NEUSPRÉCH

“Andrea Tippel interweaves drawing and pun, entangles notes with scribbling, undermines the ridiculous limitations of signifier and signified in confusing combinatorics of a drawing writing. Her text-image amalgams provide a whole cosmos of slipped meanings and therefore do not end by chance in a library – called Philoars Library – in which the entire world literature is, so to speak, Tippeled up. The drawing pencil, coloured or lead, is her instrument for poking around in the gap between word and imagination, image and meaning, in order to track down a sense other than that which logicians disparagingly call nonsense. Andrea Tippel is one of the best-known unknowns from the realm of non-representational art work. She was a long-time teacher at the HfbK Hamburg and an extremely sharp-tongued companion to many artists and art developments.” (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

NEUSPRÉCH presents Andrea Tippel’s Philoars Library, composed of 108 DIN A3 colour copies of drawings, each containing approximately 18 book spines. Andrea Tippel wrote about this work in 2009 (excerpt): „The 2000 titles in the library refer to a hypothesis I advanced approx. 14 years ago. This states that art in the current epoch finds itself in a situation comparable to that of philosophy approximately 2400 years ago, the time of the momentous transition from the Socratic to the Platonic modes of thought and action. It marks the transition from wisdom itself, Sophia, to philosophy, the love of wisdom, by means of textualisation, among other things. The central concepts of the library are: wisdom/Sophia, philosophy and the concept I coined for the correspondence phenomenon, Philoars.“

Andrea Tippel grew up as the middle sister of three in Bremen. She trained as an actress. Her artistic work mainly comprises drawings and texts, related to each other, as well as objects. From 1980 onwards, numerous artist’s books were published, several of which are in the holdings of the Centre for Artist’s Publications.
Andrea Tippel was a close friend of, among others, Suzanne Baumann, Peter Brötzmann, Henriette van Egten, Ludwig Gosewitz, Dorothy Iannone, Dieter Roth, Tomas Schmit and Jan Voss. Her first exhibition took place in 1974 together with Tomas Schmit in Bonn.
In 1997 she took over a professorship at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. In 2000 she was a founding member of the Dieter Roth Academy. Andrea Tippel died in 2012 in Berlin.

More: Andrea Tippel on the website of the Melike Belir Gallery, Hamburg

Annette Wehrmann always saw herself, with all her work, as decidedly politically positioned (long before it became fashionable). Her speaking/writing ranges from sharply observed everyday situations to musing and clearly agitating vocabulary. She called her artistic approach, which is usually aimed directly at the audience, “interventions”. The photo sequence of the Blumensprengungen (flower blasts) suddenly brought her into conversation. Her work for Skulpturprojekte Münster 2007, the staging of a pseudo construction site for an alleged fun pool, became widely known. Annette Wehrmann’s oeuvre includes concrete shell money, texts on paper streamers, a resistance wall made of foam, a spaceship as a tepee and a lot of text paintings on paper. She could easily be misunderstood as a precursor of contemporary socio-art, but what she wanted was art as a Ort des Gegen (Place of the counter). Annette Wehrmann died in Hamburg in 2010. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke).

Annette Wehrmann (*1961), was a German artist and author. She studied fine arts at the Hamburger Hochschule für Künste and at the Städelschule Frankfurt from 1985 to 1993. She graduated with Stanley Brouwn.
Wehrmann developed a strong singular artistic position between sculpture and intervention, which in terms of art history ties in with the methods of Conceptual Art and Action Art as well as the language of the Situationist International. Using ephemeral and cheap materials, she created objects that produce a tension between socio-political, epistemological and artistic questions. More info: annettewehrmann.de

In 2011 the Ort des Gegen e.V. (Place of the counter association) was founded in Hamburg. With the preservation of Annette Wehrmann’s artistic legacy, it created the basis for carrying on Annette Wehrmann’s art and thinking. In 2012 Ort des Gegen received the Edwin-Scharff-Prize, a posthumous honour for the artist.

