DAS INSTITUT

Founded in 2007 as an import/export agency by German-born, New York–based artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder, DAS INSTITUT is an ongoing collaboration that creates hybrid forms of artistic production and reproduction through painting, design, and performance. In September 2009, the Swiss Institute presented the duo’s first solo exhibition in New York, and this past winter their installations were included in “Leopards in the Temple” at the SculptureCenter in New York and as part of Ei Arakawa’s “Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show” at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Next month a solo exhibition of their work opens at New Jerseyy in Basel.

1. MIKE KELLEY, DAY IS DONE JUDSON CHURCH DANCE, 2009 (PERFORMA 09, NEW YORK)

   Kelley’s sweaty seventy-five-minute multimedia extravaganza—a live adaptation of his 2005 video installation Day Is Done—was derived from photographs found in old high school yearbooks. Keyed to an ironic echo of the venue’s hallowed history of experimental performance, this cheerfully psycho musical included such acts as women in bright gym clothes drilling and whinnying through the church basement’s basketball court, and tanned naked gladiator types hoisting a ladder as a drum major (leading thirteen horn players) called out cadences, in alphabetical order, to the tune of the Clapper jingle: “Live on! Live off! The liver!” A bizarre, dark spectacle of pure pleasure.

   
   Mike Kelley, Day Is Done Judson Church Dance, 2009. Excerpt from performance, Judson Memorial Church, New York, November 2009.

   
2. ABY WARBURG, THE MNEMOSYNE ATLAS, 1929 (WARBURG INSTITUTE, LONDON)

   Warburg began his atlas in the last years of his life, envisioning a way of looking and thinking that would seek hidden affinities and generate provocative associations among diverse objects. Drawing from nearly two thousand stamps, postcards, and photographs (with an emphasis on the Italian Renaissance), the art historian juxtaposed the images of some one thousand artifacts from different cultures and epochs in order to experiment with the psychology of interdisciplinary human expression. At the time of his death, Warburg considered his project unfinished, but perhaps its structure inherently resisted resolve. If The Mnemosyne Atlas anticipated the future of data circulation, it also proposed a new and ever continuing dialectics of seeing.

3. KEN OKIISHI, (GOODBYE TO) MANHATTAN, 2010

   This video, made between two cities and shown for the first time at the opening of Alex Zachary’s gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, offers an enigmatic urban encyclopedia channeled through a restaging of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Of course weird communication errors abound, but the unclassifiable, inexplicable, and just plain messed-up social interactions carry a positive potentiality. Yet Okiishi’s characters don’t just have Manhattan; they also have Berlin. Authentic, heartfelt, and conjuring the kind of emotional interspace that occurs when you “don’t belong,” the work is filled with mistranslated, overdubbed dialogue and out-of-sync subtitles in two languages. Subject to this constructive crisis are nonactors Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Pati Hertling, and Nick Mauss, who, cast by Okiishi as the female leads of Allen’s original, simultaneously play prototypes of their real-life selves—art critic, curator, and artist, respectively.

   Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, still from a color video, 72 minutes.
4. SIGMAR POLKE, THE CHURCH WINDOWS OF GROSSMÜNSTER, 2009 (ZURICH)

   Rocks sliced open to reveal psychedelic translucent color—cinnabar, cobalt, lapis lazuli, malachite, alabaster. Trapped underground for fifty millennia and now shot through with sunlight, they bathe the insides of this seven-hundred-year-old cathedral with a geologic index of the earth, illuminating earthly history, biblical time. A wall of stone that offers clear Technicolor vision. Polke the alchemist. What does it mean to see through the core? Let us explain. A window. A window. A window.

   One of Sigmar Polke’s agate church windows for the Grossmünster, Zurich, 2009. Photo: Lorenz Ehrismann.
5. RENÉ DAUMAL, MOUNT ANALOGUE: A NOVEL OF SYMBOLICALLY AUTHENTIC NON-EUCLIDEAN ADVENTURES IN MOUNTAIN CLIMBING (STUART, 1952)

   A mountain with an invisible summit at an unattainable height, and an unusual group of academics in search of a stone with the clarity of air: “the only material object recognized as valuable,” a parallel currency, a peradam. To find it, they must scale Mount Analogue. To follow them, we must follow Daumal, his language constantly oscillating between symbolic and concrete. It’s a story of finding a physical route to escape the system. Inspired by the esoteric Christian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Daumal wrote the book as a secret novel, a surreal, scientific guide left behind for us to follow—that is, if we can find it.

