n the work of the Austrian artist Peter Kogler we see the realization of a utopia or, at the least, the realization of said “realization.” The infinity there represented by various elements, the purely geometric forms which are always slightly deformed and which transform into half-geometric half-organic fi gures in a chain of images digital of an ant reproduced and multiplied to infi nity, of a brain and its stylized representation…all these elements are montaged in rhizomatic structures, sometimes psychedelic, in networks that cover museum walls during the Documenta X or people public building facades with a parade of giant ants. Utopia is thus the representation of infi nity through this construction of a network that covers the entire world, an idea which is rendered by the materiality of Kogler’s work: his geometric and organic figures, concrete and abstract, are generated by computer according to absolutely random chance. But it is also rendered by the subject of his work: the labyrinths extended in a space unknown to the spectator; the ants that, in their multiplication, invade public space, metro stations, the city and its communications networks; these half-organic half-geometric forms come to resemble each other as the pages turn in a paradoxical movement that gives place to their own original scene, the division of cells in a biological laboratory. As the pages fl ip by the reader-spectator can appreciate the numerous references hidden but present in Kogler’s work, hot round forms that, in spite of their dimensionality, look like Brancusi sculptures or even the lightning that rips Barnet Newman’s paintings that we find in digital form. But what is most striking, perhaps, is the eternal reproduction of the same element, the same form, fi gure, image that places Kogler’s work in the minimalist tradition. Minimalism discovered the power of repetition that generates eternity. Utopia in Kogler’s work follows this search for eternity generated, today, by infinite chance and the ungraspable logic of the computer. Repetition of the same, which is nevertheless contained by the covers of the book that resemble, in a surprising movement of chaotic synthesis, all the elements that separately people the pages of the book.
MARIA MUHLE, Paris
kip’s a scrapper, & never more so than in his onestar press book, “Cleaning in China.” He is nude in the photo on the book’s cover in a pose reminiscent of Jack Pierson’s “Youth”, as he often is in his performance pieces. Skip takes himself literally as an artist. First degree is his M.O. From the time he started fi lming himself jumping off garage roofs in California to his recent skinny dip in an industrially polluted lake in China and by way of the Bermuda triangle, Skip has remained true to his fi rst love, the elegant proposition that art is anything an artist does. Skip became an artist in the era of late 80s/early 90s California conceptual art; he’s not the only one still ready to crucify himself for the cause, and he’s getting the word out in his own determined fashion. Hence his well-known & brief manifesto, which concludes: “What is common to all my work is Skip. Skip is the artwork. The act of doing, my actions, my choices.” Talk about living sculpture. The images from “Cleaning in China” are all from Skip’s recent trip there, which is now fi rmly part of the Arnold mythology. Many of these images were shown in other formats at the galerie frédéric giroux in Paris: scenes along the road, many ends of meals, the famous bathing scene, shots of Skip. There’s a lot of chewy work for critics here, and maybe Skip isn’t quite as literal-minded as I make him out to be. He’s like your weird younger brother who ends up as a famous scientist. Or artist. It’s good to know Skip’s got his tent set up wherever he is, and that he’s busy making art, living his life with a purpose.
