Our relationship with tradition is such, so vast and so repeated, that we could well, without any risk of contradiction, affirm that there is no such thing as absolute originality. Obviously we witness continual inventions, revolutionary shifts in meaning, new readings and constant improvements, but all refer, more or less explicitly, to historical conventions. In reading a work, and utilizing what we hear and what we see, we are quite simply piling layer on layer, creating a stratiform bed of meaning. Everyone quotes, flanking the old and the new, mixing tradition and contemporaneity. We quote because it is a pleasure to do so, or because we have a taste for it, or because we need to; we quote in order to pay homage or, occasionally, because it confers a touch of class. In quoting we bring the past to life, in the best of cases finding a new collocation. We do not merely quote books and proverbs, but also artistic styles, scientific theories, customs, music, architecture and objects. No one is immune, least of all those who boast of originality or strive for it, artificially. If I read Tasso, I think of Virgil, and reading Virgil Ovid comes to mind, and then Homer. In differing ways Neo-Classicism and then Post Modernism have both attempted to solve the problem of origin/originality in relation to the links between various human inventions.
As digital culture has become established, it has supplemented the verticality of chronological time with a form of horizontality, reshaping our relationship with archives so that they have become the living past, the effect of which is to reorganise our mental processes and the way in which we perceive our memories. The access we now have to formulae and to past experiences also allows us to ‘render contemporary’ the little-noted or the forgotten, providing it with a new present. We should not, therefore, over-estimate our debt to the past, also because it is inevitably subordinate to its own relationship with the present. Only an inventor truly knows how to borrow or to “steal” - to paraphrase Picasso’s famous phrase. The most productive of our relationships with the past are those in which it is re-lived, and therefore freed from any form of subjectification. The past is not a monolithic condition, static or dead, but rather a source, a fount from which to drink; a place in which, seeing it again for the first time, we experience the new in what we already know.
At first glance Judith Fergerl’s #64 hot-wired (2011) might, therefore, be distractedly defined as citationist, or perhaps as an appropriation of Fred Sandback’s work. In reality its origins lie in an admirable sense of discontent; the expression of an inquisitiveness that emerges in the form of investigation rather than homage. In 1975, at Munich’s Kunstraum, Sandback created one of his most radical pieces of work, entitled Sixty-Four Three-Part Pieces. Using thread as a means of representing negative space, the American artist stretched a strand of rust-coloured wool through each of the Kunstraum’s three rooms. The work evoked what the artist himself defined a ‘pedestrian space’, amalgamating the everyday, the current and the concomitant. One essential aspect of this series is therefore the fact that it changes over time: composed of 64 possible variations, the artist actually produced 6 (arranging the thread in a new way for each week the exhibition lasted), suggesting an overall image of the complete work through our experience of a fragment. Sandback is therefore trying to distance himself from the burden, borne by earlier art, of the ideal; he is expressing a dissatisfaction, like Judith Fegerl’s discontentment with the reality around her, which enables her to produce art spontaneously, deconstructing. However, being interested in the objective experience of the work of art (or rather, the least subjective experience possible), like some of his contemporaries, Sandback accompanied Sixty-Four Three-Part Pieces with a catalogue illustrating all 64 possible arrangements.
Fegerl begins right there, asking herself, for example: is it just one thread or are there three of them, each distinct from the other? If they are interconnected, then what lies behind that? Or rather, what does the Minimalist image conceal?
I have always been interested, perhaps even fascinated, by people who are curiously dissatisfied. Those who are never content with the world around them, with what they see of it and what it offers them. They do not take facts for rules and they believe in self-determination as a collective contribution to the battle against stasis, against the force of habit which often transforms itself into conventions. Or, in the worst cases, mannerism.
The Latin expression Etiamsi omnes, ego non1 describes this attitude well: it is a personal instinct but should not be seen as an act of individualism. And we are not talking about the kind of inventions that – as often happens in the context of technological innovations – can create a series of new and unwished-for needs which rapidly become unavoidable necessities. Instead, what we are dealing with are innovative proposals relating to that which already exists, and which the unsatisfied individual translates into necessary improvements. What real need is there, nowadays, to design a new kind of chair? Our fascination with occupations that are of little apparent use, or generally acknowledged to be inessential, makes society a better place because it obliges society to examine itself, to reflect, instead of accepting the idle, easy comfort of gazing blindly at a blurred horizon. Dissatisfaction encourages us to observe our own past, analyzing it and learning not to take it for granted or to take it as read.
All ages are contemporaneous 2. We continually find ourselves face-to-face with the past, and the act of re-reading it with a critical eye defines our future. Every good artist re-writes our notion of history, and renders it ever denser, ever deeper, ever richer. With her inquisitive gaze trained on the past, in #64 hot-wired Judith Fegerl translates physical presence into manual action. Fred Sandback’s threadstrace out a negative space within which the body moves indiscriminately between space and sculpture, without clearly distinguishing their relative boundaries, perhaps drawing them with its own presence. In Judith Fegerl’s work this spatial design is represented on paper using collage. Volume becomes surface. Wool is transformed into copper. The presence of the body manifests itself in the fruits of the physical act of sewing. And it is this trace of manual activity that stirs up significant memories, or deep emotions.
Judith Fegerl weaves copper, substituting an inclusive material, a material which absorbs energy, with one that reflects. Warmth with coolness. An insulating thread with a wire that conducts energy. Organic with industrial. But the semiotic reference, “thread”, remains, and serves to show how the particular significance attributed to a material is based on knowledge and experience. These exist as subjective traces of the experience of touching, manipulating or holding; memories in which the absent entity is present. The copper recalls and retraces man’s discoveries. It conjures up, brief and entire, mankind’s existence in space and in reality as a whole. Copper’s history, rediscovered in all its brevity and intensity in this wire/thread, is that of conversion, and conversion in this case is art.3
Here that relationship between materiality and meaning remains intact. The volumes that Sandback represented with woollen threads are transformed into a closed circle of copper, a circular and perpetual flow of energy: a material that recalls the sentiments and memories of the artist, but also the metal that mankind has used and exploited for the longest period of time. The primitive dimension of humanity’s ancestral relationship with copper mirrors, on a personal scale, the body’s direct relationship with fabric, with our garments formed of thousands of orderly threads. A corporeal emotional experience which is repeated in the act of sewing.
The #64 hot-wired seriesincarnates the ricochet between tenderness and tension. In musical terms, given its rhythm and harmony, I would define it “pianissimo”. It is structured like an analytico-synthetic, or ‘faceted’, library classification system – a system first developed by the Indian mathematician and librarian S. R. Ranganathan – which involves breaking a subject down into simple categories (five, according to Ranganathan: personality, matter or property, energy, space and time) and then recomposing it in a pre-established order based on these categories, rather than a hierarchy.
The #64 hot wired series incorporates all five of these categories, absorbing them into the short circuit of an inverted Modernism. The form generates the function, finding its own, possible composition in the deconstruction of all we have learnt.
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1 Even if all the others - i don‘t.
2 Ezra Pound
3 Mario Merz