Déballage - An installation by Gottfried Tollmann

Galerie Gordon Pym & Fils, Paris, January 2005

One tradition in twentieth century art resides in the assertion of a work's situation not only as a work's aesthetic constituent, but as aesthetic constitutor. Although the mere situation of a work in a gallery or museum is not sufficient to guarantee the status of an object as a work of art — conversely, the status of many works of art would not be in doubt even were they to be found in common suitcases, as customs inspectors know — a worthy distinction compels that, in cases where the status of an object as a work of art would necessarily be in doubt, its situation in a gallery or museum or the like, is not merely an indicator of the aesthetic; the situation is both a conveyance and constitutor of the aesthetic. Once separated from their situations, such objects ought lose their aesthetic character and revert to their ordinariness.

The idea of situation as aesthetic constitutor presupposes an awareness of an object's overt function, and the tensions an artist can generate by means of its function rather than formal elements. A seminal work of art in this regard is Van Gogh's Chair of 1888, in which each constituent of the image generates tensions derived from the implicit mutual destruction of each object's ostensible function, due to their situation with respect to each other. Because the chair is in the way of the door (the artist emphasizes the door hinges so that there can be no mistake that the door is "supposed" to open in the direction of the chair), the door cannot open without being blocked, and thereby loses the functions of a door. It is the function of a chair to be sat upon, but this function cannot but be disturbed if someone should attempt to exercise the function of the door by opening it.

As if to make his case stronger, Van Gogh situates upon the chair a pipe and a paper with tobacco as if to reassign to the chair the function of a table, a drawer, or a shelf--besides rendering the chair even more awkward for sitting. In this regard, one might even argue that this interplay of conflicting functions is one means by which Van Gogh guarantees that his painting's function is wholly aesthetic and not decorative. In either case his more conceptual tensions based on opposed functions in the juxtaposition of everyday objects remains more much more subtle, economic, and perhaps ultimately more sophisticated than the more obviously disjunctive visual juxtapositions of the surrealists of the succeeding generation.

Informed by Van Gogh, it was for Duchamp to return to the idea of function and situation as a source of aesthetic tension, and to expand them both visually and conceptually with his Readymades. A term frequently applied by critics to the Readymades is "semantic fission," which is short way of saying that a readymade imposes a rupture between an object and its conventional meaning. This is probably true, but it is more to the point to say that a readymade divorces an object from its conventional function, and imposes upon the object a different function which is purely aesthetic, and which is revealed by virtue of the object's new situation in a space proper to viewing art.

Although Duchamp demurred, or disdained, to engage in the more conventional surrealism of many of his contemporaries-one might wish that later artists like Oldenburg had followed his example-perhaps on the grounds that Van Gogh had already outdone them with a sophistication of most simple means, Duchamp proved that one could generate real surrealistic juxtapositions by using situation to refute conventional function in favor of aesthetic "function," at the same time that he implicitly mocks surrealism by imposing the real, by really presenting such tensions through situation, rather than by representing them with images.

Without forgetting that among the Readymades there is some diversity between "pure" readymades of situation such as the bottle rack, and readymade multiples that compound the tension of conflicting function of situation by adding a conflicting function of internal relation between constituents (e.g., The Bicycle Wheel of 1913), in either case it is certain that the readymade not only used the situation to transform the function of an object, but that it also used the new object implicitly to transform the nature of the new object's situation.

We recall that, traditionally, art, which, for a very long time presupposed a defined image field, also presupposed thereby a radical distinction between the contrived, invented, or "fictional" space generated by an image, or, for that matter, by the boundaries of a sculpture, and reality external to the work of art. Since art traditionally was considered a mimetic representation of reality by definition, its product had to be distinct from the reality it represented, and from the artist who created it, in order to transcend both. It is noteworthy that surrealism, which Robert Hughes called "a profoundly Catholic movement" does not violate this traditional article of faith of mimetic representation.

The readymade, on the other hand, by integrating an object's situation with its status as art, implicitly repudiates the old boundary between the "fictional" space of the work of art and a reality distinct from it. The readymade achieved this not only by dispensing with the idea of space within the frame and the space beyond the frame-obviously there is no frame and neither is there a sculptural boundary. It achieved this by integrating a work's situation as a sine qua non of its status as art. In other words, if its situation is integral to its being art, then how could it make sense to speak of its situation as distinct from the work of art? If we enter that space which necessarily we must do in order to perceive the work directly, do we, too, become fictional extensions of the artist's contrivance? Or is it that even the idea of a symbolic distinction between an "artistic space' and reality is simply false?

This implicit destruction of the distinction between art and reality, and its corollary in the implicit creation of a new integrated reality devoid of such "false dichotomies" was, in the succeeding generation advanced into a generic elaboration of this vein of the readymade--most notably by the artist who, more than any other, is responsible for the installation having become a conventional artistic medium: Joseph Beuys.

