Editions

Edition No. 59

Roman Ondák
Man on the Wing, 2012

The Slovakian artist Roman Ondák is internationally regarded to be one of pioneering artists of a new generation of conceptual, installation and performance artists emerged in the 1990s. Ondák uses primarily everyday situations as a basis for staged works that invite the viewer to become an active participant in unusual borderline experiences and transgressions.

“do not walk outside this area” is a sign that many airline passengers recall from gazing randomly out of the window at the airplane’s wing. In Ondák’s solo exhibition, which accompanies his selection as Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2012, he takes this sign as an occasion to offer exhibition visitors a chance to walk across a real airplane wing.

In the edition to the show, Ondák miniaturizes this monumental installation. The image of a man standing on the wing appears here on a postage stamp, engraved in steel engraving technique and hand printed according to the artist’s instructions by the Slovakian master engraver Martin Cinovský. The idea of the “man on the wing” who ventures outside the allowed territory is thereby reproduced in the very medium that ensures the day-by-day transnational journey of words, images, and ideas.

Edition No. 58

Matt Keegan:
Nothing to Declare (for Deutsche Guggenheim), 2012

Matt Keegan's recent metal sculptures incorporate cliched phrases such as "It's Not You, It's Me" or "He Said/She Said"--text fragments that are vague yet evoke scenes of human interaction. In the artist's words, such phrases "are indicative of a kind of impasse where subjectivity is immediately addressed but to no clear end. They're not pointing to something conclusive; it's already posited as one perspective versus another."

Entitled "Nothing to Declare," Keegan's edition for the Deutsche Guggenheim might at first bring to mind the airport customs lanes whereby locals commonly avoid the rigorous inspections given to foreign visitors. Removed from this context, however, the object's repeated slogan suggests that beneath this innocuous statement lies hidden or even dangerous information waiting to be revealed. Through such gestures, Keegan poetically reflects on language's ability to foster, or foreclose, communication.

Edition No. 57

Paweł Althamer: Almech, 1997/2011

Almech is the name of the plastics-manufacturing company operated by Paweł Althamer’s father on the outskirts of Warsaw. It is also the title of Althamer’s new commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim, for which the museum has been transformed into a branch of the family firm, complete with factory equipment and workers who have traveled to Berlin from Warsaw.

To commemorate this project, Althamer has created this Deutsche Guggenheim edition, which follows in the tradition of memorial plaques honoring company founders or civic leaders of outstanding merit and ingenuity. He originally designed this relief in 1997 as a gift for his father that could embellish the Myral plastic-extruding machines around which the Almech business had been built; it was later incorporated into Althamer’s collaborative installation FGF Warsaw (2007).

Like the sculptures produced during the Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition, the Almech edition is a group portrait: Almech founders Adam Althamer (right) and Wieslaw Mydlowski (left) flank the company’s name and are united by an image of the original factory. Through this plaque Althamer pays homage not only to his father but to an entire generation of family businesses established in Poland during the 1980s and now lost to an increasingly globalized marketplace.

Edition No. 56

Janaina Tschäpe: Lacrimacorpus (Ettersburg III), 2011

Using various mediums, including video, photography, installation, and drawing, Janaina Tschäpe has created an mythological cosmos centering around the transformation of the female body.

Her edition refers to her video Lacrimacorpus, which was inspired by a legendary creature in Jorge Luis Borges’s Manual de zoología fantástica (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1957), the squonk. When cornered, this shy being completely dissolves into tears. In Tschäpe’s film, this creature is female and dances in an abandoned ballroom, spinning faster and faster until she collapses, within the Castle of Ettersburg near Weimar. This summer residence was a place where great intellectuals such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller met. In Lacrimacorpus, Tschäpe overlays this reference to German poets and thinkers with a traumatic chapter of recent history. During the Nazi reign, the Buchenwald concentration camp was built near the castle. As a result, the surreal portrayal alludes to the difficulties of dealing with this cruel chapter in German history and with “German” identity.

Edition No. 55

Yto Barrada:
A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners, 2011

In the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift, and riffing on Brion Gysin´s Dream Machine, Yto Barrada´s artist book is a guide humbly submitted by an anonymous bureaucrat describing how to prepare an unnamed city for a visit by a high-ranking diplomatic official.

