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A bicycle made for two
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Manifestly, it is not easy to see through the game that Thomas Kratz is playing. As I enter Center Berlin in late September to see the exhibition ‘Licking Its Eyeball oder Wie ich dem toten Hasen die Bilder erkläre’, I feel like I am entering a very white, foreign galaxy. Two round, white speakers are hanging at a distance from each other like drops from the ceiling, reminiscent of spaceships. Two superimposed panes of glass are leaning against the wall right of the entrance, one of the top corners missing; a copper-coloured track bicycle is resting against the wall. The floor is covered from wall to wall with a white felt carpet. What a mysterious composition, I think as I move closer to the speakers. Perhaps they will help me solve the enigma? Sounds are heard, undecipherable fragments of a male voice, metallic singing: these are recorded traces of the artist’s performance in 2006 at gallery Vera Cortes in Lisbon, ‘Wie ich dem toten Hasen die Bilder erkläre’. It has served as a source for two subsequent exhibitions, the most of which is currently on show at Center. Kratz had restaged Beuys’ famous 1965 performance, ‘Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt’. Like Beuys, Kratz was moving in a room separated from the audience, cradling a dead hare, face covered in honey and gold leaf—he was, however, wearing a Beuys-themed tracksuit designed by Lara Torres. It was 2006, after all. The gallery visitors were able to observe him only through two glass doors and could only hear his explanations via speakers. The actual exhibition with real objects, as it was still present in Beuys’ performance, was missing in Lisbon. Rather, the selection of artworks that Kratz was explaining was imaginary, while the names of their makers were listed on a poster in the audience room. The actual presentation of these artworks was put together by the artist himself only on the occasion of the remake of this theme as part of the exhibition Ice Trade at the Chelsea Art Space in 2007, in a room-filling assemblage. Kratz had added two new objects to the original test arrangement artist+hare: a stationary bicycle and a small robot singing the song „Daisy (Bicycle Made for Two)“ from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 - A Space Odyssey’. The stationary bicycle, a training device invested by man’s hopes for a longer life, was set up next to a small singing robot, an artefact fulfilling man’s longing to find a semblance of life in everything. Two machines acting in parallel to the hare, a symbol of rebirth for Beuys: „For the hare does in reality what man can only think of doing: it digs itself in, it dig itself a hole. It incarnates itself in the earth.“ In his performance, Kratz transcends Beuys’ approach: the exhibition that was being explained to the dead hare was an imaginary one, the exercise machine stood as an augury for a longer life and a robot attempted at mimicking something human. Fictions: reflective surfaces. Like Bowman in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, having landed in an alien galaxy, the observer in Berlin now looks back on the many previous lives of the exhibition. In ‘Licking Its Eyeball“, Kratz demonstrates the rationale of appropriation art, a strategic appropriation transforming through associative repetition and abstraction: the ways in which the ramifications of the den of the imaginary reach ever further. Here, the pictorial appropriation makes way for an acoustic representation of the past, bordering on a documentary character. Unlike other re-enactments of this Beuys action – for example by Marina Abramovic in her ‘Seven Easy Pieces’, presented at the Guggenheim Museum of New York in 2005, Kratz offensively expanded the references into the present. The stationary bicycle and robot that, in 2006, had welcomed Beuys’ dead hare into the new millennium still echo in the white space of Center in 2007 as quiet sounds and mechanical voice. Standing there, along with the two panes of glass that offer only a milky reflection and the track bicycle, only for one person, copper-coloured, on a white felt carpet. And the robot’s quiet song: „Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer do! / I'm half crazy, / All for the love of you! / It won't be a stylish marriage, / I can't afford a carriage / But you'll look sweet upon the seat / Of a bicycle made for two“. by Katharina Schlüter, 2007 (Transl. Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson) |