XXXV Gert Bendel
31.10.03 15.11.03
Im Freien/Out There
Gert Bendel is interested in how we define individual
living spaces. In summer 2003, his research brought
him to a camping site on the outskirts of Berlin where
he spent the entire season. While Bendel stayed there
as a a special kind of artist in residence, his neighbours
introduced him to the occupations and rituals that were
customary among them. He could thus engage in the elaborate
practices the 'resident campers' had created in order
to achieve a maximum of stability and comfort within
the realm of the precarious.
The artist was fascinated by a way of living that aims
to reconcile dichotomies such as travelling/staying
in, freedom/security and private/public. For several
months a year the campers leave their homes in the city,
they expose themselves to the provisional and the state
of being out there - only to conquer these odds, thanks
to their muscles and their fine craft skills. One can
regard this as a kind of playing that bears some resemblance
to an artist's activities: Without the least necessity,
the campers have resolved to seriously strive for a
figment of their imagination. Nevertheless, the utopical
quality of its illusory and futile aspects is quite
temptative.
Gert Bendel has documented this attitude in films and
photographies taken on the camping site. In his sculptural
work he adopts the campers' radical determination to
have it all tidy and fitting, out there. He surrenders
to the madness of going on and on constructing, just
like a camper's continuous carpenting of extensions
and extra extensions of his fence and his terrace. Who
cares about the point of it; this is about loving the
material, loving the sheer amount of it, loving completeness
and all those resourceful details. True perfection is
what they are after.
(BC)
http://www.gertbendel.org
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