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2002
Förderkoje® with Ralf Schmitt
wall drawing
2 x 5 m
Museum für Gegenwart Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, DE
For a presentation of Ralf Schmitt’s Förderkoje at the Hamburger Bahnhof, the artists who participated in the project during its lifespan (1998–2008) were now invited to realize one work each at the same time. The tall and narrow room was rebuilt as an object at the Hamburger Bahnhof and then, tilted by ninety degrees, laid on its side. The former door now stood open like the hatch of a beachside bar shack, held in place by two slats by Georg Herold. Visitors entered the room through the former ceiling, which had been left out. A brush and ink drawing was applied to the object’s front face, as indicated by the counter-like doorway. From gestural brushstrokes translated into a black and white shadow relief, a technique first developed in Fußnoten und Anamorphose, Wirl, Hanfbauer long beads of paint trickle toward the wall’s bottom left corner. The “vanishing point” of these streaks of paint coincides with the point around which the object was titled. On the right-hand side part of the wall, the paint runs leftward in almost level lines, i.e., sharply downward in relation to the original placement of the room. On the left-hand side, the paint trickles down almost vertically. The compositional scheme thus suggests that the liquid brushstrokes were applied to the object as it was tilted: first near its upper edge, when the object stood almost vertically, and lastly near the left or bottom edge, when it almost rested on its side. The time of the gestural application of paint, whose relief has survived in graphical translation, is thus projected onto the support object as well, doubling and reaffirming the latter’s distinct spatiotemporal logic, the process of its being tilted in the real space. At the same time, the drawing is lifted from the surface of the wall. The top and right edges of the area it covers are set off from the edges of the wall, and this area itself is moreover shot through with white fields that look as though other paintings had hung here when the paint was applied. This in turn marks the illusion of the spatiotemporal congruence of support medium and picture as an explicit illusion—and recovers it on a different level: for just as no paint has “really” flown, pulled down by gravity, no wall has “really” been physically tilted. The presences of the drawing and the reconstruction are thus open in the imagination, each in its own way, to a past movement through the real space. The picture, created extremely slowly, remains charged with the ephemerality of this movement it illustrates ironically.