Annette Wehrmann in the artist’s book Too Special, 2000:
„Irgendwelche Machtkonstellationen, der soziale Kontext oder bloß irgendwelche Stimmen aus dem Fernseher, was auch immer da aus jemandem herausplappert, oder auch Autoren. – ich glaube, L. hat die Einzelnen damals ausschließlich so gesehen, so sehen wollen, nicht so sehr individuell, sondern lauter Verdopplung und Wiedergabe von Machverhältnissen, Machtverhältnissen. Und natürlich von Grenzverläufen, sehr wichtig. Heute leuchtet mir dieser Standpunkt ein, damals eher nicht. Ich denke, das wäre ein Grund, eine Kunstsprache oder eine Privatsprache zu konstruieren, im Bemühen, das eigene Sprechen nicht dauernd den ungebetenen Anderen zur Verfügung zu stellen. Gelebter Autismus, das Bemühen um Klarheit, das wäre eine solche Privatsprache, die solch eine Klarheit ja eben nicht aufweist, mit all den sonderbaren Konsequenzen, die das hat.“

Gunter Reski is a writing painter. Peculiarly deformed words and sentences that haunt his paintings have at times almost become his trademark – at least there is nothing comparable. Everything about his picture stories is somehow under pressure. Occasionally, the pictorial space is also blown up and brought to the wall in fractal formations and writing in painting or collage form, or even installed as meter-long narrative wallpaper that takes up the whole room. His writing constellations seem to have found access to an abundance or overcrowding of sensations and ideas from everyday life that can only occur in the act of painting. Gunter Reski sees himself decidedly as a painter, but he also writes plenty of brilliant reviews and columns and curates exhibitions. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke).

Gunter Reski studied fine arts at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts from 1986 to 1992, under KP Brehmer and Gotthard Graubner. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the solo presentations Doktor Morgen, neue Sorgen borgen at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2013), Organwanderung jetzt at the Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne (2018) and Temporäre Haut at the Galerie Karin Guenther in Hamburg (2019). He also curated projects and exhibitions. Since 2013 he is professor for painting at the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design. He previously taught in Hamburg, Oslo and Berlin.

Gunter Reski has received, a scholarship from the Barkenhoff Foundation Worpswede (1997), a working scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2011), the Edwin Scharff Preis in Hamburg (2013), and other awards. He has written articles for numerous catalogues, his texts have also appeared in Texte zur Kunst and many other magazines and publications, and are also published on his website.  Gunter Reski lives in Berin.

Website Gunter Reski

„Um es kurz sagen, es interessiert (mich) weniger, ob der Pictorial Turn eventuell doch noch Kulturmaxime wird oder als Begriff datierungstechnisch womöglich seit dem ersten Atompilz versteckt am Wirken ist oder oder. Im visuellen wie im textuellen Terrain ist es jeweils die entsprechende bildliche Ebene, die mein Anliegen füttert. Mein Anliegen kann immer noch nicht besonders gut mit Besteck umgehen. D.h. es kleckert mitunter auch so ins Blaue hinein. Das Händeln mit einer bestimmten Art von Methaphernbillard sowie symbolträchtigen Bildkreationen bringt auf die Dauer mit Glück nicht nur bessere Resultate mit sich, sondern auch vage Einblicke in die Handicaps einzelner Medienbegebenheiten. Ein Bild erscheint mir mitunter etwas feierlich, ein Text dagegen etwas flüchtig. Oder am nächsten Tag umgekehrt. Von daher plagt mich schon länger eine kleine Glücksvorstellung, wie es wäre, die von mir gern besuchten Vorteile der einzelnen Medienpanels unter einen Hut zu bringen.“

Aus: Gunter Reski: „Volltext mit Bildboom“ (Starship, #2, 1999).

Aleen Solari (*1980) builds spatial assemblages in which the sweet collides with the aggressive, the handmade with the mass media, the childlike with the political, the closed pictorial with a disparate not- fitting-in-the-picture. Gentle colored backlighting meets concrete blocks, kitchen utensils meet soccer political slogans, female emancipation poetry meets phallocratic terms, the appetizing meets the unappetizing. The mixture of elements seems atmospherically contemporary, scandalous and scandal-free at the same time, as if a conversation had frozen in the middle of the conversation.

Aleen Solari studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg with Prof. Jutta Koether. Since 2009, her work has been shown in over 30 presentations in Hamburg and in exhibitions in London, Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn and other places. Some of her installations also form the space for performances. She invites people who do not follow a certain direction as in the theatre, but rather represent themselves, are present. One of the few guidelines: it is not allowed to speak. 2015, for the installation New Kidz in Hamburg, it was young football fans, for the exhibition Warten. Zwischen Macht und Möglichkeit in 2017 at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, two retired policeofficers.

