Absent 8 Days a Week, 2011 neon 15 × 145 cm

A bs en t 8 D ays a Week , 2 011
n e on
15 × 145 c m
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Hotel Absence
Laura Schleussner
15
Hotel Absence
Laura Schleussner
77
Fiete Stolte in Conversation
with Hans Ulrich Obrist
and Fredi Fischli
95
Fiete Stolte im Gespräch
mit Hans Ulrich Obrist
und Fredi Fischli
145
Connecting Times and Spaces
On Fiete Stolte’s Exhibition Library
Konrad Bitterli
149
Zeiten und Räume verbinden
Zu Fiete Stoltes Ausstellung Library
Konrad Bitterli
177
Absence as Act, or
How Can One Reflect
Oneself in One’s Own Eye?
Noemi Smolik
185
Abwesenheit als Handlung
oder wie kann man sich
im eigenen Auge erblicken?
Noemi Smolik
Hotel Absence
Laura Schleussner
The paradox of the Hotel Absence invites a host of images—an empty and
sparsely furnished room in the eaves of a small pension, the veritable room
of one’s own, an empty stage of an existentialist play, the whiteness of a
page, an anticipated place of solitude, now empty, now waiting. Hotel Absence
is not a place; it is a presence, the present, a body, a state of being.
In the space of the exhibition, artist Fiete Stolte presents us with this
simple sign, “Hotel Absence” cast in the dense, black material of graphite.
If one were to trace the letters with one’s finger, a gray dust would be transferred to its tip. The letters are ageless in shape and form, and the gleaming
solidity of the plaque underscores its materiality, its objectness, its tangible
presence in the here and now. At the same time, by declaring this location,
the artist is clearly drawing our attention to a different space. To what
potential place of occupancy is he referring? Or have we already arrived by
stepping through the gallery door?
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Opening up this dimension of the imaginary, the works of Fiete Stolte
draw us into an experience of objects, materials, and images that focus
our perceptions, while consistently pointing to a realm of action beyond
what we see. Confronting us with a marking, a reflection, a fragment, or a
phrase, Stolte enables us to engage with a performed action, a remote reality,
or conceptual framework that is implicit but never illustrated. Pared-down
and precise, his visual vocabulary sustains this taut balance between the
virtual and the real. More than a place, Hotel Absence frames the temporal
moment and instance of understanding that spans these two realms. With
poetic force and clarity he evokes the simultaneity of presence and absence—
with breathtakingly simple means.
Almost no other work evinces this tension as clearly as Mirror (Drawing
Five Lines), in actuality a large plate of polished zinc, upon which the five
fingers of a hand seem to have drawn thick black lines. The points of impact
of the fingers indicate the position of an outstretched hand, which has passed
along the surface of the mirror at a diagonal. However, depending on where
one is positioned in the room, one has the clear impression of the surface
having been touched from the side of the mirror opposite to where one
stands. The markings seem to extend three-dimensionally into the illusionary
space of the reflection. When one approaches more closely, the traces left
by the absent hand are imposed on one’s own image, canceling it out.
The marks are nothing more than an etched impression on a solid ground.
This play between the two- and three-dimensional, between the viewer and
the realm beyond the reflection, opens up a wealth of associations. One
cannot help but recall famous scene in Jean Cocteau’s Surrealist masterpiece
Orphée (1950), in which the modern-day Orpheus enters the underworld
through the full-scale mirror in his bedroom. Although he first is unable to
penetrate the surface when he touches the glass with the flat of palms,
his guide and friend shows him how to enter the mirror by the tips of his
fingers “comme de l’eau.”
Stolte’s mirror remains impenetrable. For him it does not serve as a
threshold but as a hinge between a sense of flatness and volume, between the
material impression made by touch and the absence of the body that performed this action. Physical trace and bodily agency are distilled in an instant
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that sparks the conception of a potentially different dimension of space—and
time. Speaking of the mirror, one must mention Arte Povera’s Michelangelo
Pistoletto, for whom the mirror serves not only as a dynamic image but also
as a representation of time. However, for Pistoletto the glass remains embedded in the long, fraught history of pictorial representation, which he smashes
with a hammer in an iconoclastic gesture, fragmenting and multiplying
the authority of the gaze. Instead, in Stolte’s Mirror (Drawing Five Lines)
the reflective surface is foremost a sculptural entity. It is through the position
of the viewer that the different dimensions of the mirror unfold; it is the
hand and marking of the artist that enables this shift in perception.
A counterpart to the incised mirror is the work Touching the Space (2014),
a delicate, life-sized cast of the artist’s hand in graphite. Positioned in an
upright gesture, the hand has a gentle, probing appearance with a single
finger extended slightly in front of the others, its tip worn smooth. Is this
one finger pressed against a glass? Testing a boundary? Activating a surface?
