Juro Grau, Sabine Mohr, and Dieter Vieg
The Near Northwest Arts Council’s Flat Iron Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of three artists from Kunstlerhaus in Hamburg, Germany, one of Chicago’s designated sister cities. Kunstlerhaus has been home to an artists collective since 1976, longer–it’s said–than any other building in Hamburg.
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Although the three artists, Juro Grau, Sabine Mohr, and Dieter Vieg, have created separate installations, these produce a surprising unity. The simplest explanation would be that artists who live and work in proximity can establish a dialogue. Another explanation would be that they faced the same limitations. The artists had to restrict themselves to small pieces that could easily be flown from Hamburg and assembled at an unknown site. In the case of Sabine Mohr, what was brought was augmented by materials acquired and worked on in Chicago.
Of these three artists, Sabine Mohr is the one who most often makes site-specific installations. She makes no permanent objects–no paintings or sculptures–nor any product that can be sold or acquired or has to be stored. Her installations deal architecturally with the space they’re in and exist only for the duration of the exhibition. Sometimes, however, there are reusable elements, and in her installation Sight Unseen she has attached a number of small found pieces of smooth, curved, varnished wood that she had used before. Possibly these fragments once helped form the decorative elements of furniture. Arranged on the wall here, they read as the disjointed words of some strange script or language.
Immanuel Kant can be called the father of modernity. And if we look at Vieg’s piece more closely we see that it is not a bar code at all (though since modernity covers the period of capitalism and commodification, the bar code could be referred to ironically). We might recognize it as geometry’s golden section, a canon of proportion in the academies of fine art after the Renaissance, and we see that the stripes become progressively narrower as they move right. Is time speeding up to some apocalyptic end? The end of modernity? “The only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity,” wrote the British philosopher Nick Land.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Laura Weathered.