Anna Sabrina Schmid describes Aleen Solari’s artistic quality as follows: „Solari ist eine hervorragende Beobachterin, die durch sichtliche Freude auch im Umgang mit existierenden Materialästhetiken Szene-Codes zitiert und Stimmungen zielsicher trifft. Dies tut sie mit einem Augenzwinkern, ohne dabei respektlos oder überheblich zu sein. Ihre Arbeit zeugt von Liebe zum Material, Einfühlungsvermögen, Verstehenwollen, dem Wunsch nach Auseinandersetzung und Verständigung.“

Jan Voss, as a painter (1) bookseller, is interested in everything that goes on between art and books. The book as an object and place of artistic debate does not stand for the preference of the private sphere, but rather the development of its own genre, in which a different tone is made possible than that of “great” art. (2) It is therefore only logical that since 1986, with his bookstore project, Jan Voss has also been seeking a public sphere other than that of museum-goers and big paintings. His small-format paintings often refer to poetic jokes about books, are themselves the result of a wordplay that is exquisite in a double sense, but which should be called witty rather than funny. Jan Voss has been publishing artists’ books for decades, makes his own, and together with Henriëtte van Egten and Rúna Thorkelsdóttir has been running the Boekie Woekie artists’ bookshop in Amsterdam since 1986 (3).

(1) As a painter I would rather not be considered, the word is loaded with something that does not matter to me. Paint and canvas is only a stopgap, modelling is so elaborate, but scenes that come to my mind are usually easier to depict with a brush. In many cases words do it best.
(2) And my pictures are not all small-format, the format often has to do with the fact whether it is foreseeable that the pictures have to go in the suitcase or not.
(3) And also just this: In Iceland again and again since 1971, or beginning a second life there.
(Oliver Ross/Simon Starke; footnotes by Jan Voss).

Jan Voss (*1945 in Hildesheim) studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Dieter Roth. Since the 1970s he has lived in Amsterdam and Iceland. In 2000 he co-founded the Dieter Roth Academy. Jan Voss and his Boekie Woekie, books by artists are an important point of reference for the development and understanding of artists’ publications as collected at the Centre for Artists’ Publications. For Guy Schraenen, whose Archive for Small Press & Communication formed the basis for the founding of the Centre for Artist’s Publications in 1999, Boekie Woekie with its small gallery has always been a point of contact visited in friendly exchange.
Artists’ books, created, published or distributed by Jan Voss himself, are represented in the Centre’s collections in large numbers, as is the Boekie Woekie archive.

Jan Voss wrote about his idea of art in connection with his solo Exhibition Old and New in 2019 at the Marlene Frei Gallery in Zurich: „Jedenfalls soll sie erhellen. Kunst soll erheitern, aufklären, und was der schönen Worte mehr sind. Wie wäre es, den Nutzen Nahrung, Wegzehrung zu nennen, für den langen Marsch vom Gedanken zur Realität? Auch praktisch wäre, wenn Kunst sich von tiefen Denkern als Schnorchel gebrauchen ließe.“

Click here to visit the Boekie Woekie website – with more information and of course a wide range of artists‘ books. boekiewoekie.com 

reproducts (since 1987) is an artist formation dedicated to the reprocessing of certain German-language television formats. The results create an alienation of the linguistically and visually all too familiar, strangely unpleasant reencounters with everyday television and its visual languages. It is as if one was circling over a field and constantly wondering and wondering about this wondering… with their banal messages and their desperate attempts for compensation from a world of things and services that simply won’t work. For outsiders it’s a laugh – inside it’s hell. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke).

