awaiting oblivion

Imprint

EditorsRenate Wiehager, Christian Ganzenberg

TextsRenate Wiehager, Christian Ganzenberg

EditingChristian Ganzenberg

Concept and Graphic DesignLaura Masclans

TranslationAlison Kirkland, London

PhotographyBernd Borchardt, Jörg von Bruchhausen, Friedrich Loock, Natalia Stachon

© Daimler Art Collection and the authors, Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Köln

© 2013 Natalia Stachon and the photographers. Unless otherwise specified for the reproduced works by Natalia Stachon: Courtesy of the ar tist and Loock Galerie, Berlin

The artist would like to thankAndreas Balze, David Barro, Bernd Borchardt, Jörg von Bruchhausen, Nickel van Duijvenboden, Sylvia Chalaburda, Daimler Art Collection, Peggy Franck, Lisa Frei, Christian Ganzenberg, Sophia Hauser, Stef Heidhues, Hans-Jörg Huhn, Alison Kirkland, Harri Kuhn, Friedrich Loock, Loock Galerie, mischen, Vera Rammelmeyer, Katrin Richter, Michael Robinson, Peter Röckerath, Galería SCQ, Adolfo Sobrino, Danu-ta and Andrzej Stachon, Malte Ubenauf, Raul Villalba and Renate Wiehager

For the editorRenate WiehagerDaimler AGDaimler ContemporaryPotsdamer Platz BerlinAlte Potsdamer Straße 510785 Berlinwww.collection.daimler.com

Production Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft mbHKasparstr. 9–1150670 Kölnwww.snoeck.de

ISBN 9XX-X-86XX2-0XX-8

Printed in Germany

NATALIA STACHONBorn 1976 in Katowice, Poland.Lives and works in Berlin.

2002–2004Fine art studies at the class of Prof.Pia StadtbäumerHochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg

2001–2002PhotographyHochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Zürich

1997–2002Visual CommunicationHochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg

2010EHF 2010 fellowshipKonrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin

2004DAAD Postgraduate scholarship,Switzerland

Spaces – Stages – CracksThoughts on the work of Natalia StachonRenate Wiehager

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It was to describe this kind of transformation—the intermeshing of past and present—that Walter Ben-jamin coined the term ‘dialectical image’: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal one, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.”2 Here, Benjamin is speaking of the possibilities for insight into history: the past can only be understood in our specific pre-sent day. Stachon’s sculptural space images reflect this historicity of insight in the medium of the spatia-lly plastic organized image. This quality is also expressed by the way they remain in our memory as ar-ticulated sculptural unities, whilst at the same time an inherent contradiction—one that is implemented in a calculated fashion—always remains visible, in the materials used, but also in the relationship of the elements, surfaces and shapes to each other and to the space: steel sculpture versus penciled line, diapha-nous versus opaque surfaces, stability versus instability, weightlessness versus weight, rigidity of stasis versus balance, movement versus stillness, distance versus proximity. Stachon’s sculptures and spaces are invented figurations that relate to the memory.

1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland/Kevin McLaughlin, New York 2002, p. 262.

SpacesExperiencing unity in contradiction. Dialectical pictures

The conceptualizing of ‘space’ as a substance and a quality, as something that is more than a mathema-tical, measurable three-dimensional entity, the plastic opening out of ‘space’ as a sensation, as an inters-tice, as an atmospheric volume in early modernism and in Minimal Art is one of the major upheavals in art whose implications are still felt today. In the 1960s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduced the term ‘depth’ to unite the ‘openness’ of picture space energies with that of perception. Merleau-Ponty believed that what was required was “to rediscover beneath depth as a relation between things or even between planes, which is objectified depth detached from experience and transformed into breadth, a primordial depth, which confers upon the other its significance, and which is the thickness of a medium devoid of any thing. […] [C]olors are no longer condensed into surface colors, but are diffused round about objects and become atmospheric colors […]. This voluminosity varies with the color in question, and is, as it were, the expression of its qualitative essence. There is, then, a depth that does not yet operate between objects, which, a fortiori, does not yet assess the distance between them, and which is simply the opening of perception upon some ghost thing as yet scarcely qualified.”1

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London 2005, p. 310.

