We are proud to inaugurate “Associations” on June 20, 2013, John Smith‘s first solo exhibition in the Rhineland. Most recently he was shown here in 2009 in a group ex­hibition in the Temporary Gallery, Cologne. In 2010 he participated in the Berlin Biennial.
 
Besides “Lost Sound”, a video that was created between 1998 and 2001 in col­la­bo­ra­tion with Graeme Miller, we will show two earlier works, “Associations” (1975) and “The Black Tower” (1985-87).
 
In “Lost Sound” we see fragments of audio-tape that are lying in gutters or hanging on fen­ces and trees in Hackney, a borough of London that has many immigrants amongst its population. The images of the audio-tapes are accompanied by popular music, mainly from Africa or Asia. However, we have no guarantee at all that the sounds are in fact taken from the pieces of tape that are shown in the filmed ima­ges. On the contrary, “Lost Sound […] playfully separates signifier and signified” (Ian Christie, English Eccentric, p. 64). While at the beginning of the video the “documen­ta­ry”, authentic character pre­vails and while – thus – it is at first suggested that we are looking at images (and hearing sounds) that are true to life, the esthetic aliena­tion, the rhythm, and the manipulation of image and sound gradually become more and more visible. With the supposedly documentary, but ever more intensely struc­tured images and sounds, Smith creates a quasi-narrative sequence of images that have to deal with the location and its population.
 
“Associations” does not play with associations that are brought to life by music (and that let us think of the immigrants that lead a new life in London’s East End), but ra­ther with the associations that are triggered by the English language in its multi-sig­ni­ficance, especially when it is spoken (for example in the pairings of words such as “to / two” or “generally / general”). A didactic monotone voice reads out loud a text by the American psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark, which dwells on the prin­ci­ples of the associative play on words. Smith illustrates this text with an ever faster se­quence of images that are related associatively to the single words and the syllables from which they are composed, exploring the ambiguities of language to suggest al­ter­native meanings for these fragments of speech: “Smith sensuously stages the in­ter­action of sound and image levels, producing hilarious combinations of words and images that do not always explain themselves immediately, for example when an ass, a sewing machine, or a horde of warriors on horseback appear in the film. The high speed of the image sequence causes the viewer to quickly lose track of the con­tent and increasingly concentrate on the audiovisual stimuli of the asso­cia­tion game” (Ingo Clauß, Association Games, p. 13f.).
 
“The Black Tower”, the third film we are showing, has a – in comparison with the two works described above – conventional structure. A black tower seems to hunt the nar­­rator and to force him into a state of paranoia: “The story is as simple as it is si­ni­ster: a man notices a black tower, seeing it again and again from different lo­ca­tions all over London; to his dismay, he realizes that the tower is visible to him alone. After an especially eerie encounter with the tower, he decides to stay home to avoid its pre­sence” (Kathrin Meyer, John Smith’s The Black Tower: Close-Up Views of What Cannot Be Shown, p. 21f.). This psychodrama is created by simple images, mostly shot with a static camera: “I collected a series of images and then wrote a sto­ry around them. … I wanted the film to play with the edge between immersion in a psy­cho­logical narrative and seeing the film for what it is – a material construction, an assemblage of assorted parts. So there are gradual movements between totally ab­stract manipulations of images and very straightforward narration” (John Smith in: John Smith talking film with Cate Elwes: Trespassing beyond the frame, p. 67).
 
For more information and / or images please contact the gallery.
Special thanks to Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

Art Brut and Outsider Art have long influenced the classic modern art movements of its time: artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Surrealists such as Max Ernst and André Breton, and Jean Dubuffet identified themselves radically with the creative processes and the imagery of the cultural outsider who opened a whole new view of the world. Contemporary artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Rosemarie Trockel, the Chapman brothers and Mike Kelley show in their works and their work processes, that they can hardly resist the spell. On occasion of the gallery‘s 25th Anniversary, the artist Michael Bauer ventures into the gallery archive and selects a personal and representative choice of historical and contemporary works. A tribute to the tradition of the “artists’s art” and a glimpse of the treasures of the gallery program.
 
Michael Bauer, * 1973 in Erkelenz, lives and works in New York.
Since its founding year in 1988, Galerie Susanne Zander has come to establish itself internationally as one of the leading galleries for Outsider Art and Art Brut, dedicating its program from the onset exclusively to outstanding marginal artistic positions both historical as well as contemporary. In recent years, the gallery owners Nicole Delmes and Susanne Zander have become increasingly interested in the what can be termed as “Conceptual Outsider Art,” raising new questions about common practices of curation and notions of reception, production and historical contextualization of singular artistic positions that are labeled as “Outsider Art” and which at the same time resort to common strategies of contemporary art.
Susanne Zander has co-curated a series of pioneering exhibitions for museums and art societies amongst which “Obsession” (with Morton Bartlett, Henry Darger, 2000, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, DE) and “The Message - The Medium as an Artist” (2008, Museum Bochum, DE) and has played a significant advisory role in the exhibition series “Secret Universe” (2011 - 2013, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, DE). The gallery releases publications on a regular basis such as Horst Ademeit – Living in The Radiant Cold (2010), The Message - Art and Occultism (2008), Foma Jaremtschuk (2008), Obsession (2000) or more recently Margret: Chronik einer Affäre (2012).
Over the last 25 years the gallery has brought the art of the Outsider to the attention of collectors and curators, positioning formerly unknown artists such as Miroslav Tichy and Henry Darger onto the art market as early as the 1990's. The discovery of Horst Ademeit in 2008 brought the gallery into the focus of contemporary Outsider Art unleashing once again the debate on common notions of “inside” and “outside” art.