reproducts über GESUNDBRUNNEN:
„Der entscheidende Tweet aus Adornos Ästhetischer Theorie lautet:
Alle Kunst entspringt aus Leiden.
Folgerichtig stehen Kurorte von Beginn an immer wieder im Zentrum unserer ästhetischen Praxis. Denn wo sich alles um das Leiden dreht, zieht die Kunst die Kreise.
GESUNDBRUNNEN – ein Projekt der KKKK (Kranken-Kassen-Kur-Kooperative) – fasst audiovisuelle Arbeiten aus allen Schaffensperioden zusammen, die diesem Leiden endlich ein Ende machen wollen.“

reproducts über reproducts:
„reproducts, Hamburg: Auf externe Anforderung oder als interne Forschungsinvestition betreibt das Unternehmen seit dem vorigen Jahrtausend Analysen der Passionen des Seins. Im reproducts-Archivlabor werden die massenmedialen Niederschläge hiervon gesammelt und destilliert. Konzentrierte Meditationen über die Technikgläubigkeit der 50er, das Nazi-Trauma der späten 60er, die talkenden TV-Beichtstühle der 90er, die computerisierte Zukunft des Kurwesens oder die kommenden Jugendtrends 22. Jahrhunderts – das reproducts-Archivlabor ist ein Generator für Momentaufnahmen im Spiegeltunnel der Wechselwirkung von Bild und Abbild, von Medium und Welt im Auge des Betrachters.“

Website reproducts

NEUSPRÉCH (NEWSPÉAK)
Poetological Journey to the Centre

A coincidence blew us past Bremen, by chance one of us remembered the centre and by chance the title Neusprech came to the other one’s mind. It was an idea falling into the castle on the Weser, as an incident. It struck us that something coincided… everything that is the case. Is that still a coincidence?
We’re re-speaking the old. We’re not talking about the slow growth and blossoming of an idea that’s been nurtured for years. We’re talking about something old, – but new, because visibly discussed. We are talking about an impact (or hit) with which, quite unexpectedly, three ends of a cloth (?) grip the non-object language: art/book/poetry – political language/society – art. There was, thanks to this space Centre for Artists’ Publications, finally the possibility to take a seat between the three chairs! “Ort des Gegen” (Annette Wehrmann)? Place of opposition? Alternative accommodation? In any case not a pure art enclosure.
As jagged as the triangle felt, as jagged was the book full, in which names of new speakers were entered. The strange unanimity in this listing told us: logically, NEUSPRÉCH does not exist merely as a statement. There are artists of this art-dialectic of the speech dialect. There are even substances that correspond to this twisted or tortuous idea of NEUSPRÉCH. Grown somewhere in the morass of Hamburg’s art teaching, but even then poured with international waters,- and washed.
So NEUSPRÉCH is an unfolded book. Not with a stiff spine, leather-bound, with a clean index, but magazine-like, with glued-in pictures, a few corners, not so good paper, a booklet to flip through and make fun of, frighten and drown in thoughts. Well suited for the train ride, as the mysteries are known to take place at the station today. A lot to see, because reading is looking here. It’s fun.
But: there was still something missing from the title. The something, the emphasis on deviation, the softening of confrontations. An accentuation, an accent, an unspeakable surplus! An exclamation mark! NEUSPRÉCH, set to Greek-French. Swabian connotation: Noi-schwätze (Noisy-babble), then screwed on with (Noise-bréch) noise-break. But it wasn’t just a language game…
(Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

Two artists from Hamburg, with roots in Hamburg art teaching, unfold NEUSPRÉCH in Bremen. They have brought with them ten further artistic positions, which together develop a spatially related exhibition path. The approach of re-accentuating the term NEUSPRÉCH from George Orwell’s novel 1984 and taking up the concept of resistance in the context of visual art has not only found a suitable location in the Centre for Artist’s Publications, but also an extensive and internationally unique collection of works related to the theme.
An integral part of the exhibition is thus a selection of artists’ books, magazines, newspapers, posters, records, as well as artists’ writings – theoretical texts by artists that formulate fundamental manifestos, analyses, statements and statements on the art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.
With Claus Böhmler, Bernd Joh. Blume, Tomas Schmitt, Werner Büttner and Gerhard Rühm, artists who taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste are represented. They stand for a discourse in which thinking, speaking and reflecting on concepts of work and art in general are essential elements. Other artists’ publications range from historical precursors of Dadaism or Futurism to American Conceptual Art, from Fluxus to current artists’ publications. And last but not least, some of the NEUSPRÉCH artists selected by Oliver Ross and Simon Starke have long been represented with works in the Centre for Artist’s Publications – such as Andrea Tippel, Armin Chodzinski or Jan Voss.
“Language, infested by art”. Centre for Artists’ Publications – infested by NEUSPRÉCH. With pleasure.

