Katrin Korfmann and the Esthetic of the Conscientious Fragment
By James Scarborough
A group of people sit on an art museum bench in front of Rembrandt’s painting, The Night Watch. We see them from the point of view of the work. The gallery’s green walls can be seen off to the side. The gallery’s entryway frames most of the group and provides a view of other galleries that recede into the background. Reverent and awed hardly describe their collective attitude. More like indifferent and bored, skittish.
Though bunched together like tired tourists waiting for a bus, they each inhabit their own private world. They resemble participants in a living tableau of a disheveled and suburban Last Supper. One points to the left. Another stares to the right. Two read by themselves. One speaks to someone behind him. Two converse with each other. They do everything but study what’s in front of them. This indifference is not a coincidence: the same disinterest can be seen in other scenes from the 6-minute DVD loop.
If this is reflection on a classic piece of art, then our public is not a very reflective one. If we cannot grant a work of art its requisite attention, then how can we reflect on other things matters of import: our lives, our destinies, our place in the scheme of things?
Katrin Korfmann’s photographs, installations, and videos describe with subtlety, grace, and humor our indifference to art. Sometimes a studied indifference to art and its trappings on the part of artists can serve as a viable subject. The whole arte povera movement, for instance, showed a delicious indifference to the ideas of quality and to the sanctity of the viewing space. But that’s not the case here. Here we talk about viewers – not makers – of art.
Lost in the shuffle is the personal space within which we experience and understand art and by extension experience and understand ourselves. In his piece entitled Pensees, Blaise Pascal described this state of restless superficiality that Korfmann pictures as the essence of the human condition: the product of the inability to sit alone in an empty state for an extended period of time.
This indifference is not so much an indictment as a diagnosis of a sociological situation. No matter where Korfmann situates her work (indoors, outdoors, in museums, in public spaces) you encounter the same irreverence. Photoshop editing removes the original art pieces and leaves only disenchanted viewers. The remaining figures stand in for the experience one is supposed to have in front of an artwork, thereby personifying the occasion for reflection. The piece itself is as anonymous as a sugar cube.
Unsatisfied with the mere description of indifference, Korfmann offers three explanations for why, despite the ubiquity of international art fairs, art offers no common ground that holds people together. Instead, the common ground is divided by constant shifts in attention. In the video installation Counter-Strike, each of six wall-mounted monitors show the face of a young boy as he plays a round of the Internet-based game, "Counter-Strike" in a cyber caf�. As with The Night Watch, we look at faces of people otherwise occupied. Each face barely moves: eyes barely blink, as if they are enraptured by an icon. They share a common experience, a common (albeit cyber) space, and focus their energy into a common pursuit. But it’s not art, it’s a video game. At the turn of the last century art was thought to be a universal language. Now, over a century later, it’s the intersection of video games and the Internet that commands interest.
To account for our attention-drift, Korfmann suggests that our brains cannot possibly process the stampede of visual stimuli that they encounter on a moment-by-moment basis. Lightboxes shows video stills of Cibrachrome Duratrans mounted in lightboxes. Each one is pulled from a one- to two-minute video of an outdoor activity. She creates a backlit mosaic from every sixth frame. Green shows a slightly jerky scan of a soccer game on a lush green field. Plays appear and reappear as if dancing in a disco under a strobe light. Similarly, Hospital, one-month shows a backlit mosaic of images of the same three floors of a hospital building taken once a day for a month and then mounts the results. The result is a subtle gradation of light and slow-motion kinetics as people and objects change positions.
In White Wall, Korfmann places two 250 x 800 cm white panels on each side of a pedestrian walkway in Amsterdam. The empty panels look like primed billboard panels about to be covered with advertisements or graffiti. There is no prompt that announces, "This is art. You are having an art experience." As a result, people may notice the walls but they don’t necessarily realize that they are instituted to generate "the art experience." Instead of us framing the piece, the piece frames passersby who inadvertently become works of art themselves.
Korfmann creates a similar effect with Pink wall, a pink wall, 6 x 25 meters, that she installed in the Piazza Castello in Torino, Italy. The pink is bright and stands in stark contrast to the neoclassical faces that frame the piazza. Like White Wall, it also frames passers-by. What’s surprising is not so much that the artist has put a large pink rectangle in the middle of a piazza but the fact that, as a work of art, it is barely recognized as art. Some people may notice it, some may pose in front of it as they would in front of a fake seashore at a Coney Island tourist photograph stand, but it is a mere backdrop, not a final destination
Korfmann’s work also provides a remedy to the indifference it represents. Whether or not art can compete with things like video games is beside the point. Indeed as we look at these images and situations mediated by video and photographic film, we complete the missing links between the fragmented images. We look at ourselves: we project ourselves into the work and thus complete it. And it requires concentration.
Korfmann shows us that art loses its privileged status once it becomes neutral because it turns invisible, irrelevant. She can show how once the viewing context has been bleached of the aura of sanctity and possibility, we lose the opportunism of a common and shared experience. But the one thing she cannot alter is the viewer, not the ones in the scenes but the ones looking at the pictures. Because hers is the esthetic of the conscientious fragment, her film mediates the rampant pictorial fragments. Korfmann contends that while life may be experienced as flux, we can only perceive it in individualized fragments. We re-imagine the absent connections.
It is always the viewer, me, you, who completes the work, gives it legs and sense and resonance. Through scenic fragments and de-estheticized contexts, Korfmann subtly forces us to reflect on what is before us. Through this reflection we individually become aware of art and its manifold possibilities of expression and transcendence. In turn, we return to it some of art’s formally privileged status and once again read it as a unifying language of humanity, rather than the babble of warring, distinct, and discrete tribes. While we may still squirm a little, or let our eyes and minds wander in puzzlement at what’s before us, if we take the time to give these fragmented images the benefit of the doubt, if we can permit ourselves to momentarily suspend disbelief, then perhaps we will once again find the grace that lies at the fissure between art and life.
