When a Boat Runs Ashore, the Sea Has Spoken.

Flute Douce is pleased to present a group exhibition curated by Jakov Lloyd Goldstein with works by artists Amy Zingfogl, Forster Krone and Phillip Zach. When a Boat Runs Ashore, the Sea Has Spoken. will run from May 3rd through May 28th, 2012. Flute Douce is located at 34 A Oppenheimer Street, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Taking its title from an Irish saying that is used to indicate irrevocable collapse, When a Boat Runs Ashore, the Sea Has Spoken. brings into focus a Bermuda triangle of artists whose work collide in their involvement with disunity and contradiction. Building up on the observation that the introduction of Conceptual Art signified a shift from medium specificity to idea based territoriality rather than a liberation from territoriality as such, the artists exhibited achieve a critical posture by exploring strategies of inconsistency and discord conflating conflicting positions in the same work rendering the artistic 'Haltung' ad absurdum in order to counter the ideal of the post-Fordist scheme. The common ground on which these artists operate could therefore be intentionally irrational behavior. Assuming that artistic consistency is a qualifying selection factor in the mechanics of art industry, e.g. 'branding', the artworks shown behave self-contradictorily so as to consider the following: why is psychological incoherency widely considered pathological? To which extent do cultural institutions verbally impose expectations of consistency upon their objects and how does this manipulate the perception of those objects? What kind of power relations between cultural institutions and production does that imply and how are these roles defined?

In Forster Krone's "Aspirin Dreams" (2012), a series of paintings varying in size, stretched monochrome fabrics are splattered and spilled with bleach and pigmented fluids, creating dissonant reactions with the given material. Subverting and conflating abstract painterly qualities and notions of Action Painting, Forster Krone's works mediate on controversial questions of autonomy in art production, boredom and originality as well as contemporary discussions of precarious working conditions in the art world. The chemical's intrinsically limited timeframe of workability compels the artistic process to translocate to a hastened mechanization of channeling taste. Provocatively, this liberation from artistic intention and subject-matter enables an assembly-line-like production which might stand for the loss of meaning in a psychotropic substances-driven work world. This is a drama in which Aspirin played the first act in the beginning the 20th century, when it was aggressively marketed by Bayer, but it also shows the beautiful patterns acidic molecules are able to draw onto other material, whether bleach on textile or psychotropic pharmaceutics on brain tissue.

Amy Zingfogl's recent work circuits around issues of the very realities in which the experience referred to as art unfolds itself. Not only the "what" but also the "how" constitutes her practice, incorporating the act of exhibiting as performative framework investigating codes and regimes in which the artist's subject hood manifests. Zinfogl's large-scale installation 'Re: Smarter Than the Therapist' accumulates, in an extensive free-standing but unstable structure, materials that refer to famous female artists (e.g. latex and artificial resin to Eva Hesse) as well as images taken from gossip magazines featuring female film and music stars supposedly going insane (e.g. Britney Spears with bald shaved head smashing a car with the leg of a mannequin). Deliberately dealing with the possibility of creating a cliché feminist thought impetus, she exposes the underlying expectations female artists performing in a critical environment have to face. The decision to not exhibit this object, but only refer to it in the press text, brings to light another relation of power as the line between spectator and spectacle becomes blurred while the status of the object remains unclear.

Phillip Zach’s latest work has investigated language as a power structure that determines perception, content and context of art. It's as if his photographs of cactuses have obviously been hanging under the sun for too long: they seem to be bleached out like atmospheric requisites in a juice bar at Waikiki beach. Thus their homogenous appearance contrasts the inconsistent choice of titles which partly can be linked to art related language e.g. "An Affinity with the Abstract", others seem to adapt the language of Pop music or rather unidentifiable references ('No Pants today'?). Which role does the title play here? E.g. 'My Name Is Might-Have-Been' emphasizes the sad looking anthropomorphic 'Gestalt' of this particular cactus. But how can 'Light That Strikes a Photosensitive Surface' be understood? Does it point on the surface of the photosynthesis practicing plant, the technical principle of the taking of this photograph, the fact that this print got bleached out by the sun or, merging all three together, does it tease the inherently tautological dimension of coherency itself? Framed by those sneaky formulations, looking back at the segmented genesis of these cactuses seems to mirror linguistic structures themself. In Deleuzeian terms: "［...］not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status." (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, tr. Brian Massumi, p. 7)

Jakov Lloyd Goldstein

When a Boat Runs Ashore, the Sea Has Spoken.
Forster Krone, Amy Zingfogl, Phillip Zach
Kurator: Jakov Lloyd Goldstein