On Disappearance and Illumination
Michael Stevenson in the Portikus, Frankfurt
With
his Deutsche Bank Foundation-supported exhibition project, Michael
Stevenson transforms Frankfurt’s Portikus into a gigantic camera
obscura. At the same time, “A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and
Blindness” is also a meditation on flying, human existence, and a love
of islands. Sarah Elsing met with the New Zealand artist on site.
Michael Stevenson, A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, 2012, Portikus,
Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Helena Schlichting, Courtesy Portikus
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Michael Stevenson during the installation of „A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness“, 2012, Portikus. Photo Dana Munro. Courtesy Portikus
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Michael Stevenson, A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, 2012, Portikus,
Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Helena Schlichting, Courtesy Portikus
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Michael Stevenson, A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, 2012, Portikus,
Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Helena Schlichting, Courtesy Portikus
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José de Jesús Martínez’s plane Aleph 1, Panamá c1970. Supporting
documentation for Michael Stevenson’s exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt am
Main.
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Reprinted document of José de Jesús Martínez’s Teoria del Vuelo, Panamá
(1979) compiled with a new English translation by Michael Stevenson for the
occasion of the exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. Original Spanish
edition courtesy of Silvana B. de Martínez.
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Centerfold from the reprinted document of José de Jesús Martínez’s Teoria
del Vuelo, Panamá (1979) compiled with a new English translation by Michael
Stevenson for the occasion of the exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main.
Original Spanish edition courtesy of Silvana B. de Martínez.
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Michael Stevenson, A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, 2012, Portikus,
Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Helena Schlichting, Courtesy Portikus
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Michael Stevenson, The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies project 2004
aluminium, wood, rope, bamboo, tar, WWII parachute and National Geographic magazines
Collection Queensland Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 2005
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Michael Stevenson, This is the Trekka 2003. 50th Biennale of Venice, New Zealand Pavilion, La Maddalena, Cannaregio. Photo: Jens Zieke
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Michael Stevenson, This is the Trekka 2003. 50th Biennale of Venice, New Zealand Pavilion, La Maddalena, Cannaregio. Photo: Jens Zieke
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The doors slam shut; it’s dark. In the back, near the emergency exit of the Portikus,
is a picture of an old-fashioned airplane with a propeller and a funny
roof. The object seems somehow familiar… yes, exactly! It’s the
airplane that hangs on the top floor of the exhibition hall—you can see
it through the glass ceiling from the bridge over the Main. But why is
the airplane in this room now, in the form of a flickering memory? Is
it a mirage? Not quite.
The New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has transformed the Portikus in Frankfurt into a walk-through camera obscura.
“The construction of this camera is basic and analogue. You only need a
light space and a dark space, a lens and some mirrors and you can send
an object from one place to another,” he explains. And so, in
Stevenson’s current exhibition A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, supported by the Deutsche Bank Stiftung,
an immaterial airplane is flying through the plains of the Portikus,
from the light-filled top floor through an external shaft and a series
of mirrors and into the central exhibition space. Visitors move around
in a kind of live photograph, a “floating picture” they can step out of
to take a look at the huge machine’s outer construction from the
garden. After sundown, when the camera is out of service and the museum
closed, the airplane in the brightly lit roof window is reminiscent of
the “magic” of analogue photography and the infinite nature of light.
An illumination on the Main Island.
Michael Stevenson is
fascinated by islands. Not only because the 48-year-old was himself
born on an island—in Inglewood, New Zealand. Many of his works conjure
images that are allegorically coded references to island states:
improvised rafts or absurd inventions that only appear brilliant in
their isolation from the rest of the world. Consequently, the
invitation to exhibit in the Portikus, this lonely art space on an
island in the middle of the city, was just the right thing. “The
Portikus is a very special place because of its history and its
location on the island. This is why I wanted to incorporate the entire
building into the installation. The Portikus is now an object itself,”
says Stevenson.