If we consider that Merleau-Ponty’s term ‘voluminosity’ conflates the tactile, geometrically constructed, plastic volumes with the non-demarcated quality of luminosity, which I have interpreted here in its wider sense as a light-filled, desubstantiated volume—as the ‘light-like density of a medium without things’—then we are considerably closer to understanding a significant aspect of Natalia Stachon’s plastic spatial images. Her artworks are based on precise analyses of the spatial constructions and minimalist sculptural work of abstract avant-gardes, from the visionary space concepts of the Russian and Polish avantgardes of the 1920s to Concrete Art and Minimal Art. In Stachon’s work, however, the plastic, craftsmanlike compositions of her predecessors are transformed into open spatial constellations of architectonic di-mensions and transparent materials, channeling direction of gaze and energy flows, and three-dimensio-nal bodies, all corresponding with and in exchange with speech and drawing in the capacity of psychic, ephemeral volumes.

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If we consider that Merleau-Ponty’s term ‘voluminosity’ conflates the tactile, geometrically constructed, plastic volumes with the non-demarcated quality of luminosity, which I have interpreted here in its wider sense as a light-filled, desubstantiated volume—as the ‘light-like density of a medium without things’—then we are considerably closer to understanding a significant aspect of Natalia Stachon’s plastic spatial images. Her artworks are based on precise analyses of the spatial constructions and minimalist sculptural work of abstract avant-gardes, from the visionary space concepts of the Russian and Polish avantgardes of the 1920s to Concrete Art and Minimal Art. In Stachon’s work, however, the plastic, craftsmanlike compositions of her predecessors are transformed into open spatial constellations of architectonic di-mensions and transparent materials, channeling direction of gaze and energy flows, and three-dimensio-nal bodies, all corresponding with and in exchange with speech and drawing in the capacity of psychic, ephemeral volumes.



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Cracks. Splits. Fractures The intrusion of the political into the architectonic-abstract space

The material quality of Minimal Art sculptural situations is calculated to eliminate the temporality of the objects, in order to then restore their aura at the next stage. The endeavor to eliminate the traces of time and of individual expression goes hand in hand with the use of industrial materials: copper, alumi-num, stainless steel, plexiglass, iron (Donald Judd); wire and polyester (Robert Morris); construction tim-ber, lead and fireproof brick (Carl Andre). However, in speaking about Robert Morris, Georges Didi-Hu-berman quite rightly remarks that this artist used reflective materials to keep the boundaries of his clear, cubic objects deliberately ‘vague’, with the aim of representing their geometry as “distanced and spaced, to give it an aura”8. This contradiction is joined by that of compact volumes (Judd, Morris) and hard incisions bisecting existing volumes (as with Morris’ sculpture Untitled, 1966, which is divided into two sections by an incision and, of course, Gordon Matta-Clark’s incisions into real architectural objects).

1. Didi-Huberman (see note 4), pp. 40, 155, trans. Alison Kirkland.1. Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting oblivion, Lincoln 1997. In her exhibition Awaiting oblivion, 2012, Loock Galerie Berlin, Stachon referenced

Blanchot directly.

In past years, Natalia Stachon has worked intensively with the various aspects and with the aesthetic of modern stage set designs in her own private sphere. This and her engagement with the process-oriented sculptural situations of Minimal Art are at the root of the strong currents of latency and instability, impermanence and potentiality, transition and displacement, presence and absence—or, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, the identity of “Awaiting oblivion” 7—that have characterized the exhibitions of Nata-lia Stachon since around 2008. In her 2012 exhibition Awaiting oblivion, Stachon arrived at a sculptural manifestation of unity in contradiction and a momentary convergence of oppositional forces by restric-ting herself to two materially, temporally and spatially diametrically opposed structures: a rail network of welded steel girders that ran horizontally across the entire floor, the perception of which transfor-med the space into a spatiotemporal energy with a quality of openness (Plot), and two groups of three 250 cm long plexiglass tubes, held together by wide belts, which hung from the ceiling like a balance beam (Drift). What is emphasized here is the fact that the stages that Natalia Stachon conceives for her artworks are neither motifs nor the arena for ‘sculptural narratives’. Instead, they are a self-reflexive locus for art as art: the artworks reflect their derivation and their redirection, they make us acquainted with their placeholder position as ‘variables in an experimental protocol’, and this ensures an openness in the way the space is experienced.

