Scenography of a Tempered Existence Germaine Kruip in Düsseldorf and Almere
From far away, you see the image, massive and dark. The colours are lightly obscured, in an unending pattern, abstract and expressive. It looks expensive and classical, somewhat conventional. Seen from the front, the drawing continues along the frame, in which it is engraved, massive and inseparable. Kruip has not drawn anything: it is sawn. Marble Untitled (2009) is a stone, as high, as deep and as wide as a painting, with an age-old pattern. It is a block from a quarry, with classic rectangle measurements. This is a form of sculpture in the most literal sense of the word, a drawing that did not come into being through the act of a hand, but through a decision. It sounds almost kitsch when we describe how the eye begins to meander along the pattern of lines, how you travel through it, not on top of it, as if you were en route inside the pattern. While display-hungry Europe screwed thin slivers of expensive marble onto walls in mirror symmetry, in China, people laid it across tables, in cliff walks up mountains that can be conquered only with the eye. In this way, we are very close to nature and at the same time, close to ourselves.
Marble Untitled was part of the exhibition Germaine Kruip: Aesthetics as a Way of Survival, held at the Düsseldorf Kunstverein from late May to August. There had long been doubt that the exhibition space could support the weight of the stone. Kruip persisted, and presented the stone in such a way that visitors had the sensation of entering a decor in which things were more real than they seemed: heavier, more authentic, more wonderful, yet less tangible. We quickly feel a bond with it. Visitors are, as it were, drawn into their own imaginary realities.
The exhibition in Düsseldorf also included the film Aesthetics as a Way of Survival (2009), whose protagonist is a bowerbird. Kruip accidentally discovered bowerbirds in a documentary by David Attenborough, the BBC’s flora and fauna expert. They surprised her. Bowerbirds build enormous constructions that look like upside-down bird’s nests on stilts, decorated with feathers, pieces of plastic, leaves and dried berries. They are a stage. To attract a female, the male stands behind the structure and throws objects he has collected high into the air, in a theatrical performance. It is pure aesthetics.
The article can be read in METROPOLIS M No 5/2009. ORDER NOW: <mail [email protected]>[email protected]
Catrin Lorch
