PAPER N°2JUTTA KOETHER

These days many people are talking aboutpainting’s performative dimension, its abilityto act within certain contexts as opposed tomerely transmit or represent content within aframe. With this turn to action, and theproliferation of time-based strategies thataccompany it, artists are presenting paintingas a malleable form—one that relies heavilyon external relations to bring forth themedium’s potential. Rather than mourn itsdeath, painters like Jutta Koether would preferto let it bleed—not only beyond the stretcher,but also quite materially into bodies andthings. In these destabilized sets of relations,the painting subject, and even painting itself,becomes a site whose borders are constantlynegotiated. This renewed attention to bordersbrings art’s regulating functions—specificallythe market—into question, and yet it alsosuggests that to be committed to the conceitof painting today, one must account for anobject’s entanglement with other entitiesacross time and space, as well as what thoseindividuals bring to bear on an object’sconstantly renewing subject formation.

So as a starting point I’d like to thinkabout Koether as an artist whose work deftlyperforms the creation and dissolution ofsubjectivity as she literalizes, materializes, and

liquidizes her work. I want to do so using a set of painted planks exhibited under the title Mad Garland between 2011 and 2013, along with a number of related canvases,including Black Garland Berlin (#1: WTF)(2011), which was on view at PRAXESCenter for Contemporary Art during the firstof Koether’s three exhibition modules there.In keeping with their unstable and evolvingidentity, these planks go without a precisecategorization (including their role in themarket: most are marked “not for sale”), andtheir various installations take on a number offormats. At Campoli Presti gallery in Paris,they were hung on the wall like canvases; inNew York at MoMA, they were tossed aroundlike props; at the Center for Curatorial Studies,Bard College, they appeared as fragments in alarge sculptural pile; at Zach Feuer Gallerythey were a desk and also stuff to dance with;at Dundee Contemporary Arts they were anarchitectural blockage. Using strategies ofduration and mutability, Koether presentsthese works as indeterminate forms. They arefluid and delirious. And I must confess thatthey have induced a way of talking about themthat feels entirely non-linear and fluid to me,and so I present my thoughts on them in anequally fragmented way.

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Jutta KoetherBlack Garland Berlin (#1: WTF), 2011Cold glaze, silver metal brackets,black gesso, and various metallic paints on prepared linen; 160 x 220 cm.Installation view “Viktoria”PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art,Berlin, 2013.Photo: Elmar Vestner.Courtesy of the artist; GalerieFrancesca Pia, Zurich.

WTF

“This is not a performance, nor a program, nor atheory—it’s a struggle. Use them to get togetherbecause you’re all singles!” Koether began her2011 performance Mad Garland at MoMA with a charge. To the backbeat of club muzak, theartist corralled a group of twentysomethings inthe second floor atrium to use a collection ofblack wooden planks. Under her direction, thesingles teamed up in pairs. One contestantgyrated on top of a plank, while another pairawkwardly attempted to grab one from either endand form a threesome with it. At the height of theaction, the artist asked the entire group to form“a rising-dying-subjectivity complex” by makinga snaking figure with the planks and their bodies,moving across the floor in a syncopated rhythm.

An attentive viewer would spot faintechoes of Nicolas Poussin’s Bacchanalia (1631–1633) in the campy tableaux. Koether makesreference to Poussin in many of her works; whatseems to attract her attention in the classicalpainter’s oeuvre is neither his astonishingdraftsmanship, nor the logical order of hiscompositions, but rather the way that Poussincontinually invests his paintings with imagerythat speaks as much to its own condition aspainting as it does the subject at hand.

One work by Poussin that makes anappearance in Koether’s preparatory drawings forMad Garland is The Burial of Phocion, Landscapewith the Funeral of Phocion (1648). The paintingdepicts two men carrying the body of Phocion,an Athenian general known for his austere

lifestyle who was wrongly accused of treason.After a harrowing death by hemlock, he wasdenied official burial in Athens, and his body waslaid to rest outside the city gates. In Poussin’spainting, a proper burial site is shown in thedistance, overlooking the funerary march, nodoubt a signal of the general’s unjust treatment.Forced into exile even in death, the picture mournsPhocion’s departure and the noble restraint hispresence symbolizes. Poussin shared Phocion’sstoic outlook, and so, some argue, his nod to theancient figure may allegorize his own contentionwith Baroque painting’s excess, as if the heap beingcarted into oblivion was Poussin’s painting itself.