   René Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (Stuart, 1952).
6. NOMAD, SILVER LETTER STYLES (GERMANY)

   Nomad’s silver lettering is an archetype of extreme style writing. More than graffiti, his pieces are universal idea machines where thought, language, and vision converge in a hypercomplex but superclear diagram—akin to Renaissance manuscript illumination. First seen in Bremerhaven, Germany, on trains and subways in the early 1990s, Nomad’s cold chromatic complexes appeared across Europe as he worked with the old-school SM 365 and NBG crews. Now, he mainly writes with OBS and BASF crews, both known for their aggressive wildstyle. Subversive, abstract, mathematical, and yet strangely romantic, Nomad’s pieces are hard-core solid.

7. WERNER HERZOG, THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL—NEW ORLEANS, 2009

   Stretching the limits of morality to the absurd, Herzog and his lead, Nicolas Cage, tell an utterly real and human (even if totally crass) tale of a man’s downfall and redemption. Cage, as a rogue, crack-smoking cop in post-Katrina New Orleans, plays the ambiguous hero and uses incredible energy and wide-eyed comic distortion to deliver a delirious state of imbalance. Abel Ferrara may have made the same movie with the same title in 1992, but does it even matter? Herzog’s version is exquisitely unpredictable and, unlike the original, impossible to genre-type: About halfway through, the film veers decisively, defying the logic it had thus far established, derailing its own conclusion.

8. SETH PRICE READING FROM HOW TO DISAPPEAR IN AMERICA, DEC. 19, 2009 (BURNING BRIDGES, NEW YORK)

   The ideal feast: an empty space, two windows linked by a vast black floor, and, at the very center, a magnet—a table with a ham and good liquor. Hours pass. Christmas spirit engenders wonderful fraternity. Are you part of an audience or creating the scene? Suddenly the scene shifts and, from another room, the voice of a manipulator, a mesmerizing storyteller. Seth Price reading from his own book—a manual for leaving your former life, erasing your identity—passages culled from the Internet but then edited, recombined, extended, until who’s to say which words aren’t his? Opening at random to any page, Price starts by speaking the printed text but switches to new texts from his head, and now you understand: The reading is not a reading; the book is not a book; the audience is not an audience; Seth Price is not Seth Price.

9. THE RAINBOW EUCALYPTUS AND PLUMED BIRDS OF PARADISE

   This is überpainting and performance subculture. Art occurring in nature due to surplus. Display and ornament for the sake of intensification, to test a limit, not just base survival.

   
   David Attenborough, “Birds of Paradise,” BBC. (Excerpt)

   
10. ALEXANDER McQUEEN, AN BAILITHEOIR CNÁMH (THE BONE COLLECTOR), 2010/K8 HARDY, J’APPROVE, 2010

    Suited balaclava to boot in dizzying, computer-generated ossuary-print patterns mimicking animal skin, fur, and ice, McQueen’s final collection (menswear fall 2010) is a breathless macabre spectacle. The fabric’s design, perfectly aligned with the garments’ cut, carves up the human body like a Lacanian mirror marbling hallucinations of the Imaginary and the Real.

    
    Alexander McQueen menswear autumn/winter 2010 show, Milan.

    But if the Deleuzian schizophrenic is more your style, check out K8 Hardy’s new fashion line, J’APPROVE. From farmer to femme fatale, each look suggests a different female archetype of “becoming woman.” Curated by Travis Boyer, the launch was presented at JF & Son in New York, where Hardy (on her own body, size 8) modeled the entire collection. Also, J’APPROVE is affordable!

    
    K8 Hardy modeling J'APPROVE at JF & Son, New York, 2010.