A conflation of overlapping systems

A photo is traced, like a silhouette: the contours of the recorded event are strengthened by the succinct and delicate line drawing realized with slavelike precision, intensified in its delineated concision and at the same time hollowed out. The clichéd nature of the photo, its conventional composition and the prominence of subject are presented as lucidly as devoid of meaning by Christine Würmell, who most recently showed her works in a multimedia installation at the Temporary Kunsthalle in Berlin. Much is at stake in this drawing: the artist traced an art magazine photo documenting the legendary oak tree planting performance by Joseph Beuys at the Kassel documenta 7 in 1982. Of particular interest are both the formal and thematic parallels of this strategy to Ketty La Rocca’s “Riduzioni”, such as the tracings of gallery opening photographs from newspapers. Both decompose stereotypes of modern media with line drawings that simplify as much as emphasize. A good 40 years after Ketty La Rocca, Christine Würmell exploits this artistic strategy in various ways. Take, for example, Untitled II (My Friend the Tree) (2007), in which the above-mentioned drawing is confronted by two more popular references. One is the record album cover of the German pop song, My friend the Tree (Mein Freund der Baum) from the legendary year 1968, in which the singer Alexandra croons that the dead tree has been “razed in the morning light” (“abgeholzt im Morgenrot”). The artist also collages into the tableau another photo, of contemporary graffiti protesting the removal of trees in the Mitte neighborhood in Berlin. The artistic juxtaposition of these three different image systems – art (history), pop and agitational underground – not only critically compares, but also provocatively questions the alleged differences between these illustrated and lived environments. Maren Lübbke-Tidow points to the political qualities inherent in this method: “The complex juxtaposition of diverse reference paradigms from the realm of the everyday, art (-mediated) life creates a backdrop, before which the space opens up for new narrations of the political – that is, for a re-politicization of aesthetic discourses.”
Christine Würmell questions the structural differences, the parallels among various substructures of our society (ultimately questioning the possibility of plurality in society at all) primarily through a reflection of the formal elements used in these substructures. One good example is her installation Bollocks was it the hand of God (2006). At the center of this wall-covering work, a blue paint bomb burst onto the exhibition wall a la Jackson Pollock’s action paintings links an expression of anarchic activism with artistic strategy – once again, through the use of similar formal elements.




The combination of blue paint on the white wall also leads to the Argentinean soccer icon Maradona, who is quoted in the work’s title. Maradona can be seen here in a photomontage, in which the tattoo on his right upper arm is visible. The tattoo is of the revolutionary Che Guevara – placing Maradona not only as a “global player” in the world of football, but also as a political activist, who publicly expressed his sentiments against former US American president George W. Bush and chatted in an Italian talk show with his friend Fidel Castro, who had invited him for rehab in Cuba. The parallel drawn between art and politics is confronted with that between sports and politics, resulting in precise blurrings: both formally and with regard to content. The paint bomb is not the creative expression of some anarchist artist, and Maradona is not just a soccer player and activist, but also, notoriously, in relation with some Camorra members. These multiple realities revealed by artistic montage create in Würmell’s work a semantic and sensual cosmos that seems simultaneously homogenous – and completely contradictory. As critic Kirsty Bell once put it: “Such conscious misinterpretation of circumstantial evidence and scrambling of temporal information is at the crux of Würmell’s work. Through a conflation of overlapping systems and misaligned information, she emphasizes the flexibility of interpretation and the multivalency of meaning; the fertile gap between plan and event, intention and effect”.
Back to the drawings of the Berlin artist, to be precise: to her series “Captions” (2009), which she produced for the German political magazine Polar (www.polar-zeitschrift.de). Here the artist uses a single medium – drawing – to successfully achieve that “multivalence of meaning”, the plurality of the same, which seems so characteristic of our globalized society following the disappearance of the real. In keeping with the thematic focus of the magazine, Würmell drew motifs dealing with the problematic of the climate catastrophe. Each drawing presents a motif as well as a second image that addresses the motif from a different perspective. For example: The motif water is addressed with a tracing of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967), along with the tracing of a journalistic photo of the 2005 flooding in new Orleans. In addition: A photo of Hurricane Felix inserted into an advertisement for an artificial indoor tropical oasis. As with the collage Untitled II (My Friend the Tree), Würmell’s aesthetic master plan reveals a “conscious misinterpretation of circumstantial evidence and scrambling of temporal information” as well as the “conflation of overlapping systems”. Here, however, the artist alters the mode of her traces. Now it is no longer about precise reiteration, but much more the spontaneous tracing of given lines and surfaces, with intentional sloppiness and omission of certain pictorial information.




The artist certainly functions here as a “discourse network” (Friedrich Kittler) of images, but a faulty one; she also operates like “record player needle on a scratched record”, as the artist herself has described her strategy. Thus her drawings bump and jump, shift between legibility and diffusity and thus reflect the losses that occur on a daily basis in the entropic haze of our over-information society. What is also exciting about the dual system of these drawings is also the convergence of both affirmative critical image content based on a single motif. In his The Future of the Image (Le Destin des Images, 2003; English translation 2007), Jacques Rancière addresses the difference between “symbolic montage” based on a harmonization of the similar, and “dialectical montage”, characterized by a critical accentuation of the contradictory. That this differentiation, however, has become obsolete, that both realms have long interpenetrated – take the commodification of punk music or on the notorious ads for the United Colors of Benetton – is likewise demonstrated in Christine Würmell’s graphic montages.
And finally: Christine Würmell’s new artist book Druckbuch (2008). Diverse layers of images overlap throughout the book; this time, the photographs push into one another. The photo from the previous page lies in halftone beneath the current photo, an after-image, which like a palimpsest, enters into gripping dialogue with the new one. The book takes on the global financial crisis in terms of international banking and the critique surrounding it, be it philosophical, topical or activist. In Druckbuch one embarks on a semantic quest associating Karl Marx’s Capital with the Dresdner Bank as well as public libraries and their use. Across the collaged pages of her book, the artist researches that the volumes of Capital were housed in the Dresdener Bank’s library, but fell casualty to the takeover by Commerzbank and subsequently “rationalized”. The Capital then wanders into the stacks of a public library in Berlin-Mitte, where its volumes are borrowed and read, as is evident from Würmell’s photographs of notes made by borrowers in the books themselves. In this context, the books’ forbidden inscriptions can be immediately understood as a pro-active utilization of public property; a use that intentionally does not comply with implicit rules of preservation or appreciation, but which rather (and herein lies the difference to the politics of finance) places recognition as the most significant profit of all.