P. Kogler – English

PETER KOGLER: ENDLESS LOOP

For two successive editions of Documenta, Peter Kogler (Innsbruck, 1959) covered the exhibition space with digital silk-screened motifs. Both the decoration formed by lines of antes on the walls leading into the Museum Fredericiarium in 1992 and the ornamentation consisting of connecting tubes at the Documenta Halle in 1997 revealed, at first glance, a total lack of content.

Spreading out over the walls and ceilings of those enormous galleries, the mise en sceneof those simple computer-generated motifs, and their systematic repetition, was simply spectacular.

Anthropology has traditionally considered ornaments to be a reflection of the development of an economy based on accumulation. Nevertheless, Adolf Loos considers overcoming ornamentation to be typical of a culturally-evolved society. Peter Kogler’s signs, however, prompt us to question their ambiguous meaning, after overcoming the initial enthusiasm produced by their spectacular staging. This ambiguity has always appeared in Kogler’s art, even since its inception, and a good part of it is on display in the exhibition on show at the Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK) in Vienna since last October.

Back in the Eighties, when he produced his initial works, the artist seemed to distance himself from the excessive enthusiasm towards new technologies that invaded the youngest artist of the time. Thus, he conceived what appeared to be a home video lasting a few minutes showing an ant unsuccessfully walking on the printed surface of a newspaper, fruitlessly attempting to escape. Peter Kogler already used digital motifs of strokes that configured strange faces of what looked like hand-painted doodles. He showed a sort of poetic resistance coupled with a fascination with the use of new technologies, which started to introduce changes in traditional modes of representation an in our perception of the environment.

Another feature that Kogler has been developing since he started out and is the basis of the forms that define his current art is the use of small domestic architectures made of paper or cardboard, constructed and coloured by hand, revealing the artist’s fascination with the set designs used in German expressionist cinema, with deformed architectural perspectives that create threatening atmospheres. Based on ornamental modules or motifs that are repeated systematically, Kogler’s domestic constructions could become an unpredictable continuum of new configurations.

In this artist’s contemporary work, the venues in which the projects his art on walls or silk-screened paper show, as occurred with the early domestic architectures, a clear scenographic sense. His scenographies reveal a space imbued with a temporal meaning which, given its grandiose mise en scene, involves an almost ecstatic experience. On many occasion, his interventions have an ephemeral nature, a characteristic that is essential to a great part of the contemporary artistic production that is linked to new technologies, as a genre that is more interested in the temporal experience of perception than in the materialization of a static, durable museum object.

Most of Kogler’s repetitive motives (also on curtains, scaffoldind, panels, furniture…) represent living beings (ants, wormlike creatures, tentacles), vital organs (brains, innards) or complex systems (interconnected piping) that seeming to reproduce endlessly. This concept was revealed in 2006 in the intervention he carried outside the Kölnischer Kunstverein building, in Cologne. From the street, viewers could see enormous rates parading one behind the other, in an endless loop. Previously, as part of Sculptura 2002 –a public art encounter staged in Falkenberg Sweden-, he had presented a project intermittently until they invaded the whole space like a plague –walls, ceilings and floor- and then suddenly disappeared and appeared again seconds later. In 2007, Kogler appropriated the galleries of the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Mamco) in Geneva, filling the viewer with vertigo and fascination.

The obsessive reiteration of these motifs seems to refer to the forms of production employed in our contemporary society, which continuously manufactures and creates images, as part of the developed economy of accumulation. These symbols, without a hierarchy, maintain a complete interdependence with one another. They compose an interconnected system that does not allow for a rational itinerary, and instead reveal a sort of universal order, governed by an unknown and seemingly inaccessible principle. These motives could represent the omnipresent mechanisms in which information currently circulates and is produced, in a continuous, non-hierarchic, incommensurable and infinite network of connectivity.

Translation : Laura F. Farhall

(Lápiz n° 248 December ,2008)