If travel is searching & home what’s been found
A solo exhibition by Erik Wenzel that took place at the WerkStadt Kulturverein in Berlin, DE from  October 6 - November 5, 2011

Recent Work 2011 — 2007

Installations, paintings, sculptures, works on paper & objects from the last four years.

Live A Little, Live Ennui • Harold Washington College President’s Gallery • 2010

In the unique site of the President’s Gallery, two places literally inhabit the same space in the form of an exhibition hall that is simultaneously the administrative offices of the college. In cultivating a self-consciousness of this double life of the space, the usual gestures and “furniture” of an art exhibition such as wall text and pedestals are repurposed from their conventional uses. What is created is a third space that is between the office cubicle and the white cube gallery.

Additionally, a series of talks, conversations, screenings and discussions on varied topics were held throughout the run of the exhibition. The shape and content of these Evening Academies were determined by the participants. Guests included: Ethan Breckenridge, Marilyn Volkman & Diego Leclery. Evening Academies

INTERNAL NECESSITY: a reader tracing the inner logics of the contemporary art field

Internal Necessity was the topic of the Sommerakademie 2009 at the Zentrm Paul Klee, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr. The corresponding publication was initiated and co-edited by the Fellows. The result is an independent reader that does not aim to document the 2009 academy, but reflects and develops its topics in a rich diversity of visual and textual forms. Developed by the Fellows and invited guest contributors these include short essays and graphic designs as well as letters, image spreads and skype conversations.  The volume argues for publications as sites of art production alongside studio practice and exhibition making. As a visual object with a particular aesthetic, it reflects and continues the intensive dialogue of the Internal Necessity academy. 

Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York, 2010

Edited by: Tirdad Zolghadr (Managing Editor and Curator Sommerakademie 2009), Claire Feeley, Bettina Malcomess, Judith Raum and Erik Wenzel (Co-editors and Fellows Sommerakademie 2009)

Contributions by: Gürsoy Dogtas, Claire Feeley, Linda Franke, Agnieszka Kurant, Bettina Malcomess, Mariangela Méndez, Uriel Orlow, Judith Raum, Shirana Shahbazi, Oraib Toukan, Ricardo Valentim & Erik Wenzel. With guest contributions by: Ethan Breckenridge, Alice Creisher, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Bruce Hainley, Rahel Jaeggi, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Manuel Krebs, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Suhail Malik, Matthew Metzger, Ivor Powell, Hans Rudolf Reust, Victor Manuel Rodriguez, Maggie Taft, W.A.G.E. & Eva Weinmayr 

New ‘N’ Lonelier Laze • DOVA temporary • 2010

“The ephemeral event, as opposed to the material object.” *

But what about the ephemeral object? Not in the sense that it is an object that is thrown away, or has a short finite life (“ephemera”). But the ephemeral object that is only art for a period of time. The object that is sometimes art and is sometimes just a object.

And what about the material event? Not the material leftover from an event, the “ephemera”, postcards, checklists, dirty dishes & leftovers, residue. But the event that is material. The art exhibit. Art is the pretense for an event or series of events. The exhibition is an event surrounded by material.

A scratching post that in its regular life sits in an apartment. An object whose purpose is to be destroyed by a cat. But when sat in an art context it can be considered æsthetically.** It is the material of the exhibition. And the consideration in the mind of the viewer/s is also the material of the exhibition. When the exhibition ends, the scratching post goes back to the apartment and rejoins the rest of the world. It can’t be considered in quite the same way since all the other stuff of life is surrounding it. You can train yourself to sift things out and mentally frame/excise these moments or objects. The apprehension and presentation of such instances in the form of material events is the work of the artist.

— Erik Wenzel, Hyde Park, June 2010

* This phrase is common enough, but in this case I came across it in “Texte zur Kunst” (Dezember 2007 17.Jahgang Heft 68) during the installation of this exhibition.

** When I say “æsthetically” I mean “as art.” If anything can now be considered art, than a thing in the situation of art is free to be considered in any way, it is no longer bound to be considered only in terms of its real life purpose. Such an object can be considered formally, politically, economically or poetically for example. 