Ingrid Scherr (*1962) is a painter, music performer, sculptor and art poet. Her wild performances, like her paintings, are carried by an irrepressible will for independence, which breaks through in a mischievously clumsy language. In her musical pieces she eludes the “musical”, in sculpture the sculptural and in painting the painterly. Her language is one of euphoric refusal and genuine inspiration, hardly a sentence that is not accompanied by laughter or abysmal sadness. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

Ingrid Scherr was born in Munich in 1962. She studied communication design at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg/Schweinfurt and fine arts at the HfbK Hamburg, under Professor Bernhard Johannes Blume. She showed her work at exhibitions in Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Riga, Zurich and other places. Together with Peter Lynen and Alexander Hoepfner she founded the group WUUUL. The artistic work of Ingrid Scherr is extremely diverse. It includes stone sculptures made of recycled gas concrete or electronic sound collages of a “post-feminist folk singer”.

More on Ingrid Scherr’s website

Ingrid Scherr: Neuspréch_ I am – am I

Entschuldigung… völlige Verwahrlosung weggesperrt in tiefster Dunkelheit – Komaglotzer – fehlendes Sprach-und Erinnerungsvermögen. Befinden wir uns im 19.Jahrhundert im Kasper Hauser Syndrom?
Nöchen – Aufgepasst – Hook up culture peoples. Keine emotionale Bindung – keine Beziehungen und Freunde – im Klickschritt – im Arsch.
Was für eine wohltuende Umgebung – nie mehr selber putzen. Ab heute stehen auf wir auf Skandigirls und Nacktyoga… nur wie bekomme ich meine Lingeries wirklich sauber?
Yeeeees – bin ganz hygge. Leben in einer Welt voll Wollsocken, Duftkerzen, ungenießbaren Teevariationen und feinsten Zuckerschnuten. Shape babe!
Was? Wer? Ich? Ich feier das weg.
Kampf dem Weltschwachsinn.

Armin Chodzinski (*1970) worked as an artist for a while in management consulting. Not so much to help corporations artistically, but to do art research on business and to make the structural conditions of the business world artistically visible. He does not aim for simple evaluations, but rather balances the complexities of economic and artistic action with each other. He writes and builds brochures, makes appearances and develops semi-scientific exhibition settings. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

Armin Chodzinski studied fine arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig with Thomas Huber and Raimund Kummer. At the University of Kassel he received his doctorate in the field of anthropogeography on the subject of “Art and Economy. Peter Behrens, Emil Rathenau and the dm drogerie markt”. Since 2015, he has been developing the feature series Dr. C.’s Conversationslexikon – Eine ökonomische Radiofeature-Reihe mit und ohne Publikum (Dr. C.’s Conversation Dictionary – An Economic Radio Feature Series with and without Audience) for SWR. Since the winter semester 2017/18 Armin Chodzinski has been a guest professor in the interdisciplinary-artistic area of the Studium Generale at the Berlin University of the Arts.
For the exhibition Bandsalat – Aufnahme, Rücklauf, Wiedergabe, Stopp. Audio-Cassettes in Contemporary Art 2013 at the Centre for Artist’s Publications, he set up his spatial installation “Like Anselm Kiefer!” consisting of several thousand cassettes.

Armin Chodzinski: Ri, Ra, Reaktion – ein Selbstgespräch
Je näher man den Dingen kommt, desto detailreicher und uneindeutiger werden sie, schöner und hässlicher größer und kleiner.
Was eben noch Lösung war, ist jetzt der Kern des Problems. “Alles ist heute so komplex…”, sagen viele, weil sie sich eine Zeit zurückwünschen, die es nie gab. Es war immer komplex, nie einfach und das Eindeutige meist fatal. Trotzdem wünscht sich die Hoffnung eine unbedingte Euphorie, klare Aussagesätze – wenigstens ein verklärtes Leuchten in den Augen, Gerechtigkeit und Glück. Es ist alles verdammt einfach, nur eben sehr kompliziert.