More immediately the worn-down finger suggests the delicate gesture as
an act of material transfer. Every action is accompanied by an erosion, the
mark of time. Although the position of the solitary upright hand has an
iconic quality recalling religious imagery or even reliquaries, in which the
outward-facing palm emanates a numinous power, this one hand underscores
the moment of human agency, in which intent, touch, and impact are combined. Stolte shows a solitary act, the instance of making contact with “the
space,” the dimensions of which remain indefinable and open-ended.
Pointing to a universal realm, the video installation Sun Moon (2015)
lends a pulse and rhythm to the exhibition as a whole. The work is structured
like the viewing of an eclipse, in which the images of the two heavenly bodies
are not captured directly but shown in separate projections as reflections
on a dark surface of water, which are in turn reflected onto the wall by a large
mirror on the floor. The fixed camera captures their agitated movement across
this dark rippling expanse, recording their paths in relation to the earth
over a span of several minutes. Only by a slight difference in intensity and
definition is it possible to tell the sun from the moon, which otherwise seem
to function as mirror images of each other in terms of shape and motion.
This layering of reflections is central to the work—sun and moon shining
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onto the water, their images directed onto a mirror, and the two bodies
engaged in a dance of opposites yet twins. On the wall, sun and moon gradually approach each other, verging on contact and becoming subsumed in
one another in a moment of brilliant unity, which produces not darkness
but and intense, burned-out orb of light. The sun and moon then lose
their alignment and drift past each other, only to repeat this process again
in a pendulum-like motion.
Founded upon Stolte’s personal experimentation with his own waking
and sleeping cycles—Sun Moon assumes a rhythm that contradicts natural
or “objective” time and mediates an alternate temporality. By equating
the sun and the moon, the artist unifies and negates the alternations that
punctuate the sequence of our days and the structure of the calendar. Despite
its meditative calm, the installation therefore also has a perplexing quality,
making us unsure how to orient ourselves in relation to these strange
orbits. How do we break down and piece apart this continuous flow?
Time removed of its external clock hands becomes an act of consciousness,
or in the words of Francisco Varela simply “experience in time.” 1 There are
moments when the two luminous circles are set apart and confront the
viewer like winking eyes, and time becomes collapsed in this encounter.
Their reflection on the dark water summons a biblical line of poetry, in
which the future, the end of time, is made immanent in the gaze: “For now
we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 2
A final work engages the photographic process to underscore this
distance to the self as constitutive of self-recognition—and of the individual
perception of time. In the work EYE, Stolte presents a photographic apparatus constructed like an ordinary photo booth. Instead of taking a portrait
of the face, through the specific positioning of the camera and a mirror,
the artist captures the eye of the user—and his or her silhouette, reflected in
and framed by the pupil. Playing on the old adage of the eye as the window
to the soul, the work, like Mirror (Drawing Five Lines), points to another
dimension, which remains inaccessible and conceptually removed. What we
discern is an altered experience of the self as replicated, yet alien, as in a hall
of mirrors. In the words of Susan Sontag’s famous essay, “To possess the
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world in the form of an image is, precisely, to reexperience the remoteness
and unreality of the real.” 3 Looking into our own eyes, we do see ourselves,
but only as a multiple reflection. When scanning the wall of all the staring
eyes captured in Stolte’s small photographs, we see the mirror as shattered.
Only with difficulty does one find oneself. Then recognition is made, not
by the shapes of one’s body but in the lines, shapes, and crevices that make
each eye as individual as a fingerprint captured in a flash of light.
Francisco J. Varela, The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology
of Time Consciousness, http://franciscovarela.franzreichle.ch /Human_
Consciousness_Article02.htm#I1 (accessed March 27, 2015).
2 I Corinthians 13:12.
3 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London, 2008), p. 164.
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s unri s e # 1 o f 8 / b erlin
s uns et # 1 o f 8 / l o ndon
s unri s e # 2 o f 8 / –
s uns et # 2 o f 8 / ho ng kon g
s unri s e # 3 o f 8 / –
s uns et # 3 o f 8 / s ydn e y
s unri s e # 4 o f 8 / –
s uns et # 4 o f 8 / ho n olu lu
s unri s e # 5 o f 8 / ho nolu lu
s uns et # 5 o f 8 / –
s unri s e # 6 o f 8 / l o s an ge le s
s uns et # 6 o f 8 / new york
s unri s e # 7 o f 8 / new york
s uns et # 7 o f 8 / new york
s unri s e # 8 o f 8 / –
s uns et # 8 o f 8 / b e rlin
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8 S u n r i s e s / 8 Sunset s, 2 0 0 7
16 Po l aro i d s , l ab el e d on c ardboard
e ac h 23 × 19 c m
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Suit s, 2012
28
2 t a i l o r- m a d e s ui t s , fi rs t -ai d b l anket s , t hread
ea c h 210 × 60 c m
e dition of 10 + 3
32
Ho t el A b sence, 2014
g rap hi t e
25 × 35 × 3 c m
34
S u n / M o o n, 2015
vi deo i n s tal l ati o n , 2 pro j ecti ons, mirror
d ime nsions va ria b le
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