One of a number of Koether’s drawingson tracing paper depicts the two pallbearers inbright red ink, focusing on the stretcher betweenthem and the cloth bundle resting on top. In her picture, the sunlit hills of Athens havevanished, and in their stead, a leafy garlandframes the scene. It seems to celebrate, or haunt,the parade as it marches onward. As a motif ofimpermanence, this garland may attest less to thedeath of Phocion—or of painting—and more soto the fact of being carried; carried beyond thegates, carried beyond the image, and throughKoether’s retrieval, carried even beyond Poussin’spainting itself. Adding her own retort to thenarrative of painting’s exile, Koether has scrawledthe lyrics to the Robert Johnson song “Me andthe Devil Blues” across the top of her drawing:“Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone.”

JUTTA KOETHER

Jutta Koether (drawings)Red ink on tracing paper; 21 x 29.7 cm, each.Courtesy of the artist.

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PAINTING OBJECTS

A month prior to their appearance at MoMA,Koether’s planks were used in another version ofMad Garland at a conference entitled “Art and Subjecthood: a Conference on the Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism” at the Frankfurt Städelschule. Isabelle Graw, theorganizer, gathered a panel of critics to offer their thoughts on “the wide acceptance ofanthropomorphism” in recent art and asked if thetrend was “a manifestation of the increasinglydesperate desire for art to have agency.” Using asexamples the sculptures of Rachel Harrison andIsa Genzken—works that took up a Minimalistvocabulary with reference to the human figure—Graw asked the participants: Could it be that theanthropomorphism in these works is amanifestation of the increasingly desperate desirefor art to have agency? 1

In her talk for the conference, laterreprinted in Artforum, Graw answered herquestion in the affirmative. Citing art historiansMichael Lüthy and Christoph Menke, sheargued that as the modern period wore on, the categories of subject and medium graduallydissolved. This dissolution tracked the growthof capital from industrial production to thecurrent state of semio-capitalism, with itsdemands for affective labor putting not only the human body, but also its “personality,emotions, and social relations” to work. Graw concluded her argument by using ananthropocentric metaphor for post-Fordism, aswell as its art production: “where productsbecome persons, and persons are themselvescommodified.” Art’s desire for agency, in Graw’sestimation, was tied to its compromised status asa market commodity, just as the human subjectnears death in the “grip of consumer capitalism.”2

Koether was the final panelist, and she began by describing the topic of subjecthood

as “a material problem in relation to painting. My method: literalize, materialize, liquidize.Impermanent configurations. Irrepressible fluxof compositions and reappropriations. …Desirefor painting as the medium to deal with [theontological uncertainties of our times].”3 As shecontinued to speak, five assistants ceremoniouslypresented five of the black planks at the front of the room. Koether declared, “Coming out with a painting is coming out to go into a battle with a totally inadequate material. To shovemateriality in everybody’s face. There it is.” Shefinished by calling her paintings “tools” andresponded to Graw by saying that if paintings do anything, they now create work for critics, who mine the artistic semio-labor that bringsthem into existence. This, she concluded, “is why a painting could and should say WTF.”4

Phocion’s image haunts this talk, inwhich Koether abstractly exposes painting—a “totally inadequate material”—to the battle of semio-capitalism. In her estimation, theinadequacy of the painting planks falls withintheir materiality: For how can an inanimateobject—ostensibly exerting no control over its production, display, and dissemination—possibly have agency? What part could it play to install itself as a subject? Is such ananthropocentric term even appropriate?

