LOLLYGAGGER

Miriam Steinmacher & Thilo Jenssen: Lollygagger Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal, Wiesbaden
18 September – 2 November 2025 Five years ago, when the overdriven machinery of late capitalism suddenly ground to a halt, a question emerged: could such a rupture also hold potential, a pause in the hamster wheel, a space for different ways of thinking? That brief moment of idealism soon gave way to renewed acceleration. The race for efficiency intensified, and technological change sped up processes at an almost unimaginable pace. Within a short span, artificial intelligence transformed from utopian promise to everyday companion – an extension of both physical and cognitive being with the explicit aim of eliminating human error. Against this backdrop, the title Lollygagger—an old-fashioned English term for idling, dawdling or procrastinating—appears almost defiant. It describes precisely that which has no place in a culture of constant self-optimisation. Steinmacher and Jenssen take up the term as a productive counterfigure, an emblem of slowness, hesitation, and the generative potential of failure. Lethargic yet striving, Miriam Steinmacher’s fragile characters stretch across the exhibition space in The Meritocrats (2025). Four organ pipes, connected to a radial blower, hang from wire rods, taped to their concrete bases. As if exhausted, these supposed representatives of a performance-driven society bend from their round pedestals towards the ground. Each pipe produces a single tone; together they form a slightly dissonant polyphony. Originally designed for harmony within an organ, they falter here in their function. Instead of consonance, they produce an echo that lands nowhere. They appear as solitary figures on alien terrain, their communication falling flat. Concrete bases, wires and organ pipes combine in Steinmacher’s practice into corporeal forms that oscillate between the anthropomorphic and the animalistic. Sculpturally, the quartet moves somewhere between the tactile materiality of Franz West and the situational humour of Erwin Wurm. In this vulnerable yet comic reimagining of everyday objects, The Meritocrats become stand-ins for our own selves within a society of relentless achievement. Their overstretched exhaustion mirrors the communication mechanisms of the present: constant availability, much noise, little substance. Steinmacher treats failure not as a shortcoming but as a principle. Her sculptures are disarmingly human precisely because they resist the illusion of flawless perfection. Thilo Jenssen likewise foregrounds the human element of making. His Blech Paintings (all 2025) are composed of lacquered and ground steel panels joined by spot welding at 1700 degrees Celsius. Marked by prominent seams, they assert a raw, Frankenstein-like presence. Stretched along the gallery walls, they trace a material line through the Bellevue-Saal. What once seemed fragmentary resolves through proportion and colour into a dystopian vision of abstract modernism. Using recycled metal, Jenssen’s approach evokes an uneasy, futuristic premonition. What once belonged to the domain of smooth, impersonal colour-field painting becomes here a visible record of labour and process. The works play with the genealogies of the traditional painted panel and testify to the physical presence of work itself. His palette—yellow, green, red, blue—and his formats often reference visual systems of the public sphere: underground lines, wayfinding schemes, floor plans, shop signage. In abstracting these semiotic structures, Jenssen reveals his interest in the invisible power of architecture to guide movement. He points towards a built reality that is never neutral but one that shapes behaviour. In his new video work Sisyphean Loop (2025), developed in collaboration with his brother Ole Jenssen, this enquiry is translated into the digital. A neural network, fed with prompts and datasets from hardware stores, scenes of manual labour and DIY tutorials, generates endless sequences. Yet the actions derail. What first appears as staged reenactment of human tasks soon reveals itself as synthetic simulation: sand being polished, spray cans emitting light, screws turned into nothingness. Like a game of digital Chinese Whispers, seemingly logical operations dissolve into absurdity, forming a dadaist chain of misfires. The screens are mounted on steel-tube structures reminiscent of handrails in buses or underground carriages, frameworks that stabilise the body while also directing its position. A solid construction, then, for an increasingly unstable video. The longer one watches, the more dystopian and surreal the details appear, as if reality itself were slipping out of joint. The work speaks to our sensorily overloaded present while offering a comic relief, a brief moment of humour amid the growing pressures and promises of digital optimisation. At the core of both the Blech Paintings and Sisyphean Loop lie fundamental gestures: adding and removing, dismantling and reassembling. In the metal works, these are inscribed materially as welds, abrasions and seams. In the digital realm, they are simulated, varied and looped into absurd perpetuity. The AI-generated video unfolds from technoid transformation into visually heightened fragments of everyday life. Across this shift emerges a hypervisual artificiality that transcends material boundaries and examines the relationship between body, technology and action. Jenssen’s practice spans an ontologically and materially charged spectrum, from the physical presence of the Blech Paintings to the purely digital existence of algorithmically generated images. To the absurdity of omnipresent echo chambers and the immaterial promises of artificial intelligence, Steinmacher and Jenssen respond with analogue, almost playful installations and sculptural works. They open a space for reflection on the material and the bodily, particularly at a moment when the physical world seems ever more diminished in comparison to the digital webspace. What remains uncertain is how long it will take before, amid the delirium of imminent AI perfection, the flawed and human-made might once again be recognised for its value. Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus all understood failure as a fundamental condition of human existence. Steinmacher and Jenssen’s sculptural characters and metallic paintings recall this insight. Comforting, almost encouraging, they affirm the processual, the failed, the imperfect—and with it the tangible and the authentic. — Maja Lisewski