Of course this scratching post may be thought of – viewed – in any number of ways wherever it sits, but the situation of a gallery space is particularly conducive for such moments since it is a decided separation from the everyday. In this way it encourages such leaps.

Belief in Doubt in Painting • 65GRAND • 2009

Interview

I like ideas that are really stupid or really smart. That isn’t to say that is the only sort of idea I am interested in, but it is something that over time has come to the fore. It seems like a simple enough statement, but I could, and probably will, spend ages reworking the wording of it. Why “like?” How about “I am attracted to ideas…” or, “I am interested in,” “intrigued by,” and so on? And why “really stupid or really smart?” It could be “clever” instead of “smart.” Or “good” and “bad” or “awesome” and “dumb” or “brilliant” and “dumb.” There’s also the question of style and flow. For instance the word “really” is important and using it twice is important, for the rhythm of the statement and for its emphasis on extremes. But for now, the way I am saying it is the way that I mean it:

I like ideas that are really stupid or really smart.

I came to this realization over the past 5-7 years of occasional rumination on an instance that occurred in Paris in 1967. The artist group BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Paramentier & Niele Torini) displayed their systemic, reductive and repetitive paintings at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in January of 1967, “an annual exhibition given over to old-fashioned figurative and abstract gestural paintings.” * At the opening, the four artists set about making their paintings before an audience of guests. The four worked in the gallery space while a sound piece announced over loudspeaker, “Buren, Mosset, Paramentier, Toroni advise you to become intelligent.” At the end of the opening day, they withdrew their work leaving behind a banner reading “Burren, Mosset, Paramentier, Toroni are not exhibiting.” My response has varied, perhaps depending on mood or the weather, whenever I have thought of it. This was idiotic, what a stupid prank and waste of time! No, this was a carefully enacted performance of refusal. It has been my inability to reconcile the situation that has given the “manifestation,” as BMPT termed it, its potency. It is something that refuses to go away.

I’m reluctant to invoke this as a guide or a maxim, but ideas that are really stupid or really smart and ideas that keep coming back tend to be ones worth doing. So it is the case with The White Room. ** 

Oftentimes ideas for a work spring from my head fully formed. An idea will then preoccupy me for a time, either eventually fading away, or continually asserting itself. For The White Room, I am not even sure what the catalyst was, but for more than a year now I have been thinking about it, tweaking it but remaining relatively true to the initial concept that sprang forth. The idea may have popped into my head in an instance, but the elements were all there for a while, some of them for years. It was at some particular moment that they all came together. The idea was this:

In the exhibition space present Utrecht brand canvas board panels resting on anodized aluminum shelves purchased from Ikea with two binder clips affixed to the top edge of each panel. In this space play the album The White Room by The KLF.

It wasn’t even in that order, it was spontaneous, the concept appeared in totality.

All the elements mentioned had been floating around for various amounts of time in my conscious and subconscious. I am not sure if going in and explaining every reason for each decision is a good idea.

One thing I am thinking of while making these panels, which have resulted in a system, is the trouble of painting. Hence the title of the show, “Belief in Doubt in Painting.” “My background is in painting and drawing,” is something I say when asked about my work. I think my discomfort in being “just a painter” is not only because that practice is just a portion of my interest in art, but what Joseph Kosuth points out in essay “Art After Philosophy,” that painting is not art; it is a kind of art. And that the job of the artist now is to define art, to examine its boundaries and so forth. Granted, but painting—a loaded and iconic symbol not only of art with a capital “A,” but of concepts like human achievement and culture—is an excellent field, or subject to operate in while trying to do the work of sorting out this art problem.

Of course with The White Room there is the immediate corollary with Ryman, and the inevitable invocations of Kasimir Malevich’s White on White, Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and any number of other white painters [sic]. For the record while it was Ryman and years of mediation of his work that provided the springboard for this, it is my feeling that the closest relative would be Rauschenberg’s whites. If there need be a next of kin at all. That is the condition of art, and painting in particular, that most weighed down and burdened of all the media, a consciousness of its own history and its need for, or habit of, self-criticality. So Modernist. But is that not what art after Modernism does too? It is almost exclusively engaged in self-criticality. And it seems there is a generalized trend brewing, not a return to the Modern, but an increasing interest in sifting through the trash heap and salvaging, repairing or reconsidering aspects of the “Modernist project” that have promise of a new relevancy.