Koether retains a desire, stated quite clearly in philosophical quotations sheincludes on the planks (she cites Deleuze and Guattari, along with contemporaryphilosopher Quentin Meillassoux) to explorethe ontological uncertainty of painting anew. Isit an object? A subject? Something in betweenthe two? Perhaps it is like a canvas-coveredbody, or an empty cipher, or a non-, waiting tobe filled with an accumulation of the imagesand events that fall along its path.

1 Isabelle Graw, “Ecce Homo: Isabelle Graw on Art and Subjecthood,” Artforum 50:3 (November, 2011): 241_247.

2 Ibid., 247.

3 Jutta Koether at “Art andSubjecthood: a Conference on the Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism,” organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik (Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum,Nikolaus Hirsch), Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, July 1, 2011.

4 Jutta Koether, “Mad Garland,” in Art and Subjecthood, ed. Isabelle Graw (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 41.

JUTTA KOETHER

Jutta KoetherBlack Garland Berlin (# 1: WTF), 2011 (detail)Cold glaze, silver metal brackets, black gesso, and various metallic paints on prepared linen;160 x 220 cm.Courtesy of the artist; GalerieFrancesca Pia, Zurich.

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PAINTING SUBJECTS

The title of Koether’s project, Mad Garland,became the topic of (or decoy for) this series asearly as 2009, when the artist encounteredfragments of a Roman wall painting in theMetropolitan Museum of Art. The garland’sfloating presence in these pieces—displacedfrom their original architecture and repositionedat a remove in the museum—resonated with themotif ’s ubiquitous appearance in all manner ofcultural artifact from antiquity to the present.Through its generic repetition in such diversesources as Egyptian coffins, Flemish still lifepainting, and the images of Dionysianintoxication, Koether saw the garland asshedding its iconic status. And adding to thenon-ness of the garland as such a multiple was

the role it continually played within any one ofthese historical painting-contexts. The garlandcould be described as a surrogate, a cipher, or anextra: standing in for the honored dead of Egypt,for the deities of the Counter-Reformation, orsimply for the capacity to transform a subjectfrom one state to another. In her non-paintingsfor Mad Garland, Koether uses this multipleform again, trading in the garland’s leafy boughfor glassy black planks, while hardware andcheap accessories replace its traditional freightof flowers and fruit. The status of these planks,not unlike the garland in history, possess theability to take on a variety of positions as theymove from the frame of one exhibition to thenext, and become frames themselves.

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In his most recent writing on the concept of emergence, philosopher Manuel DeLandaintroduces something he calls object “capacity.”He uses this term to distinguish between thefixed aspects an individual entity retains nomatter where it goes—its properties—andaspects of the entity that can only be actualizedthrough its relations with other things. Thelatter requires a sort of contagion or couplingbetween different individuals, or as DeLandastates, “a capacity to affect always goes with acapacity to be affected.”5 To demonstrate thedistinction, DeLanda gives the simple exampleof a knife. While in property it may be sharp,long, and flat, its capacity consists of its abilityto cut and be cut. The cutting of a piece of fruit,for instance, actualizes the knife’s capacity as a discrete event: the cut.

In thinking about Koether’s constantlyshifting garland, what is interesting aboutDeLanda’s understanding of capacity is how itprominently accounts for the “contingentcoevolution” of things, in which various affectualcouplings reveal new aspects of an object andgive rise to different potentialities in differentconfigurations.6 It is a term that sits close toperformativity, because to exert its capacities, anobject must act—as opposed to merely containor represent—what it is. Understanding thecapacity of objects thus necessitates aninvestigative or experimental mode, because it isalways about forming and reforming new modesof assembly: When an object touches this, movesthere, gathers these people, or those ideas, whatabout that object is realized? What do we learnabout it in that very moment of the cut?

