Michael Dreyer

Triple Negation - Double Props, I WE NOW INTERUPT FOR A COMMERCIAL (Aanant & Zoo, 02.2011)

Guest curator: Clemens Krümmel … Read more

In this exhibition the Stuttgart based artist, Michael Dreyer, presents not only his new large scale works concentrated forms of circles with varnished colors. The title of the exhibition already alludes to framing-gestures which are also designed circular and graded in a row at the same time; “Triple Negation, Double Props” refers to the resisting basic power balance between representing, recognizing (props) and rejecting (negation). And those are the mechanisms of (re-) production, interruption and adjustment of the creative process, which is regulated by the intervention of curatoric reason and is usually credited to the curator. In fact, however, the intervention has begun to invade artistic modes of operation and are now, at least partly, laid claim to by many artists.

These artists form negotiations, which are usually left implicit, between the western model of the artist as an individual subject, which is lining up for evolution and the model of the so called “freelance curator” which is also used hyperinflationary. In that sense, the curator from Berlin, Clemens Krümmel, who placed the artist with the gallery and now has been placed by the artist within it, acts as a “guest” in Dreyer’s artistic plan. Like this staged relationship which is displayed as a dialogue or rather as a touching farce of expressing mutual respect, all parts of the exhibition can be understood as a complex play between the free circulated principle of production, reproduction, repeating and imitating, the regulating caesura and the (economic) reality of a gallery exhibition.

The second title, “We now interrupt for a commercial,” refers to a work of music with the same name which Free-Jazz-Saxophonist Ornette Coleman recorded in 1968 for his album “New York Now!” During his performance the idiom of “free” Jazz, which had long since become the testing ground of the marketing departments of the music industry is literally intercepted by an enchanting and self-reflective gesture, a pause in the musical contingency and the (blank) message that an advertising message would follow shortly.

Both exhibition rooms place a different focus between artist, curator and gallerist in the representation of the acknowledgement-machine. In the first room the uncomfortable authoritarian space-domination-gesture of a floor work, that urges it’s observers to the edge, stands opposed to the psychologistical gesture of the “intimate” portrait of the curator. On two photographs and one “writing sample” the curator is exhibited in the mode of the historically burdened “character sketch”; an affirmation that cannot, according to the above mentioned principles, stay without interception - in this case, and interception in the photochemical development process, which causes a solarisation effect.

It is the small bronze piece by Alfred Löcher, who Dreyer has discovered for himself and studied in many of his own works, which makes the closest reference to Colemans “Commercial“ and which is presented in a joint work with the curator thanks to Dreyer’s mediation, and with the help of an acquainted collector. It is on sale right now.