More on Armin Chodzinski’s Website

Hans-Christian Dany (*1966) writes as an “artist” and has been co-editor of the magazine Starship for 15 years, which he gave up six years ago to concentrate on writing. His themes and texts are sometimes of an angry, often rambling, but always as precisely formulated, uncorrupted tone, which does not answer to any literary, theoretical or philosophical standard, but to the intense need for socially open-hearted reflection. In doing so, he remains close to the personal. At the same time, he makes far-reaching abstract considerations and undertakes precise research into backgrounds and contexts. His writing remains committed to the artistic because it resists the logic of socio-political functioning. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

“Hans-Christian Dany, born in 1966, lives as an artist in Hamburg and has long been on holiday from what he is supposed to do. How many who do not know where to go with him, he writes. Sometimes they become books.” (Website Edition Nautilus).
Hans-Christian Dany studied fine arts at the HfbK Hamburg. He has participated in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Shedhalle Zürich, Kunsthalle Wien and Kunstverein Baden Baden.

Hans-Christian Dany: Morgen werde ich Maler
Der Wunsch, die Wiederholungen und ihre Funktionalität im falschen Leben zu unterbrechen braucht nicht gleich in kopflose Aufregung verfallen. Perspektivischer scheint es, gelassen zu schauen, was passiert, wenn die Selbstbezüglichkeit der Regelkreisläufe, zugunsten riskanter Hypothesen verlassen wird. Die Augen zu öffnen dafür, wo sich grazile Fäden zu Fluchtlinien bündeln. Es geht nicht um einen riskanten Gestus, der sich repräsentativ beweisen muss, sondern um diskrete Überschreitungen, die auf das Unbekannte zugehen und Fäden zum Ausgang legen. Es wäre eine politische Kunst ohne kritischen Inhalt, deren Freiheit sich gegen die Steuerung von Kommunikation sträubt und versucht, sich nicht mehr von ihr einholen zu lassen. Es wäre eine wild gewordene Sorge der Idioten um ihr kollektives Selbst, die heitere Umstände feiert.

Aus dem Katalog The Happy Fainting of Painting, Köln 2014
Hrsg. Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Gunter Reski

Peter Lynen (*1971) is mainly a sculptor without being bound to specific procedures. There always seems to be an emotional core in his works. The entanglement of the psyche in the functions of world physics is reflected in sometimes expansive arrangements. Language is used more for the sake of impact than for explanation. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

Peter Lynen was born in Geneva in 1971. From 1992 to 1999 he studied fine arts at the HfbK Hamburg with Prof. Claus Böhmler. Since 2017 he has been running the Kunsthalle Schlieren in the canton of Zurich together with Ingrid Scherr and Martin Senn. Peter Lynen lives in Osnabrück and Zurich. In the works shown in NEUSPRÉCH under the collective term “New Alphabets”, Peter Lynen interweaves the most diverse language types: From the genetic code of alphabet soup, the melanocyte painting of a cow skin to voices from outer space. From braille, numeric and worm writing to art historians‘ speak.

“Mein künstlerischer Ansatz besteht in der Erzeugung von Bastarden aus naturwissenschaftlich-technischen Vorgehensweisen und den kunst-philosophischen Manifestationen der Seele. So entsteht eine Art Fusionsreaktor, der Themengebiete wie Halluzination und Geometrie oder Elementarteichen und Psyche… miteinander verschmelzt. Aus der Vielzahl dieser fusionierten Bastarde erhoffe ich mir eine Art theoretische Evolution, die nicht sprachlich sondern vielsinnig wahrgenommen werden kann“.
Peter Lynen

Oliver Ross (*1967) produces complex, garishly colored, rampant pictorial objects and walk-in racks, into which a psychopathic vocabulary is interwoven, which gives the layered and processual a garishly ironic-existential note. The impression of a flatly arranged jumble, a kind of transparently structured delirium, obviously develops a high degree of connectivity to all conceivable materials, media and forms of language. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

Oliver Ross was born in Munich in 1967 and lives in Hamburg. There he studied at the HfBK Hamburg with Prof. Bernh. Joh. Blume. In 2013 he founded the “new integrative segt” ROSSOLOGY, of which he is the only member; further members will not be admitted. He formulates the background and goals in seven points to “What is ROSSOLOGY? Together with Simon Starke he developed the idea and concept of the current exhibition NEUSPRÉCH at the Centre for Artist’s Publications. The artist provides an overview and many visual impressions of Oliver Ross’ installations, collages and texts at http://www.oliverross.net/

