NEON (MILANO) – ZBARAZ
There are three ways, three possible interpretive behaviors in the face of a work that encompasses an entire environment. The first is the most immediate. One abandons oneself to it completely. One is sucked into it. Or not.One rejects it a priori on the base of convictions – or conventions – of taste or critical adequacy.In any case, the eventual interpretive instruments come into play later.A press release, an introductive text, a conversation, draw a trace that contextualizes, that opens more or less, that eventually confirms. Anyhow, it puts things in their place, definitively reassuring everyone in their proper positions and the proper posture, skeptical and curious. The second way consists, thus, in the establishing of a pact that definitively outlines one’s own point of view.Finally, the third possibility, one reenters. And one returns to the work. One verifies, more or less quickly, the conditions, chilling, re-measuring, and systematizing one’s own interpretive spectrum.Andreas Golinski’s Zbaraz is without half measures. One sole text, his own.And in the spirit of the short show series, a small bet. A perfect pretext for an experiment: abandoning a convention.The convention, the articulation of modes or behaviors, becomes a more enlarged articulation of time. First nothing, if not Andreas Golinski’s text.Then, only after the opening, a text that retraces the experience and the sources.
Finally, an additional brief text, a return. A verification, naturally also open to failure.
This is a hole
But also an entrance
Here we are saved.
This is a cell.
This is where we live.
This is the lower level.
Here it is dark and humid.
This is our hole,
Here we are crawling.
What is Zbaraz? Where is it? And what does it represent? Andreas Golinski’s Zbaraz begins outside. From a closed door. We enter. Profound darkness. Only sound. Or a sole greenish video projection on the right-hand wall. Or still sound and image together. It is a cycle. And the three possibilities are mounted one behind the other. The video image helps little. The TV camera records something from above. A rubber hose, a tube on the ground. The floor, something like a basement or a boat’s hold, at first glance seems to be recorded by a surveillance camera. But it is not so. The movements are human. It is an exploration, probably a subjective one. The sound is around us. But it feels like it is above us. A door, perhaps a trapdoor, squeaks. Footsteps, breathing. And nothing more. We are alone. Literally. Abandoned to Zbaraz. We return outside. In reality we don’t know much about Andreas Golinski.
He works with sound. With video, with light. And he recreates works in empty spaces that ooze memory. But they are dramatically silent. Rather, not exactly mute or silent. Never that. Rather, voiceless. Golinski leaves us without anything to hold onto. Semi-shocked and captured. Or imperturbably disinterested. But that is not our case.There is something to be excavated. One perceives that fairly clearly, as if it were a bizarre sound in the background, scarcely outside of time with respect to the flux of the real. Let us try interpret this in another way. To what historical-artistic configurations could Zbaraz and Andreas Golinski’s work in particular belong? There is no doubt that, for Zbaraz, the strongest visual reference could be Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the studio (2002). And that an idea of sculpture that works principally with perception and the perceptive states of the public could be very important. The relationships between the proportions of the images, of the work more generally in its environment with the body of the spectator, are obviously carefully measured. And as in Nauman’s work, more than with other sculptors of the neo-avant garde onwards, the possible objects in the field necessarily assume an extremely strong evocative and metaphorical value. So far as it can remain enigmatic and buried.
The treatment of sound makes one think of a re-elaborated work of field recording. Perhaps. The video images are fragments of possible sequences by grand video experimenters, certainly heirs of expanded sculpture, such as Viola or Hill. On the other hand, if a hypothesis of context, or rather of profound configuration, could be this, there is something else that emerges. And – perhaps improbably – it is a strange feedback with Luc Tuymans that passes through Andreas Golinski’s work. Nothing that makes a direct reference. But an impression of levels. A possibility of hidden traces in the image, of clues that are buried but flagrant. Of possible, terrible other truths.
As much as it is a work, can an authorial path of research illuminate, retell or retrace a territory? How are the clichés of a territory moved and constructed? How does an artist reverberate the imaginary? And, on the contrary, how much of a territory penetrates an artist’s imagination? Andreas Golinski comes from Essen, the basin of the Ruhr. Heavy industry, dismantling. Sometimes, rarely, re-conversion. Hardness, heaviness, both economic and social. Andreas grew up during the years of the end of that cycle. Let us not deeply explore his biography this time. Let us imagine, however, that the suggestion of places and above all of architectures inhabited by ghosts whose memory slowly but inexorably melts into the ground has its own specific weight that is difficult to ignore. Biographies, physical space, architectures and places.But also – evidently – biography, stories, history, memory.The clues are all there. And probably also the keys.It remains only to excavate.With a sole caution. A brief text, in first person plural, accompanies Zbaraz. It is the clearest clue. That which risks being invisible in its obviousness.Zbaraz begins outside. It certainly concerns someone, somewhere else.But it ends and remains nestled for a long time in a precise place. Unfortunately, or fortunately, within us.
Andrea Lissoni