And it’s precisely the disappearance of
objects that Stevenson shows in the altered Portikus. Visitors do not
get to see the actual airplane, but only its projection, in keeping
with the exhibition’s motto, a quote by the Panamanian mathematician
and philosopher José de Jesús Martínez,
who died in 1991: “Objects have physically disappeared. Only their
images and their memory remain.” Chuchú, as Martínez was also called,
was furthermore a personal bodyguard and advisor to the Panamanian head
of state Omar Torrijos Herrera
(1968–1981). In addition, Chuchú was an enthusiastic pilot who
developed a theory of flying in 1979. His treatise is more poetry than
science, and yet it precisely describes how conditions in the air
change, how everything suddenly becomes quiet and clear. In contrast,
life on Earth is A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness,
as the exhibition title formulates it. Indeed, the visitor to the
darkened hall feels like a blind person, hopelessly at the mercy of
life’s brutality and vulgarity. Only the trembling image of the
airplane reminds us of a brighter life that takes place in the higher
spheres.
There is yet another connection: the airplane beneath
the Portikus roof is a reconstruction from Martínez’s fleet. The hobby
pilot named his propeller machines after Aleph numbers, a mathematical
number series that describes infinity. “Also light is infinite,” says
Stevenson. “Martínez’s story is parallel to the installation. Each
element informs the other. You can understand the installation without
the narrative.”
In this sense, the installation at the
Portikus is typical for Stevenson. His art is always based on stories
he then alters in surprising ways to create allegorical images or
objects. The resulting works are direct and accessible to all viewers
and at the same time so multi-layered that they never lose their power,
even for experts. At the 2003 Venice Biennial,
for instance, Stevenson presented two inventions in the New Zealand
Pavilion of which his compatriots are particularly proud: the Moniac and the Trekka.
The first is a water-generated computer that simulates the national
economic system, the second a kind of Land Rover allegedly developed
especially for New Zealand’s unique terrain. Stevenson, however, takes
a closer look and exposes the Moniac as a ludicrous construction with
water flowing like money through its pipes, gutters, funnels, and
plastic tanks. And the great Trekka, symbol for the elemental inventive
spirit of the New Zealanders, is a rickety vehicle running on a Czech
tractor motor. In one sense, that’s all wonderfully grotesque and
ridiculous, but in another, Stevenson caricatures the idea of the
Biennale as an international “achievement show” where each country
presents its art and itself from its best angle.
Another example for the double-layered depth of Stevenson’s works is the installation Rakit, which could last be seen in its entirety in the Herbert Read Gallery
in Canterbury. The work consists of a ramshackle raft pieced together
from empty plastic tanks, boards, and a white bed sheet sail. Stevenson
refers here to the story of the Australian artist Ian Fairweather,
who set sail in 1952 on a homemade raft headed for Malaysia. After 16
days, he landed on a small island and was brought to England on a
passenger ship, where he was forced to dig graves to pay back the costs
of the unwanted passage.
Stevenson arranges found objects around
the raft, things Europeans and Americans typically associate with
journeys to the South Seas: a stack of National Geographic magazines, yellowed remnants of maps, a washed-up globe, and a copy of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, an anthropological study on community life among various South Sea peoples.
Thus,
Rakit turns a story well known in Australia—the story of an artist
clinging to a ridiculous object to reach new shores, only in the end to
have to pay for something that he didn’t want—into an image of the
strange form taken by the global exchange of goods and money, an image
of himself as an artist enmeshed in the mechanisms of global business.
The nice twist at the end of the story is that Stevenson’s installation
was sold to four German collectors who have divided up its components
amongst themselves. The philosopher and hobby pilot Martínez’s quote is
apt here, too: Rakit has disappeared as an object. It only remains in
the memory, and of course as a photograph.
Michael Stevenson: A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness
through December 2, 2012
Portikus, Frankfurt am Main
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