The abstracted arrangement of sheep, the orbit of the sun, and the imitation of nature could be interpreted as a parody of the pastoral as a distorted, ridiculed shepherd’s scene. These idealized depictions of an idyll with grazing animals reached their peak during the baroque period. A temple was usually to be found in the background of these pictures. In this exhibition, the background would be what is outside of the gallery space, the sealed-off mansion of Volkswagen’s CEO, Martin Winterkorn. At the end of the rococo period, the temple was replaced by ruins. What also belonged to the rococo repertory was the motif of fêtes galantes, mostly depictions of couples in love.

If one seriously read the arrangement along these lines, the missing amorous couple could refer to the friendship between the artist Judith Hopf and the gallerist Deborah Schamoni. The two made the video Hospital Bone Dance (2006), in which the controlled world of a nurse is affected and disrupted by unexpected and uncanny events.

While the parody is an edifying play requiring knowledge of what it is modeled on, irony criticizes and mocks the prevailing conditions with the means of dissimulation and inversion. A decisive aspect of this topos is that one must not take what is shown or said literally. The flock of sheep made for an exhibition in the town of Lingen in the Emsland region of Germany, evokes both idyllic images and their unsettling disturbance through nuclear piles forming the backdrop of the pastures.

Irony demands skepticism toward social narratives and toward oneself. At the center of Judith Hopf’s relativizing and open method lies her interest in an ongoing process of self-correction and self-relativization. It is difficult to describe where her works position themselves so as to mark both outside and inside. Daniel Pies’ description of the Sun Up / Sun Down  series may be a help here, “The order of things is consumed by the haze of shades, overlays and reflections.” This also describes Judith Hopf’s artistic practice.

We know that Gilles Deleuze preferred humor to irony, since he suspected hierarchical thinking in the latter. In humor he found a liberating force at work for the reason that it “…has always undermined games of principles or causes in favor of the event and games of individuation or subjectivation in favor of multiplicities.” (from: Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues II [1977]).

In her CAPTCHA series on view in the upper rooms, Judith Hopf operates with humor’s multiplicities and openness.

CAPTCHAs are challenge-response tests that Website providers use for security purposes. These tests are usually employed to check whether the entries in Internet forms were made by humans or machines (robots). One example is a text distorted by an image filter that the user must enter in a field. Computers require pattern-recognition algorithms to process these kinds of images. A great amount of effort is needed to program the algorithms and they make high demands on the software.

These texts are now starting points for Judith Hopf’s short poems. For example, the CAPTCHA “project polisar” is expanded by “means plenty of noise under a rug.” The distorted texts take up the largest part of the DIN A4 sheets and they are surrounded by typed stanzas. The ephemeral poems stand in strong contrast to the elaborate programs behind the CAPTCHAs, but also to the pompous marble floor of the exhibition space, which reveals the previous tenant’s luxurious interior design sins. The order and simplicity suggested by the title Sun Up / Sun Down are humorously entangled in tacit stories about the social sphere and the reception of art that are alluring due to their indeterminacy.

Reviewed by Gürsoy Doğtaş publisher of the Artistzine Matt Magazine

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Osborne constructs a thorough argument to support his claim through the work of indisputably important figures in recent times. He moves through key aspects in the work of artists Robert Smithson, Sol Lewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Gerhard Richter. Other seminal thinkers making substantial impacts on the writing are Rosalind Krauss, Kant, Hegel, and Gilles Deleuze. Osborne leaves very few stones unturned in this pervasive and exhaustive examination. The writing is scattered throughout with ideologically illustrative charts and work example images, serving to make his case more digestible to those less practiced in opening topics usually doused with academically rigorous jargon.

The text presents an overarching evaluation not only of important work of these times, but also of the institutions and spaces designed to hold the products created by the more advanced minds of recent art history. Osborne makes historically troublesome academic ideas appear lucid, his word choice cutting to the heart of complex notions. A minimal amount of digging is required for the reader.

I can’t sit here and tell you that I fully absorbed all that this soon-to-be important book had to offer, but to my mind that only validates the all-inclusive nature of the project it sets out for itself. I’m not quite as well read as Mr. Osborne, when all is said and done. If I was, there’d be no reason to read this book. Anywhere or Not at All entices readers such as myself with an opportunity to look forward to a second read, knowing that what was made clear on the first go-round will shed further light on the points that I did not previously grasp in full.

I have put eyes to it once, after all—which I am guessing puts me at least one read ahead of you, considering you were interested enough to read all the way to the end here. It’s true that I may be coming across just a touch too snarky, but this book has really instilled me with a feeling of intellectual confidence. Just do yourself a favor and go buy this book.

Reviewed by Matthew Hassell

versobooks.com

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