What Holds

What is part of an artwork and what merely surrounds, supports or protects it? A frame can become part of the meaning of an image; a wall can become part of an installation. What Holds shows works by the artists Billie Clarken and Yoel Pytowski in a site-specific constellation. Both practices, foreground structures that would ordinarily remain in the background. These include supports and casing, architectural elements and construction materials. In Aesthetics of Installation Art, theorist Juliane Rebentisch describes the boundary between an artwork and its material and/or spatial surroundings as fundamentally open. A frame, an enclosure or an architectural detail can shift from seemingly incidental condition to a meaningful part of the work itself. In What Holds, this relationship becomes tangible. Whatever supports, protects or confines an image or a space is never neutral; it contributes to how that image or space is perceived. Yoel Pytowski has developed an installation that responds to the existing architecture of the Moltkerei Werkstatt. Added structural elements and spatial layers divide and connect the space, altering sightlines and guiding visitors’ movements. The exhibition space itself becomes material for a work that necessarily takes shape in relation to its architectural conditions. Some of the elements used originate from earlier installations and carry traces of those previous contexts into their new arrangement. However, Pytowski does not reconstruct these earlier states. Rather, he transforms the material into a new, albeit temporary, architectural form. Construction, transformation and dismantling appear as different states within an ongoing process. Billie Clarken’s series Chewing Tongue likewise begins with material that is already in circulation. The artist uses ‘found footage’ whose histories of production and original contexts are no longer accessible. The images follow the logic of so-called ‘cursed images’ (a term coined in internet culture to describe images that appear simultaneously familiar and yet almost impossible to explain). Precisely because their origins are and remain, unclear, they evoke a feeling that sits somewhere between recognition, irritation and unease. Clarken prints the photographs on pink foam and encloses them in DVD security cases. In doing so, the photographic image gains volume and becomes an object. At the same time, the cases’ original function and associations of preservation and consumption stay recognisable. Both artistic practices work with materials and images that have already passed through other uses and contexts. Their earlier functions do not disappear entirely but remain present as traces and associations. At the same time, their original contexts cannot simply be reconstructed. With each relocation and reconfiguration, new relationships emerge between material, space and perception. Clarken’s encased image-objects and Pytowski’s walk-in architecture mutually alter the conditions under which they are perceived.