StagesTransitory loci of true sensation

The new understanding of space as a sensory value, as an atmospheric volume, as an ‘open’ picture space dimension implies a shift in perception; instead of focusing on the specificity of the object, percep-tion must now reflect the specific relationships of the objects to each other, to space and to the observer. The subject is now relationships in time and space—as Rosalind Krauss expressed it when speaking of Minimal Art, the object of interest is the control of “the entire situation. Control is necessary if the variables of object, light, space and body are to function.”3 The locus of art becomes the stage, which turns objects into variables in a temporally structured situation. What we have here are “protocols” of an experiment concerned with time, with the relationship of bodies in space, with reception and action, “in a certain locus”.4 The stage as a motif and locus of art initially gained importance through Bauhaus and through the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s.5 The explicitly theatrical, performative protocols of the early exhibitions of the American minimalists were sublimated configurations of this concept—one example of this was Robert Morris, whose cubic volumes served as actors: “The curtain is raised. In the center, a grey-painted plywood pillar eight feet high and two feet wide rises. The stage is otherwise empty. For the space of three-and-a-half minutes, nothing happens; no one enters, and no-one exits. Suddenly, the pillar topples. Three-and-a-half minutes pass. The curtain falls again.”6 The German Minimalist artist Charlotte Posenenske was a trained stage set designer and—to name but one of many links with the present—many aspects of the work of Heimo Zobernig relate to his early stage set studies.

3. Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post 60’s Sculpture”, Artforum, November 1973, pp. 43–53.4. Georges Didi-Huberman, Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes, Munich 1999, p. 55, trans. Alison Kirkland.5. Cf. the abstract geometrical stage set designs of Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova (Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Construc-

tivism, ed. Margarita Tupitsyn, London 2009, pp. 123–131) or Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Avant-garde Pathways, exhib. cat. Museo Picasso Málaga, Málaga 2010).

6. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), Cambridge 1981, p. 201.

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This is where Natalia Stachon’s formal strategy comes into operation: her sculptures and plastic situa-tion constellations of walls and bodies, vertical and horizontal lines recall a 1960s inventory of forms and materials, but deployed in what might be described as a thinned-out way, in the form of quotes, in a kind of double distancing effect: emerging from emptiness and extending into emptiness. In Stachon’s work, this hollowing out, emptying and disfiguration of the minimalist vocabulary goes hand in hand with plastic splits, fractures and cuts—either through transparent cubes and compact blocks, horizontal arrangements of quadratic aluminum panels and flat plexiglass sections or created by hard photographic lighting. What remains entirely abstract in three dimensions presents a decidedly threatening face when seen in two dimensions in drawings: broad, white elements shatter like glass, burst buildings plunge out of the white surfaces of the picture, the physiognomy of the bombed Warsaw of 1939 rises from the grey and white of a urban relief.



1. Didi-Huberman (see note 4), pp. 40, 155, trans. Alison Kirkland.7. Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting oblivion, Lincoln 1997. In her exhibition Awaiting oblivion, 2012, Loock Galerie Berlin, Stachon referenced

Blanchot directly.

In past years, Natalia Stachon has worked intensively with the various aspects and with the aesthetic of modern stage set designs in her own private sphere. This and her engagement with the process-oriented sculptural situations of Minimal Art are at the root of the strong currents of latency and instability, impermanence and potentiality, transition and displacement, presence and absence—or, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, the identity of “Awaiting oblivion” 7—that have characterized the exhibitions of Nata-lia Stachon since around 2008. In her 2012 exhibition Awaiting oblivion, Stachon arrived at a sculptural manifestation of unity in contradiction and a momentary convergence of oppositional forces by restric-ting herself to two materially, temporally and spatially diametrically opposed structures: a rail network of welded steel girders that ran horizontally across the entire floor, the perception of which transfor-med the space into a spatiotemporal energy with a quality of openness (Plot), and two groups of three 250 cm long plexiglass tubes, held together by wide belts, which hung from the ceiling like a balance beam (Drift). What is emphasized here is the fact that the stages that Natalia Stachon conceives for her artworks are neither motifs nor the arena for ‘sculptural narratives’. Instead, they are a self-reflexive locus for art as art: the artworks reflect their derivation and their redirection, they make us acquainted with their placeholder position as ‘variables in an experimental protocol’, and this ensures an openness in the way the space is experienced.

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8. Didi-Huberman (see note 4), pp. 40, 155, trans. Alison Kirkland.


When an etymologically trained thinker such as the philosopher Walter Benjamin uses the word ‘dia-lectic’, it is justifiable—particularly in reference to the work of Natalia Stachon—to recall that the word particle ‘dia’ refers to a crack, a distance, the transition from one dimension to another and the emergen-ce of one quality from another. In this sense, also, Stachon’s picture space constellations are dialectical pictures.

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AWAITING OBLIVION

AWAITING OBLIVION

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Drift 03 and Plot, 2012

Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting oblivion, Lincoln 1997, p. 72

“What keeps them separated, displacing both of them from presence …” —“is the story where she attracts him and where there can be no presence except that which is expressed.” —“Presence that is always intact, only present through the detour of the story.” —“But what allows the story to unfold as the calm play of the story …” —“is this gap where they are both already waiting, removed from presence …” — “And in this gap, in the void between seeing and saying, carried illegitimately toward each other through waiting.” —“Through forgetting.”

