Alice Creischer
27 April - 22 July 2012
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| © Alice Creischer, 2012 |
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ALICE CREISCHER
The Establishment of Matters of Fact
27 April - 22 July 2012
"The Establishment of Matters of Fact" was the guiding principle of the
early empirical sciences. They brought a new power into the world: the
power of fact. Truth was to become manifest in the scientific experiment
as though of its own accord: unaffected by regimes of belief,
unconstrained by the interests of the ruling powers. In short, pure
fact. For her exhibition, the Berlin-based artist, writer, and curator
Alice Creischer, who was born in 1960, has mistranslated this central
motto of the seventeenth century: "Das Etablissement der Tatsachen." If
this title sounds vaguely disreputable, that is very much intended:
Creischer’s multipart installation for KOW illustrates that the
normative power of the factual constitutes a regime in its own right,
one that is permeated by domination and politically obscene.
At the center of the exhibition stands the matter-of-factly
reconstruction of a vacuum pump the scientist Robert Boyle, a founding
member of the Royal Society, used in the 1660s to prove the existence of
a vacuum, or the absence of air from a space. His claim led to a
dispute with the political theorist Thomas Hobbes: Boyle intended to
arrive at true propositions with the assistance of technical implements
and "modest witnesses" (neutral observers); Hobbes, by contrast,
insisted that even scientific insight had to submit to the power of the
absolute ruler, the "Leviathan", and rejected Boyle’s experiments. If
the existence of a vacuum could be proven by experimental means alone,
without regard for the laws of pure reason and political philosophy,
this space would be exempt from government control and, Boyle feared,
might provoke a political vacuum as well, i.e., anarchy and civil war.
Boyle prevailed. He expended immense efforts to make his vacuum pump
leak-proof enough that it could be used to suffocate lab mice. Far from
creating anarchy, he invented the death in the laboratory as a
demonstration of physical fact that could be reproduced before
witnesses. The family trees, scientific classifications, and genetic
codes of countless generations of lab mice serve Creischer to hang parts
of her installation, which idiosyncratically short-circuits Boyle’s
experimental arrangement with present-day political events and denounces
the illusion of a knowledge isolated from power. Creischer guides the
visitors through a dense sequence of images, collages, objects, and
encoded poems; the exhibition also features a dramatic script in four
acts that comes with a critical apparatus—an appendix that is as
detailed as it is hard to read.
Encryption and the deliberate withholding of information are the
defining characteristics of the exhibition’s semantics. Here, too, to
understand is to appropriate. Knowledge is not something we just find.
What can be known and what cannot is subject to conditions—for the one
who speaks and the one who listens. No fact is innocent; neither is the
knowledge of it, nor its critique. Creischer observes as the critical
zeitgeist establishes new Leviathans, and she refuses to comply. Her
exhibition remains deliberately fragile, both in its means and in its
assertions. She addresses political matters of the present against a
backdrop of profound familiarity with the early history of capitalism
and its ties to the rational universalism of the Enlightenment as well
as the shared presumptions both have been guilty of ever since—but
everyone furnishes his or her own "Establishment of Matters of Fact", as
well as its deconstruction.
As a theorist and art critic, Alice Creischer has staked out an
influential position in the theoretical and political discourse of the
German arts scene since the 1990s. Her art, however, has been fairly
rarely on display in Berlin. She has long been a regular writer for
Texte zur Kunst and springerin. As a curator, she has worked on
important exhibitions around the critique of neoliberalism and
colonialism: "Violence Is at the Margin of All Things" (2002),
"ExArgentina" (2004), and "The Potosí Principle" (2010–2011). Solo shows
at art institutions have featured Creischer’s work in conceptual art,
painting, and sculpture. In 2007, she participated in documenta 12. We
now present Alice Creischer’s first solo exhibition at a gallery.
www.kow-berlin.com
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