Despite that, for obvious reasons, here we must postpone any treatment of the encyclopedic range and complexity of Beuys's ambitious aesthetico-political program, with which Tollmann was well-acquainted as Beuys's student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, I should like to recall that Beuys also assimilated and greatly expanded the readymade's integration of situation into the fabric of a work, its awareness of the aesthetic possibilities of conflicting function, and the idea of the artistic reassignment of function. These are, among many other things, consistent features both of many of his multiples, and especially his installations, some of which, partially by virtue of their outdoor situations, and the artist's external theoretical views, implicitly subsume the whole world as their integral situation.

As with Duchamp, any adequate reading of Gottfried Tollmann's Déballage, must not ignore the work's mingling of humor with its conceptual aim. Already, we have established that to situate a readymade in a gallery (or other space for viewing art) is integral to its status as a work art, but, more obviously, such a space is necessary for us even to identify it as a work of art rather than, say, a bottle rack with its original function undiminished. Despite that Beuys enthusiasts are fond of repeating the story of how an overzealous member of as museum cleaning staff drained one of his installations of oil (it comprised a tub) and washed it, the fact is that the cleaner remains a rare exception among those who encounter a Beuys installation. The majority see it in its intended situation, they may like or dislike it, "understand" or not, but only the most cynical among them would doubt that it is to be regarded as a work of art.

Déballage is installed in a gallery to be sure, a gallery with an existing record of single installations. But the installation has been contrived by the artist in such a way that despite its situation, one is at great pains to recognize that it is an installation at all, and indeed the vast majority of those who enter the gallery leave without the slightest notion of having seen an installation.

Anyone who would seek a clue to its status as a work of art in its title would be equally at a loss to distinguish it from something other than a work of art. Its title, French for "unpacking" is a term used to by [usually] low end antique dealers and junk peddlers to denote an informal liquidation of their excess stock, often outdoors, at a flea market, or even in a rented, temporary space. Among the connotations of the term is that the seller makes no guarantee as to the authenticity of the items for sale. By intentionally obscuring the distinction between an art installation and a real sale of this sort, Tollmann generates layers of irony with respect to ideas, which in our generation have become conventions of the relation between situation and aesthetic function.

Tollmann reinforces the original conventional function of a "real" déballage by actually selling constituent items of the installation. In this way, the artist not only further conflates the idea of artistic reassignment of function through situation, but also satirically echoes other artists who have permitted the sale of constituent parts of installations (e.g. Ed Ruscha's Letters at Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles in the late nineties).

But even Ruscha's Letters, though eventually "parted out" for piecemeal sale (convertible to discrete works once separated?), were not to be removed from the installation until after it was permanently dismantled. A primary reason for this is that once installed, convention dictates that an installation is to be regarded as inviolate as an old-fashioned painting. Galleries and even museums tend compulsively to respect this convention regardless of whether the constituents of an installation are literal products of the hand of the artist-they rarely are — instead of having been selected and/or assembled from existing objects like the old readymades. They respect it regardless of the cost of doing so, and whether or not to change or substitute constituents of an installation would do violence to the work's conception.

In rejecting this convention of the inviolateness of the installation by selling and replacing constituents of it, Tollmann satirizes the notion that a conceptual work can have commercial value as individual artifact. Since, for Tollmann, whatever aesthetic value it has is entirely conceptual, it is not inviolate, and its constituents are substitutable because to treat them as such does no violence to the conception. Tollmann's work reveals an acutely awareness of the hypocrisy of treating conceptual installations as inviolate like old-fashioned paintings. Such a convention is a dubious way of ascribing to conceptual works a quality of artifact that their aesthetic modus rejects, for patently commercial motives. Tollmann satirizes this commercial agenda in the very act of gleefully selling constituents of his installation, which he then replaces with other objects of equal or greater validity with respect to the whole.

But there is yet another sense in which Tollmann's rejection of the conventional inviolateness of the installation expands the idea of installation, and distinguishes Déballage from its earlier roots in Beuys and Duchamp. By continually selling and substituting constituents of his installation, thereby casting its components into flux, he invests the installation medium with a temporal motion. Déballage poses a tension between the installation's individual constituents that change with time as they are removed or substituted; and the whole, which as conception, remains unchanged and static with respect to time, or implicitly eternal.

The fact that the work's constituents are for the most part, either representational works of art of occasionally dubious quality and origin from a variety of cultural traditions and periods, or books that offer self-conscious reflections on art history of a similarly eclectic range, underscores this temporal tension even as it suggests a further tension between the conceptual and the representational, and evokes further ironies of aesthetic "function."

Is Déballage a joke? We can only hope so. The more it is a joke, the more guaranteed the soundness of its conceptual "function."

--Drew Hammond, Paris, 2005