'1 zu 43 bis 47', installed at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Human organization, and the force humans apply to nature to create man-made order, obsess Michael Sailstorfer. With his small retrospective laid out over two rooms adjacent to Terence Koh's megalomaniacal installation - a blindingly white, nuclear fallout of cuddly effigies which includes a Peter Rabbit doll being sodomized by an umbrella frame - Sailstorfer is a comparably quiet wallflower. His works strike a soft, unfamiliar tone of art from a different era, a point that's made clear by the artist's investigations and influences. From Land art to Fluxus, the line of inquiry of his current show "10,000 Stones" grips reality in a calmly assertive way.
Freshly popped popcorn spills out from a trolley onto the gallery floor besides an adjacent projection. In a moment of confusion, you might think that there's been a miscalculation but the popped popcorn has simply overpopulated its predetermined parameters. The work is entitled '1 zu 43 bis 47' (1 to 43 to 47), which the curators inform us "refers to the size ratio of the surface of a kernel of corn to a popped kernel, which with its folds, recesses, projections and curves represents the infinite variety of becoming." Were it a pithy symbol for human excess and overpopulation, it would belong to the genre that makes cover art for the Economist look clever.
A projection streams a time-lapsed film of a cabin in a field that wheezes like a tubercular lung ready to rupture at its seams. The structure heaves to and fro, one second ready to implode, then switchbacking ready to explode its "entrails across the snow-covered Thuringian landscape." Sailstorfer is known to dissect a building like Gordon Matta-Clark or early Vito Acconci, make any space psychosomatically uncomfortable. Keeping company with a number of European artists such as Carsten Nicolai and Arcangelo Sassolino, Sailstorfer taps into a nearly anthropological vein of site-specific, mechanical interventions designed to address human existence and its futility to absorb and resist ultimate destruction.
'Wohnen mit Verkehrsanbindung' (Living with transport connection)
A series of small wooden abodes 'Wohnen mit Verkehrsanbindung' (Living with transport connection), seemingly identical, are, on closer perusal, filled with identical bath and bed fixtures arranged in differing combinations. You can enter them, presumably touch them, and in a nightmarish instant, imagine living inside of them. This is not your ideal summer cottage by a placid lake. Rather, this might be a set design for an even more claustrophobic rendition of Michael Haneke's ultra-violent film Funny Games. The four on display, each from a specific township, were originally conceived as fully equipped bus stops that the artist installed along Bavaria's rural roads. It's disconcerting even to contemplate their use by different people for one or the same purpose.
'Zeit ist keine Autobahn - Frankfurt' (Time is no highway - Frankfurt)
The exhibition takes its title from Paul Auster's novel The Music of Chance (1990), in which two protagonists attempt to transport 10,000 stones of a fifteenth-century castle destroyed by Oliver Cromwell from the Britain to the US to build a useless wall. Among Sailstorfer's works on display, there is a sense of just that kind of futility. Why construct or consume, reproduce or renovate, when all it amounts to is paltry dust? Just as our senses were alerted to the smell of hot buttered popcorn, in the last room there's a thin whiff of petrochemicals. At the far end of the exhibition, Sailstorfer's boldest work in the show, 'Zeit ist keine Autobahn - Frankfurt' (Time is no highway - Frankfurt), is Sisyphean machine that spins a truck wheel against a reinforced gallery wall like a whetstone sharpening nothingness. A dusty silhouette of residue marks its wake as it, like man, patiently wears its tread thin.
Steve Pulimood
Michael Sailstorfer: 10,000 Stones
Until 31 August
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic. He lives in Paris.
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