In any case, I have this desire to paint. The act of doing it is important for some reason to me. I can’t give it up. It is also a meditation on the act of painting, the vestigial desire in the face of a certain futility. White is used for a number of reasons. The origins of the piece lie with a vivid experience that I have held on to for a while. Over ten years ago, the Art Institute of Chicago, built a room within their contemporary galleries to display Robert Ryman’s The Elliot Room (Charter Series). Those super flat industrial panel paintings in relation to the space constructed for them resulted in a strange painting-as-white-cube environment. The paintings weren’t part of the walls, they reiterated them. 

The panels that make up The White Room were each executed one of the four following ways:

1.) With the manufacturer’s plastic wrap removed and painted white.

2.) Left in the plastic wrap and painted white. 

3.) Left in the plastic wrap and unpainted.

4.) With the plastic wrap removed and unpainted.

OK the white. We have these canvas boards that come gessoed. Gesso, at least in the general sense, is a white acrylic substance, not much different than white acrylic paint. So it starts out covered white. I paint it white, it has the act of painting, but it is little changed, almost undetectably so. I have this desire to paint. But what? Is it the act of painting? Is that what abstraction and systemic painting is about, a focus on the process of painting? “The project” of painting? There are subtle differences in the white on plastic. The painting takes place up against the prophylactic substrate versus the ones where the painting takes place after the removal of the wrapping. Sometimes there is withdrawal, refusal, or giving up before one starts. The panel is left wrapped and painted only by the factory gesso and in the sense that a painting surface on the wall in an art context is enough. Then, the act is halted in the middle, the panel is unwrapped, the clothes are off, the cock is out, but then, “fuck it, I’m not in the mood.”

These white panels are white because that is taken as a neutral. White paper, blank paper, white walls, the white cube. It is standard. Canvases come blank pre-stretched, readymade, white. White has a cultural connotation; in this case, the association is blank, empty, neutral, flat, noncommittal. Gesso is white, when you gesso you are not painting, you are preparing to paint. You are going through the motions. Gessoing is like painting a wall, it is painting but it is not Painting. Preparing to paint, painting the act, is that ritual?

—Erik Wenzel, 2009

* I first read about this in Painting at the Edge of the World, the catalog to Douglas Fogelson’s exhibition of the same at the Walker Art Center.

** The site-specific installation that formed the heart of the exhibition.

WARM FOR YOUR FORMALISM • DOVA temporary • 2009

The ideas I am working with in this show are viewership—how art is received, transmitted and consumed as a form of cultural entertainment—and sharing the products of a world view that takes into consideration certain Modernist ideals, such a formal composition, and relates it to the everyday. The confrontational arrangement of the sculptures and the layout of the checklist act as catalysts to start the viewer thinking about not just the art, but their place within it. Through pieces in a variety of media, I display how I view the world and things in it, as opportunities for aesthetic moments. Which is to say I have an ideal formal criteria, one coming from a preoccupation with a personalized Ur-Modernism, say 1950s New York, and expanding out from there. I see things in everyday life that resonate with it. Sometimes they lead to works of art.

THINGS THAT I HAVE VERBALIZED AND THAT OTHER ARTISTS HAVE VERBALIZED THAT RESONATE WITH MY ART

I am reluctant to make any statements about my work doing anything specific to, or for, the viewer since I am deeply suspicious of the idea that art does specific things. Rather, I am interested in the way viewership works, and the ways art, as a unique form cultural entertainment, is received, consumed and transmitted.

My work is art and the things around art. 

You keep referring to yourself as a painter. But I’ve never thought of you as a painter. More as someone who injects painting issues into situations.

I am interested in ideas that are either really stupid or really smart.

I want to make work that I can look at as a viewer.

Everybody sees art differently, I only make suggestions.

The meaning of a work of art can’t be reduced to the ideas that generated it.

This is the best I can do.

— ERIK WENZEL, May 4, 2009