>> Awaiting oblivion>> Elude>> Plot>> Drift

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Drift 03 and Plot, 2012

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Maurice Blanchot, the one who was standing apart from me, Barrytown 1993, p. 49

I tried to understand why, in this space, there were still knots and tensions, strong areas in which everything was a demand, others in which everything leveled out, an interlacing of expectation and forgetting that incited one to an uninterrupted agitation.

>> Awaiting oblivion>> Plot>> Drift

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Plot, 2012

Drift 03, 2012

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Robert Graves, Das kühle Netz. The Cool Web, Frankfurt a. M. 1990, p. 5

This rainbow spanning our two worlds

Becomes more than a bridge between them:

They fade into geography.

Variegated with the seven colours

We twist them into skeins for hide and seek

In a lover’s labyrinth.

>>> Drift

Drift 03, 2012

Robert Graves, “Lost Acres”, in id., Collected Poems, New York 1958, p. 128

Lost Acres

These acres, always again lostBy every new ordnance-surveyAnd searched for at exhausting costOf time and thought, are still away.

The have their paper-substitute- Intercalation of an inchAt the so-many-thousandth foot:And no one parish feels the pinch.

But lost they are despite all care,And perhaps likely to be boundTogether in a piece somewhere,A plot of undiscovered ground.

Invisible, they have the spiteTo swerve the tautest measuring-chainAnd the exact theodolitePerched every side of them in vain.

Yet, be assured, we have no needTo plot these acres of the mindWith prehistoric fern and reedAnd monsters such as heroes find.

Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,Their trees behind the phantom fence,But of a substance without words:To walk there would be loss of sense.

>>> Sheer Range

>>> Plot

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Juan Goytisolo, Landscapes After the Battle, London 1987, p. 157

… you discover the future metropolis before you: ruins vestiges debris of a prosperous destroyed civilization: blackened doorway of a dead train station railroad tracks choked with weeds im-promp-tu forests on old arteries green spaces erasing everything: imposing abandoned embassies overgrown with vines bunkers blanketed in ivy streetcar rails buried in sand old river port transformed into a garden …

>>> Container>>> Plot>>> Sheer Range

Sheer Range 01, 2011

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Sheer Range 03, 2012

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Nickel van Duijvenboden, Plateau, Amsterdam 2008, p. 25

The ribs of the structure loomed ahead. She now saw that the source of the swishing sound was one of the four steel cables that secured the antenna. It had become detached or broken loose. The tension wire swung around dangerously in a circle. Each circle sent a sound through the steel frame of the tower. She recollected the comic strips she read in her childhood, the descriptions of sounds, sounds such as this. She knew for certain that no word existed for this sound. There was no way you could transform this tableau into a series of drawings, let alone make it intelligible, not even if you wanted to. This landscape permitted no structuring, it allowed no classification in visual elements and it took no account of a reader—just as there were no guidelines for her to unravel it and interpret its meaning.

This scene was confusing. The cable banged against the mast, calmly, treacherously. Lev had been taken by surprise. That much was certain. There was a jagged piece of ice close to the foot of the mast; beyond it—water. This had happened recently. During their stay most of the e-dges of the plateau had lost their jaggedness, eaten away by the sea water or broken away through grating along other ice packs, but an ice-hole had never occurred so near the work area before. The water resembled glue; it was bluish, semi-transparent and slushy. It was filled with slivers of ice and here and there she saw down, pristine white goose down that floated, became waterlogged, clotted and sank.

>>> Thinking

>>> Zoning

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At Stake, 2011

#04 #05

Container, 2011

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#06 (Edition)

Thinking 04, 2009

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Robert Graves, “In Broken Images”, in id., Das kühle Netz. The Cool Web, Frankfurt a. M. 1990, p. 40

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;I am slow, thinking in broken images

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes the their relevance;

Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;

Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;

When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;

I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of this understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion.