Koether’s paintings ask their viewerssimilar questions. To begin to understand thecapacity of Koether’s work is to follow thegarland, so to speak, as it is recast under theaegis of painting proper. At the Gemäldegaleriein Berlin, there is a painting by the Baroqueartist Jan Fyt called Still Life with Fish and Fruit(1654) that Koether visits often. It depicts amonkey toppling a bowl of dead fish on a table.The monkey is barely noticeable at first, as hemischievously grabs the edge of the tableclothin the bottom third of Fyt’s picture. A garlandhangs above the scene, which, in contrast to thegray fish and the picture’s dull palette, is dottedwith colorful fruit and bright green branches.Fyt paints the sweeping greenery in far moredetail than the rest of the picture, causing thegarland to move from its structuring functionand take on a starring role. Fyt’s garlandperforms compositionally, even rhetorically, tomake its presence just as central as the scene it supposedly contains. The garland, thoughostensibly a borderline or supporting figure,exerts its capacity to hold the scene. In sodoing, it shows itself to be that very sort ofobject Koether herself produces: non-paintingsor supports that demonstrate their capacity tobe something more.

In her 2011 exhibition at CampoliPresti, Koether displayed a large painting oncanvas called Black Garland / Double Waterfall(2011). The painting was flanked by fivewooden plank-canvases shooting out in a lineacross the wall, Mad Garland (Plank PaintingsSet #3) (2011). As its title suggests, the paintingdepicts an abstracted double waterfall. Twin

5 Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), 105.

6 Ibid.

PAINTING MULTIPLE

PAINTING CAPACITY

Installation view “Mad Garland”Campoli Presti, Paris, 2011.Courtesy of the artist; CampoliPresti, London / Paris.

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sets of fluid black lines, mixed with deeppurples and magentas, swirled down the front ofthe canvas. Where a frame would usually go(running along its border, set in a few inches fromthe edge), Koether attached brackets. The L-shaped hardware, usually a hidden tool fordisplay and support, was repurposed as adecorative accessory in each of the painting’s fourcorners. Like Fyt’s use of the exaggerated garlandto suggest how a decorative framing device couldplay a central role in any given piece, Koether

used the brackets to dissolve the hierarchybetween painting and support. The link betweenKoether and Fyt’s works was rendered even moreexplicit in the promise of the garland in the title:Black Garland / Double Waterfall. Even thoughthe garland was noticeably absent from the centerof the canvas, to look again meant to see thebroken bough dispersed, dripping across thecanvas in a pool of liquid glass shooting outacross the wall. The planks were the garlands,creeping out beyond the picture’s frame.

JUTTA KOETHER PAPER 2

Koether did an iteration of Mad Garland in April2012 at the Center for Curatorial Studies, BardCollege. I worked with her on the show, whichpresented the planks in a single sculptural pile,where they assumed the form of a sudden crash.Planks jutted out in every direction and activatedthe composition, as if their action was stoppedin mid-motion. There was a seductive quality tothe crisscrossing arrangement, even though afull view of every glassy surface was impossible.The planks supporting the structure from

beneath were frustratingly obstructed from view.When I corresponded with Koether about thetitle of the work, I suggested Mad Garland (PlankPaintings Set #2) (2011–), leaving its end dateopen, with the intention to communicate thecontinuous nature of the project. Yet Koethersuggested it be dated simply 2012, “as thisparticular sculptural formation was done in theNOW.” To be Mad Garland is to become MadGarland, and with such a transformation, toshow when a painting can in fact be one.

Jutta KoetherExtreme Unction, 2013Installation view “Seasons and Sacraments”Arnolfini, Bristol; DundeeContemporary Arts, 2013.Courtesy of the artist.

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PAINTING NOW

“WTF”© 2013 PRAXES / The authorAll images© 2013 Jutta KoetherPublished byPRAXES Center for Contemporary Art www.praxes.de

With this Paper, Curator of The Artist's Institute and Jutta Koether scholar andconfidant, Jenny Jaskey follows Koether's expanding series of Mad Garlands. Underthe title “WTF”—an inscription in a recent and related painting and a provocationKoether suggests paintings could and should say—Jaskey identifies capacity in the“non-ness” of Koether's works. A parallel is made between Koether's approach topainting and the garland's longstanding cumulative usage—from discretedecorative bough and framing device to endowed symbolic presence.