,
towards abstraction during the postwar period. Chase Ass’, and refers to a photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing
Wohnseifer’s exhibition is certainly involved with both the chess with nude model Eve Babitz. Here we return to the theme of the
cryptology of historical excavation and the code-breaking of conceptual endgame (Duchamp also famously played chess with Samuel Beckett),
exhibitions. The first piece in the exhibition is an ‘exhibition poster’ which and in a sinister turn, we might perhaps look to Duchamp’s treatise with
depicts the plans of the Pyramid of Cheops, which we are directed towards Halberstadt which concludes that, in a famous endgame position known
as a ‘key’ to understanding the exhibition. This, the found paintings from as the Lasker-Reichelm, the most black can hope for is a draw. The parts of
Nazi Germany and several of the other works in the exhibition touch lightly this exhibition, a historical excavation of personal, global and art histories,
on the elastic nature of time, as it freezes over certain events, embalming are certainly disparate and require a great deal of consideration to interpret
them in a traumatic past. Clock, a numberless, handless clock hung high or decipher. But as the chess player, the code breaker and the archaeologist
over the exhibition, reads dead time over and over again, while Kalender, know, this may be where the most arresting discoveries are made.
12 silkscreen works, reads not months but rather a repeated cover of an Laura McLean-Ferris
East German child psychology book from the 1970s. The image of a
Emptiness & Violence
II, 2008 (exhibition
view). photo: adam reich.
Courtesy the artist and
Casey Kaplan, new york
131 Artreview
REVIEWS_April Part 1.indd 131 5/3/08 11:03:49
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