Kunstverein Hannover e.V.
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Simon Dybbroe Møller: Kompendium
March 14-May 17, 2009
Simon Dybbroe Møller submits the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century to a subjective revision: His installations, collages, films and sculptures deal with minimalism, concept art and constructivism, De Stijl and Bauhaus. They are defined by a fascination with such exemplary twentieth-century artistic models which he appropriates in a first step. They are then linked and questioned by means of diverse references to art, design, architecture, literature and music. The associative lines in his works range from Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dan Flavin and Henry Moore to John Cage and the Danish mathematician Sophus Tromholt.
The large-scale site-specific installation Mass, Weight and Volume (Fallen Into Place) (2008), for example, encompasses steel pipes that are seemingly wedged every which way across the exhibition space between the floor and the ceiling. The material and its rusty patina suggests Richard Serra’s massive sculptures, but their distribution in the space is dictated by chance. Simon Dybbroe Møller let pick-up sticks from the game of Mikado fall into a model of the Kunstverein and reconstructed the arrangement of the wooden jackstraws true to scale in the exhibition space itself.
The — absurd — idea of combining steel and Mikado, the precise realization of the results of chance dynamic processes in a material that is the epitome of the static as well as the embedment of the sticks in a total art historical context, however, join the diverse approaches in dealing with the piece. The intertwining can be spun on and on. The game of Mikado, for example, developed from the Buddhist “Chien Tung” oracle and traditionally comprises 41 3 mm thick wooden sticks. Chance or father determines how the sticks fall, and the loser is the one who moves a stick. This led to the concept of the Mikado method in which two parties mutually block each other (because the loser is whoever moves).
Dance of Light (2009), one of his most recent pieces produced especially for the exhibition in the Kunstverein, shows the complex entanglements and references that Simon Dybbroe Møller integrates into his works:
In the late 19th century, the Danish mathematician tried to photograph the Northern Lights from his research station at Kautokeino, Norway. The project failed because of the not yet fully developed photographic technique. Tromholt therefore drew his impressions of the Northern Lights, photographed the drawings, and then nevertheless published the results as photographs of the Northern Lights. The texts with which he attempted to describe the “dance of lights” with the instruments of his classic scientific education read like similarly circuitous reviews of modern dance that endeavor to describe a complex choreography. Simon Dybbroe Møller translates the dance of lights into real dance: He gave the texts to a ballet group from the Lower Saxon State Opera Hannover — ballet as Brilliantly colorful photographs were in turn made from this interpretation which — as Tromholt planned for his analysis — reproduces a moment within the movement. Despite the time exposure recollective of Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography, the interplay between the individual dancers is missing in a chronological sequence. The photographs cross-fade from two slide projectors as a succession of individual images, and the stills are almost relegated back into motion. But the viewer is shut out of the actual dance which, if at all, can only be realized again in his imagination — just as Tromholt was only able to reproduce his own notion of the Northern Lights.
A second piece referencing Tromholt is Only Particles, Some Fast Some Slow (to Sophus Tromholt) (2006-2009), a series of Lambda print collages whose title describes the physical process the makes the Northern Lights possible. Solar wind particles meet up on the magnetosphere over the poles and discharge energy in the form of light. The Lambda prints are in turn Tromholt’s Northern Light “photographs” which Simon Dybbroe Møller colored, cut up into tangram parts and reassembled. The parallels that often come about in the process can be related to the basic concept of Cubism on the one hand, but also comprise the fact that Tromholt is known today for little more than his Tangram-derived mathematical dice games.
Simon Dybbroe Møller was interested here in how diverse approaches — quite by accident — can lead to a similar canon of forms. By means of the actual genesis of the individual objects and images that follow a strict programmatic notion characteristic of Møller’s works, he foils the fundamental idea of minimal and concept art as formulated in Lawrence Weiner’s “Declaration of Intent,” for example, which very clearly gives intellectual dealings precedence over the actual execution of the conceived work: “1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built.”
An aesthetics resembling the cut and reassembled Lamda prints from “Only Particles” can be seen in Oh Spirit Duplicator, Oh Moving Image (No More Dry Writing) (2008/2009), a work that deals with translations in a manner similar to Dance of Lights: The 16 mm projection ostensibly depicts abstract forms and colors that, upon closer examination, turn out to be sequences of letters. The words "No More Dry Writing" are written in a kind of photogram formed by the movement of colorful, in part transparent objects on a photocopier.
Here, too, Simon Dybbroe Møller closes the gap to another discipline; not modern dance this time, but modern music: The overtone of John Cage or Charlotte Mooreman can be clearly grasped when a string quartet attempts to imitate — almost self-ironically — the sounds of a photocopier in the soundtrack of Oh Spirit Duplicator.
Simon Dybbroe Møller is interested in the failures and peripheries of recent art history and he combines individual fragments in order to construct new references or to underscore forgotten protagonists and byways. An aspect of modernism comes to light behind the smooth, clear, and rationalistic façade of abstract and concept art which Sol LeWitt referenced in his Sentences on Conceptual Art: “We are mystics rather than rationalists.”
The exhibition Kompendium is continued in the exhibition Appendix that is on show simultaneously at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (March 27 to May 31, 2009). |
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Simon Dybbroe Møller, Curtain for Neue Nationalgalerie (No More Moore), 2008, Silkscreen print on polyester, 6,096 x 16,002 m, Courtesy Harris Lieberman, New York; Curtain for Louisiana (No more Moore), 2008, silkscreen print on polyester, 1,80 x 18 m, Courtesy Francesca Minini, Mailand; Iota Cephei Chandelier, 2009, Neon, metal, Courtesy Galerie Kamm, Berlin, Harris Lieberman, New York; Gamma Ursae Minoris Chandelier, 2009, Neon, metal, Courtesy Galerie Kamm, Berlin, Harris Lieberman, New York; Installation view Kunstverein Hannover, Photo: Raimund Zakowski.
Simon Dybbroe Møller, The 13 Problems, 2008, Installation of 13 objects: steel, wood, paint, Installation view Kunstverein Hannover, Photo: Raimund Zakowski, Private Collection London, Collezione Federico Luger, Collection Ivo Moser, Austria, Giovanni Gorno Tempini, Courtesy Francesca Minini, Milano.
Simon Dybbroe Møller, Gamma Cephei Chandelier, 2008, Neon, Metall, Draht, Größe variabel, Installationsansicht Harris Liebermann, New York, Courtesy Galerie Kamm, Berlin und Francesca Minini, Mailand. |
