Materialistic immateriality – a counter spell
How can the ongoing interest by artists in the conceptual art of the 1970s be explained ?

Is it the purely formal pleasure of overcoming objecthood?

Art has already been confronted several times with the issue that decisive events in the physical world or in the social relations of power can no longer be experienced visually.

Already at the beginning of the 20th century, the almost simultaneous appearance of atomic theory and psychoanalysis significantly contributed to the development of abstraction.

Meow Gallery: The gallery is empty.

That the situation is more complex is indicated by Annaïk Lou Pitteloud. In “Out” (2012), she confronts us with the museum style presentation of a SIM card, which now has become one of the most common objects in daily life, and thus emptied of any significance, even more so than Jasper Johns’ Stars and Stripes or the decorative strips of Daniel Buren.

Lines in the gold ground refer to the technical function of control and memory. How the technology operates exactly, how and what it conditions, remains hidden to the layman like a black box. The tricolor design of a telecom company under a plexiglass bowl presents itself as an art object, just implying that it conceals: cache.

What is shown can hardly actually be meant. What is concealed cannot be revealed. It’s only the relationship between image and legend that offers a perspective on the chasm that the non-displayed illustrates: “OUT, sent message, variable dimensions” refers to a possible message that, whether saved here or not, could at any time be traveling in the electronic data flow and generating additional messages or actions.

The current scope of this object is extended to barely tangible communication channels outside the art space. The empty sign as a sign of emptiness, or at least of the consciously generated illegibility, can easily turn into a universal rechargeable sign, into a polyvalent or fetish in a very personal “Ex Voto” digital culture.

The artist temporarily becomes the ethnographer of tribal relations in a community that wants itself seamlessly monitored and comprehensively able to communicate, yet does not know signs that go beyond rushed micro scenes.

In his introduction to “Intense Proximité” La Triennale de Paris 2012, Okwui Enwezor formulates the conditions under which the question of significant signs among the forest of neoliberal capitalism is raised: “Recent discussions across different levels of political, cultural, and social debate have exposed one common fact: the rising visibility of a politics of anti-difference. (…) This process begins with framing a common question: how do Contemporary social logics – Self deal with spatial and temporal disjunction when the distance between the – in a time of increasing proximity between incompatible communities, contending identities, multiple cultural agents and artistic institutions and the Other, between us and them, has collapsed? … The more salient question is how to live with disjunction. In the thickness of ethnocentric and identity based processes »

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud began her artistic work with opulent, deliberately staged or assembled photographs in large formats. That way she opened allusive narrative contexts, initially theatrically in the form of self-revealing tableaux vivants, then as artificially generated urban panoramas.

Her most recent omission of epic details is therefore not to be categorically understood as positioning in a objectless conceptualism, rather it is an attempt to again create recognizable differences through withdrawal – in a strategically immaterialized value production, in which spatial and temporal, but above all cultural, distances implode and fall into one through identification by the implosion of all identities.

Pitteloud’s images and objects at the edge of the visible initially designate the impossibility of visually grasping these relations that increasingly determine our lives. She operates a realism of non-illustrated, more precisely, the hidden.

Hedge funds, that have essentially caused one of the biggest crises of capitalism, ultimately rely on the complexity of their design, to hide their external fictionality that exceeds that of any fairy tale.

These pure “financial products” that no longer reflect events in the world of production of goods must disguise their plain cheating with illustrious number acrobatics.

For this purpose they use a rational orchestrated data magic, a twisted narrative about enormous profits that will captivate investors. Imagination, once the domain of the arts is surpassed by the cynically invoked “realities” of the Trade gamers. Art, with its pragmatic potential for a counter spell, is thus called upon.

When the unintelligible shredded data of a hedge fund, or its electronic communication, is found as a pile in a gallery then it points less to the analogy between value transactions in the financial or art worlds, but rather the collapse of obfuscated chains of signs.

Illegibility as a gesture also creates excitement about the moment when artistic speech could unexpectedly again step into action. For example, in “Theory of Practice III” (2011), where the left hand to the right and the right hand to the left synchronously clasped these two words.

The conceptual hierarchy of the theory of practice is reversed in the practice of writing the two terms, while the conventional direction of writing and reading is resolved. Art holds its own here as a form of material activity.

Lawrence Weiner already vehemently rejected the term “conceptual art” in 1972 and claimed a new form possibility for Art. Stefan Brüggemann uses “Looks conceptual” or “conceptual decoration” more than forty years later in an ironic allusion, with adhesive letters like wallpaper on the wall.

The mere appearance of a conceptual look wants to bare the basic misconception about the disappearance of art, be it in conceptual practices. Art as a specific form of thinking about things also finds resistance of material with Annaïk Lou Pitteloud. We can expect of her further surprising turns in the “disjunction” of neoliberal immaterialization.

Text: Hans Rudolf Reust
Translation: Olga Stefan