Tris Vonna-Michell
Leipzig Calendar Works (2005)
Performance at the HFBK Gallery in Hamburg, 30th October 2006
Courtesy of the artist
Tris Vonna-Michell
Leipzig Calendar Works (2005)
Performance at Witte de With, May 19, 2007
Courtesy of the artist
Photo Belinda Hak
The curators at Zürich's Kunsthalle have presented Tris Vonna-Michell and Mario Garcia Torres' work as two interwoven solo shows. Although their works vary enormously in form and content, they share a common seam of enquiry into how history is recorded, delivered and interpreted.
Mario Garcia Torres' approach is to the point and poised. 'I promise' (2004 and ongoing), the series of letters to collectors guaranteeing himself a praise- and investment-worthy artist, manages to be scrupulous in repetition and determination and yet without scruple as he promises what is beyond his control. This reality is his perception alone, but if he crafts this vision with enough conviction, it will be shared. He even puts the same message on vinyl, a heartfelt ballad by a financial advisor. Elsewhere, neatly splattered dustsheets allude to missing masterpieces, and canvases dryly note great art that is not apparent. Garcia Torres knows only too well what art-historical baggage his viewers are likely to carry, and how given half a chance we can't resist creating significance. Each collector's letter is from a different chichi hotel; is this an illustration of globalisation, the nomadic artist, the banality of style - or the artist showing off where he has been put up in style?
I Promise..., seit 2004,
Pierre Huber Collection Switzerland
Tris Vonna-Michell is only 7 years younger (born in 1982) but his works are characterised by youthful exuberance, excess and self-importance. He works with great volumes of materials, led by random methods and research but constrained by self-imposed limitations and conditions. Two room-sized installations, Puzzlers and Seizure, are catalysed by the historic legacy of the DDR. Puzzlers sees Vonna-Michell stage the destruction of his own history, echoing what the Stasi did to thousands of files, by systematically destroying and re-collaging images from his own childhood, documented here in film, slide and paper remnants of his new nonsense history. Seizure is inspired by the life stories of three figures, Reinhold Huhn, Reinhold Hahn and Otto Hahn, in the wake of the Second World War. This installation is even more chaotic: slides set the scene of severe communist architecture of East Berlin which overlap and confuse, while the artist's voice throws out scraps of information, or fiction, or association, or fact, none of which the listener has time to ponder or comprehend.
Vonna-Michell created one of the most hypnotic installations in the current Berlin Biennale; with Studio A the topmost storey of KW has become a theatre of projections and sound recordings generating and querying narratives about Detroit, a barren place industry and wealth have left behind. In the Kunsthalle, this is the subject of further investigation; Auto Tracking is a work in progress, generated via a phone link between Berlin and Zürich, with the result to be a performance in 2009. Its current manifestation is as two bare desks and telephones at the extreme ends of the Kunsthalle, at the latter end facing speakers conveying Vonna-Michell's messages from afar. Despite the confusion caused by the rest of the exhibition, one's ears and mind still seek to comprehend the answering machine recordings, to be responsive to the intimate communication.
Vonna-Michell is doing something very interesting in relation to reception and absorption of history. His three Berlin figures, for instance, are a DDR border guard shot dead by a citizen of West Berlin trying to help his family flee, and the nuclear physicist who worked with a Jewish colleague to split the atom. The third is a corruption, a ghost created by the slippage from Hahn to Huhn. The artist slips between the anecdotal and free association with abandon, so the listener has no stable area of knowledge from which to observe. Tris Vonna-Michell is best known for performances, and will be performing during this exhibition. As installations, without an actor present, this exhibition is balanced precariously between engaging and disorienting theatre, or a jaded manifestation of the contemporary surplus of information and our inability to comprehend it.
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Tris Vonna-Michell: Auto Tracking
Mario Garcia Torres: Some Stories That Went Missing, Others That I Belong To, And A Few Studio Works
Until 18 May
Kunsthalle Zürich
Aoife Rosenmeyer is based in Zürich after several years as a curator with Artwise in London. In Switzerland she is doing all manner of work art related and contributing to publications including Art World Magazine.
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