With contributions by Katrin Bucher Trantow, Günther Oberhollenzer and Johannes Rauchenberger
112 Seiten, dt/engl, € 28,-
Gestaltung: @andreaswesle
Übersetzung: Bettina Fichtenbauer-Reysach
Edition Eremitage am Kamp / Clemens Feigel
ISBN 987-3-9519795-3-3
Setting Signs
The exhibition has the beautiful as well as polysemic title “Setting Signs”, a title already describing artistic practice in a wonderful way and allowing us to immerge right into the extraordinary world of Michael Endlicher. I have known the artist for some years now and just recently visited him in his studio. Within a short time we were deep in a lively conversation about his understanding of art, especially his central topic: the relationship between art, word and script and also text and sign as the object of art as such.
Every day we encounter texts, words and letters in combination with images in the most diverse manifestations. At least since the avant-garde movement of the early 20th century, innumerable artists have made writing an important part of their work. Together with modernism, an increasing permeation and mutual stimulation of literature, commercial art and visual arts developed: more and more artists used letters, numbers and numerals as formative elements in their works while writers arranged their texts like works of art. In the second half of the 20th century, the borders between image and language, between what is visual and what is verbal are often not (any longer) distinct. The text becomes an independent visual medium, it can comment and reflect, it is conceptualised and becomes a gesture or also a general symbol.
Endlicher’s artistic work draws on these considerations, though adding new facets and aspects. Here too, language is the starting point and work material. By means of letters, words and texts – recited in performative lectures, processed in videos, installed as paintings in the Petersburg hanging scheme, sprayed wildly on floors and walls – Endlicher blurs the borders between painting and text, concept and object, but also between artist and critic.
Endlicher is a word acrobat, a writing artist, an artistic writer, who knows how to visualise the conditions of artistic work between fast witticism and profound analysis. For me as a curator, this is a fascinating venture since he thereby questions humorously and provocatively how people talk and write about art and discuss it. The practice of art theory meets the practice of making art. Endlicher turns words into images, loves to quote art critics, theoreticians, philosophers and their reflections on art and then takes these quotes out of their original context and puts them into a new one. He finds and defamiliarizes charged words and sentences, whose clarity or also ambiguity tempt him and invents group of words, jumbles them up in a seemingly random way and creates new, sometimes mysterious complexes of meaning.
“THIS WILL HAVE BEEN” is a sentence that can be seen and read in the exhibition, made up of individual “letter paintings”, created in the stencil typeface with the beautiful name “Wunderbach“ (literal translation: Miracle Brook). This may be a description, a metaphor for the longing for security in our present that has become so insecure. At the same time, and maybe closer to the heart of the matter, this is a trivial, an even banal sentence, which makes us aware of the pseudo-intellectual babble and the meaningless phrases that we love to apply, especially in the art discourse.
At the same time the artist is also very much interested in the material value of language, he analyses the relationship between letters, numbers, individual words and the surface they are carried on as well as their surrounding space. Similar to a printing process Endlicher sprays black letters on the canvas painted in off-white. Each sign and its surrounding space are defined individually by sharpness and fuzziness, by washed-out colourings and additions, evoking street art due to their crudity and spontaneity. The letters are objects and/or paintings, used for a wide range of compositions and experiments. “I am an old surface-fetishist”, says the artist with a wink. The canvases can be assembled in different ways, just like in a type case game, also leaving a pile of letters to us spectators so that we can – not unlike Josef Bauer’ tactile poetry – imagine our own picture.
The starting point for these processes is always the intention to overcome the character of language to refer to something outside itself and to treat words and signs as a reality in their own right, putting them in a spiritually activating, meaningful form, be it on canvas, on metal plates, on paper or wherever. In this way language is also an object of art, a conceptual image absorbed by the artist consisting of verbal and non-verbal elements and signs.
Besides the choice of concepts, the choice and arrangement of words, lines or signs is crucial for the individual text image and the symbiosis of writing and image. Endlicher succeeds at it especially well with his new letter collages (“signs”). Superpositions divest the individual letters of their original verbal meaning; they turn into mysterious signs evocative of the codes used by graffiti artists but also of an abstract, geometric way of painting – in any way receiving a new aesthetic meaning due to their condensation. This is an appealing perception and guessing game, because it whets one’s appetite to find out which letters where used in which work (the artist himself, by the way, often does not remember anymore and this is why the solution is indicated on the reverse side of the canvas).Thus a varied series of images is created with a very different pictorial realisation, with rigid lines and rough or thinly varnished surfaces, with loud and restrained, wildly playful and subtly delicate sections.
What is new and slightly out of line are the digitally developed letters and numbers, including the gender star, in bright colours, which come across as very technical. All construction lines of all signs – Endlicher retraces them on the computer by means of a tracing tool – produce the background, only the lines of the current sign lie over it in the foreground. Works that evoke the aesthetics of advertising in an ironical way.
Heinz Gappmayr once said with reference to his work, “Visual poetry shows how mere strokes turn into signs that make a meaningfully logical world possible.” And further, “Words are made up of crooked and straight lines like a drawing; but we associate them with a certain meaning. Our daily dealings with written material obstruct our view for the extraordinary quality of this phenomenon.” Fathoming out this phenomenon is also Michael Endlicher’s ambition. He succeeds in looking behind the evident sign surface, in questioning our approach to word and image, but he also invites us to reflect on our way to talk and write about art.
Günther Oberhollenzer, art historian. He was curator at the State Gallery of Lower Austria, since 2022 he is the artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Wien.