>>> Thinking

Thinking 04, 2009

Neither, 2012

#07 #02

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#06 #03

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Elude, 2012

Ajar, 2010

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Blinding 03, 2011

Zoning 02, 04, 2009

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Nickel van Duijvenboden, Plateau, Amsterdam 2008, p. 41

The scorched form hung slightly off center. Apart from this exception the islandscape was as always: rugged, detailed, virtually shadowless and primarily horizontal. Unemphatic. This was why it had been a cherished subject for her sketching: nothing to distract her attention, she was free to concentrate on the overall picture. Now, however, that freedom felt imposed: the eye was doomed to a meaningless wandering in an enveloping movement round the spot to which it was denied access. She looked approvingly at her pencil drawing and visualised the contours of the ice ridges as grooves in a long-playing record. Their jagged patterns could be interpreted the same way a needle of a record player picks up a signal from the vinyl. She concei-ved the white spot as a place where the record was completely worn smooth, where the raised contours had crum-bled away until there was nothing left to interpret. The needle was doomed to jump back in time, to the previous groove from which it began to slurp the melody with the same gluttony. Until someone decided they were tired of the constant repetition, took control of the innocent mechanism and finally lifted the needle out of the groove and placed it back in the holder.

>>> Thinking>>> Zoning

Zoning 02, 04, 2009

John Hejduk, “Sentences on the House and Other Sentences”, in id., Such Places as Memory. Poems 1953–1996, Cambridge 1998, pp. 120–128

An empty house is one that metamorphoses into vacant space.

Day dreams blank out light.The house likes the weaver;

it remembers its early construction.The house never forgets the sound

of its original occupants.The stairs of a house are mysterious

because they move up and down at the same time.

A house’s shadow proves its dark two-dimensionality.

A house awaits letters.The thoughts of a private house

should be kept secret.Tree roots are relatives

of a house foundation.A house is born, lives, and dies

and its named house.The house searches

for its lost occupants.A floor carries all the house’s

vanished footprints.The house receives hidden letters,

photographs, and secret thoughts.The rulers of a house are its mirrors;

time is measured and judged.Moldings hide the wounds of a house.Death hates film negatives.Death’s painting in a house is still life.

>>> Neither

>>> The house searches

for its lost occupants

>>> Container

The house searches for its lost occupants, 2012

Ajar, 2010 6 copper profiles, magnets, steel, 250 x 250 x 8,7 cm, ed. 1/3

At Stake, 2011 Plexiglass bars, magnets, stainless steel angle, 71 x 15.6 x 250 cm, ed. 3/3. Freeman Collection, Chicago

Blinding 01 (Detail), 2009 8 copper profiles, overall dimensions variable, ed. 1/1, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin/Stuttgart

Blinding 03, 2011 15 copper profiles, trolley (wood, paint), approx. 300 x 60 x 33 cm, ed. 1/1

Container 05, 2011 Pencil and ink-print on paper, 72 x 54 cm, ed. 1/3, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin/Stuttgart

Container 04, 2011 Pencil and ink-print on paper, 55 x 40 cm, ed. 2/3, Private collection, Bonn

Container (Edition), 2011 Pencil and ink-print on paper, 48.3 x 33 cm, Edition for Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, ed. 130 + 10 AP

Container 06, 2011 Pencil and ink-print on paper, 62 x 44 cm, ed. 2/3, Private collection, Bonn

Drift 03, 2012 Two-part sculpture, 6 plexiglass tubes, 2 tension straps, 2 stainless steel strap tensioners, cord, stainless steel hooks, overall dimensions variable, ed. 1/1, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin/Stuttgart

Elude, 2012 24 plexiglass tubes, stainless steel cart, 269 x 97 x 67 cm, ed. 1/3

Neither 02, 2012 Pencil on paper, 75 x 55 cm, Collection A. G. Rosen, New York

Neither 03, 2012 Pencil on paper, 55 x 75 cm, Collection A. G. Rosen, New York

Neither 06, 2012 Pencil on paper, 120 x 95 cm

Neither 07, 2012 Pencil on paper, 120 x 95 cm, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin/Stuttgart

Plot, 2012 Double T-girders, partially screwed, welded, polished and loose, zinc screws, overall dimensions variable, variation 1/3

Sheer Range 01, 2011 Pencil on paper, 180 x 125 cm

Sheer Range 03, 2012 Pencil on paper, 190 x 140 cm

The house searches for its lost occupants, 2012 Design for an outdoor sculp ture, steel structure, matt black finish, 600 x 360 x 522 cm

Thinking 04, 2009 Plexiglass, stainless steel, engraving, 17 x 14 x 250 cm, ed. 1/1, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin/Stuttgart

Zoning 02, 2009 Plexiglass, wood, paint, 52 x 48 x 158 cm, ed. 1/3, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin/Stuttgart

Zoning 04, 2011 Plexiglass, wood, paint, 53 x 48 x 158 cm, ed. 2/3, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman Collection, New York

awaiting oblivion

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