Oliver Ross in einer Mail vom 30. 1. 2020:
„Und immer dort, wo Kunst und Philosophie die Phrasen aus den täglichen Themen etwas anders nur nachplappern, verlassen sie sich. Kunst wird dann missbraucht. Die Biennalen und thematischen Ausstellungen sind voll davon. Schon vor Jahren hatte ich den Eindruck, dass auch die Künstler ihre Kunst von ihrer Einbindung in international verabredete Kuratoren-Diskurse wieder emanzipieren müssten. Im Sinne einer musischen Verbindung zur Sprache. Also nicht nur die Sprache mit den Mitteln der Kunst emanzipieren, sondern auch die Kunst mit Mitteln der Sprache, ich denke, das geht Hand in Hand, oder es geht gar nicht. Wenn es stattfindet, hast Du beides. Also: Immer poetologisch progressiv bleiben!“

Simon Starke (*1958) puts together spatial stagings, sculptural handicraft arrangements with found objects, exhibition environments in which artistic equipment is subjected to a fundamental revision. Linguistic utterances appear equivalent to pictures and furniture like fractals in an attachment, the events are comically colored by titles. The focus is on the spatial and intellectual situation of showing, of exhibiting. Similar to parables, there often seems to be talk of something significant, but it is the “speech” itself, the showing, that makes the “meaning”. (Oliver Ross/Simon Starke)

Simon Starke passed the first state examination for art and German at secondary schools in Heidelberg. His studies at the HfbK Hamburg with Franz Erhard Walther developed a relationship to space, philosophy with Hans-Joachim Lenger opened the door to thinking. From 1996 onwards, he curated group projects, entered into cooperation with various artists, exhibited conceptual-spatial installations in free places and institutional contexts. Alongside this, a whole series of texts and artists‘ books were produced. Simon Starke lives and works in Hamburg.
In the exhibition NEUSPRÉCH, which he conceived together with Oliver Ross, Simon Starke shows a twenty-part panel series designed for the “corridor”, entitled Versäumtes Versagen (Missed Failure): A double hem of words with the prefix VER carved in Styrofoam, anecdotal sentences and transparent black and white copies of cords and knots, language links.

Simon Starke: Notiz
Wir sind genervt, nicht nur wegen Corona, vorher schon, wir sind angestrengt, wir haben das Gefühl, dass etwas grundsätzlich aus dem Ruder läuft. Wir, die wir Ausstellungen besuchen genauso wie „die Rechten“. (Schließt sich das gegenseitig aus? Kann man das trennen?).
Es ist nicht mehr das Aufkommen eines Entsetzens, wie in den 80ern, sondern eine Art Traumatisierung durch einen vergangenen Einschlag. Wir müssten ihn verarbeiten, aber wie? Wie die, die dem Krieg entkommen sind? Wer spricht mitten im Gefecht davon, dass es ihm zuviel wird? Burnout?
Wir wollen weder all die Fronten auflisten, an denen gekämpft wird, noch so tun, als gäbe es keine. Doch unerwartet hat sich eine Frontlinie dort gebildet, wo das Zur-Sprache-Bringen selber zur Debatte steht. Wie können wir miteinander frei reden, wenn jeder jeden frei Haus beleidigen kann?
Es ist eine Frage des Stils, ganz klar. Hatespeach ist erst mal mangelnde Diskretion. Doch die Anprangerung einer stilistischen Zerrüttung, ja Verwüstung, ist nur die wohlfeile Reaktion eines medialen Beleidigt-Seins auf die Kündigung und Zerlegung des Vernunft-Konzepts. Niemand entkommt dem Sprechen, das haben sich andere schon sehr viel ausgiebiger zunutze gemacht.
NEUSPRÉCH ist nicht das, was jetzt landauf landab als sozialkritische Kunst verkauft wird, so als sei Kunst ein Nebenerwerbshof des Theaters. Dessen bildungsbürgerlicher Auftrag ist von Kunst nicht duplizierbar, denn Kunst meint nicht, sondern sie ist. Sie meint das, was sie ist. Bildende Kunst kann überhaupt nur sehr beschränkt Kritik darstellen, weil alles, was mit Kunst gemacht wird, Bejahung ist, „ja ja ja“ (sonst würde es ja nicht gemacht). Entscheidend ist vielleicht auch, was nicht gemacht wird, Diskretion.