Neue Arbeiten

A March 1924 issue of The New York Times reports that the bohemian feeling of Berlin, which expats and tourists travel and pay for en masse, has been gone for at least 20 years. High costs for creative communities are cited. It’s true, one of the big problems for an artist in the right place is paying for it all. One can be supported by family or fuckwad or get a job, as long as it has zero visibility (lest you be deemed unserious). If work sells there’s the worry about being commercial. Bohemianism acquires a romance by the bougie artists playing it and a necessity for the other few. Samuel Haitz sits somewhere in the middle of this dynamic and views it with some lucidity. His creative life, displayed here in scripted part, is only specific to place and time in its specifics, designed individually and collectively from a working template echoed across the urban West. Traded for and built up, so that where the head is rested reflects the conversations and interests of the rest of the day. The whole business relates well to his practice of grabbing and scanning. Economies and economies of form. This unspoken idea that beauty eternally slumbers embalmed on this earth already; to be freed, relit or reframed. Do the chic and DIY rest comfortably with each other, posters made like teens dreaming with computer and desktop printer (scanner bed included)? The way the handmade connects with high design within his art is complicated, these crops and enlargements pretend to be, but are not, equivalent to Enzo Mari’s chairs whose auras are maintained when built with downloadable plans. What we see here is singular, even if spawned from the preexisting condition. They front as easy, perhaps disposable, and precious concurrently. Haitz’s touch lies everywhere in a seeming ease, the small reliefs across the boards promising a quickness of completion. Yet, his interest in the recorded has an understanding that the best books as blocks of information don’t just define our little living spaces, taking up valuable room and making a move seem daunting. We take images and lines and entire paragraphs with us as we walk the world. How do we fan the elements we admire? The ones that turn us on both upstairs and down. Stealing, saving, refeeding and copying down into the margins of walls and paper - like all good poets across time. When we adore, we project. Dickinson’s slanty truth. We organize physically and mentally, a grid is a good way to structure a city, a space for the public or not. – Mitchell Anderson