The manual consists of illustrated instructions, graphs, charts, collages, and photographs, and promises to "reveal for the first time ... a radical innovation" in the method of placing palm trees along the visitor´s route.

Seemingly reasonable at first, these directives – on repainting sidewalks, making cardboard spectators and arranging palm trees to "induce a state of euphoria" in the visitor – begin to suggest something amiss behind the patriotic Potemkin facades.

Edition No. 54

Agathe Snow: You Are Here, 2011

The world´s monuments and landmarks are indelibly inscribed in our collective memory. Iconic structures such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brandenburg Gate have been reproduced in infinite images and souvenirs, to the point where everyone can instantly conjure these points of interest in their mind´s eye and carry around their own individual impression of these cultural touchstones, whether or not they have encountered them in person.

Agathe Snow has taken this perpetual visual presence literally. Her edition for the exhibition All Access World is a pair of sunglasses in which a fine golden horizon line is drawn on the inside of black mirrored lenses, forming the silhouettes of the New York skyline and the Egyptian pyramids. Invisible to others from the outside, and for the wearer no more than a subtle, barely registered presence, it is only when the glasses are taken off that the motifs become recognizable.

The sunglasses, handmade by Berlin based eyewear brand MYKITA go by the name of "Cyrus. Each of the horizon lines is painted by hand, ensuring that each pair of glasses is a unique object.

Edition No. 53

Markus Amm: Tape, 2010

"Modernism cannot be reinvented" Stuttgart-based artist Markus Amm stated in an interview for db artmag. Just as little as its significance can be ignored.

This ambivalence is perhaps the reason why Markus Amm is interested precisely in breaks. Not in sacred values or timeless beauty, but in the disassembly of a composition and the fissure lines of clichés.

What applies to Amm´s dealing with classical modernism can also be said of his examination of color field painting of the late 1960s and 70s.

In his edition "Tape" which Markus Amm developed especially for the "Color Fields" exhibition, the color fields do not result from a painterly, "creative" act, as it were, but apparently from the traces of applied and then partially torn-off tape as it is more likely used to pack up pictures.

The utilization of cheap materials such as tape or ballpoint pens is just as typical of Markus Amm´s work as the imperfect processual character of "Tape".

Paradoxically, precisely this draws "Tape" astoundingly close to the efforts of color field artists such as Gene Davis or Frank Stella to achieve a corporeal color art.

Edition No. 52

Desire Machine Collective: Sacred, 2010

The edition accompanying the exhibition Being Singular Plural is closely linked to the sound installation Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted (2008/10) for which Desire Machine Collective "collected" sounds from a sacred forest in Meghalaya.

Sacred is the equivalent of a technological "sound map" that replaces colonial mapmaking.
The path through the protected area was precisely documented by means of GPS. In the printed version, QR codes are positioned along the trail, which can be decoded using a smart phone, for example, thus making the original recordings audible again.
The counterparts of this immaterial part of the edition are six sheets that lead to the sound installation on the Internet, which is only accessible with a password. At the same time, they are images of the virtualization and deterritorialization of a unique, now only supposedly immovable piece of nature.

Edition No. 51

Wangechi Mutu: The Bride Who Married a Camel's Head, 2010

Wangechi Mutu's provocative works oscillate between beauty and horror, and the edition the Kenyan-born, New York-based artist created to accompany her one-person exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim does the same. The piece is based on her collage The Bride Who Married a Camel's Head (2009), which depicts a girlish figure, surrounded by butterflies, exotic plants, dried leaves, and animal skulls in a surreal grassy landscape. As she kneels on the ground, blood spurts between the teeth of her bony lower jaw, which she holds high in defiance, while her Medusa-like hair winds around her opulent flowery headdress, which is held in place by a lavish pearl earring. This mixture between grace and abjectness is characteristic of Mutu's works, which question black female identity as it is caught between Western consumerist culture, fashion, African politics, and postcolonial history. For her Deutsche Guggenheim edition, Mutu turned The Bride Who Married a Camel's Head into a three-dimensional puzzle. The relieflike assemblage is made of Corian, a valuable mineral-based material whose surface imitates the texture of the original collage. The highlight is a central puzzle piece: the figure's earring can be removed and worn on a matching chain.