Collection Study
Andreas Slominski, xWSy7z, 2008

Text by Matthew McLean
September 2015

Introduction

xWSy7z is a work by Andreas Slominski (b.1959, Mappen, Germany) from 2008. It is composed of a panel of acrylic-painted polystyrene of immense size (242 x 312 x 30 cm) which has been carved in relief, and onto which additional painted and variously shaped polystyrene pieces have been attached.

The main panel is painted white and features geometric shapes, mostly triangles, in an angular arrangement emanating from the panel’s edges. Circular indentations of different sizes have been made into their surfaces and that of the panel. The largest of the affixed elements is at the lower right centre of the composition: a humanoid figure, picked out in red, orange and yellow shades of acrylic paint, and given an iridescent sheen through the use of acrylic varnish. To the right of the figure’s feet, four further elements are also fixed to the panel, the shapes of over-sized chess pieces heaped on their sides. The whole ensemble is encased in a steel and glass vitrine which is integral to the work. It was first exhibited in June 2008 at Sadie Coles HQ in London, where it was purchased for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.

Massimiliano Gioni has observed that the series of works to which xWSy7z belongs – nicknamed the ‘Styrofoam paintings’¹ –“seem to have come into existence not through slow, handmade process, but rather through some mysterious, sudden chemical transformation”.² In fact, Stephan Urbaschek outlines the many stages of their creation: first polystyrene sheets are bonded together into a block, which is then carved into relief, before being painted “both abstractly and ornamentally” using spray guns and stencils to apply acrylic paint (as well as, in the case of xWSy7z, varnish); finally, fragmentary sculptural elements, produced from polystyrene in multiple, are provisionally pinned onto the work’s surface. Before they are finally affixed, the artist considers and revises their place in the overall composition – a process which, Urbaschek says, in some cases lasts years.³

¹ Stephan Urbaschek, ‘“The Divine Spark of Poetry” in the Paintings of Andreas Slominski’ in Andreas Slominski; Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010
² Massimiliano Gioni, ‘Stop Making Sense: Notes towards the misunderstanding of Andreas Slominski’ in Andreas Slominski: Roter Sand und ein gefundenes Glück, Cologne, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007
³ Stephan Urbaschek, Op. cit.

Since his first exhibition of Falle (‘Traps’) at Hamburg’s Produzentengalerie in 1987, Slominski has been widely known for his sculptural work, moving from objet trouvé – presentatons of working, often agricultural traps and kitschy model windmills – to his own recreations of the same, to inventions of less legible origin (such as Gerät zum Erschrecken von Personen, die sich nachts in Parks aufhalten, 2000).

In the same way that a trap’s static form indicates a movement or action, the forms of Slominski’s broader three-dimensional œuvre regularly imply performances, processes or gestures, by turns elaborate, banal or implausible – such as a stamp which has been licked by a giraffe (Anfeuchten einer Briefmarke, 1996), or an arrangement of steel allegedly welded underwater (Sculpture Welded Under Water No. 3, 2006).

Given these emphases, the unprecedented inclusion of a group of Styrofoam paintings in Slominski’s 2005 retrospective at London’s Serpentine Gallery constituted, to at least one critic, a “revelation”.⁴

⁴ Ibid. It should be noted that some works which arguably resemble traditional, wall-mounted paintings do exist in Slominski’s oeuvre prior to 2005, for example the 1998 denim-covered canvas Bild aller Augäpfel aller Menschen auf der Erde

The styrofoam paintings show little sign of having been a passing artistic fancy: Slominski has consistently produced and exhibited iterations of this body of work since 2005 in solo exhibitions in 2006 at New York’s Metro Pictures, in 2008 at London’s Sadie Coles HQ, in 2009 at Salzburg’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and in 2012 at the same gallery’s Paris outpost.

While appearing as an abrupt innovation in his practice, it is possible to trace some subtle continuities between the Styrofoam paintings and the bulk of Slominksi’s prior production. As traps are frequently designed to fool their quarry, so the Styrofoam paintings also engage in a deceptive ‘game’ with viewers.⁵ While weighing several hundred kilograms each (xWSy7z was exhibited at DRAF for the first time only once an interior doorway had been widened), the works are hung on the wall as if no heavier than oil-and-canvas; the volume of their massive, rough hulks is often concealed by their presentation, so that approached frontally and from a distance, they appear shallow.

⁵ Urbaschek, Op. cit.

That the Styrofoam paintings also engage notions of trapping and confinement is apparent once their impressive vitrines are considered in relation to museological display – Gioni likens them to “the findings of a meticulous entomologist […] giant butterfly collections”– thus evoking images of specimens caught, pinned and enclosed.⁶ xWSy7z in particular bears comparison with another form of natural history display – the museum diorama, as Urbaschek notes.^7&8

⁶ Gioni, Op. cit.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Boris Groys in Bettina Funcke & Jens Hoffmann, ‘Slominski. Ein Gespräch mit Boris Groys’, Parkett, 55, 1999

Perhaps, with its figure against a barren pale field it recalls specifically a diorama of prehistoric humans, like that captured by Hiroshi Sugimoto in his photograph Earliest Human Relatives (1994).

But more than these metaphorical or thematic links, there is a deeper sense in which the styrofoam paintings like xWSy7z are contiguous with the rest of Slominski’s career – namely that by making a seemingly unprecedented, unexplained and unintelligible shift in his practice, Slominski enacts the very willingness to vex, beguile and above all disarm his audience with which his output, from his very first traps, is rife. Precisely in this disarming capacity, the Styrofoam paintings constitute not a rupture but a sly continuity.

In an interview from 1999, Boris Groys stated: “I have the impression that everything that Andreas Slominski does is pointing to something else. That’s its real power”.

In an essay from 2010, Birgit Sonna reports that “Slominski himself says that he would like to paint, but that now he has reached middle age he no longer wants to tackle the process of learning the technique”.⁹

⁹ Birgit Sonna, ‘Film à chassis – A Framework for Invisible Acts: Andreas Slominski’s Projective Film Arsenal’ in Andreas Slominski, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010

In declining thus to ‘tackle the process’, the styrofoam paintings resist being placed wholly within traditional categories of practice. xWSy7z is not fully a painting, nor a sculpture, nor even a sculptural relief; not entirely collage or bricolage, either, but not quite wholly ‘installation’. It seems to shift, Gestalt-like, between each of these categories upon every new consideration, combining elements of all of these formats, mediums and traditions, but without coalescing them into a solid sui generis category either.

What complicates this question of artistic category is the carrier material of polystyrene itself. Polystyrene is a plastic, discovered in its basic form in 1839, the mass production of which was greatly expanded by German firm IG Farben in 1931. Expanded and extruded polystyrene foams are produced by blowing agents into polystyrene to form bubbles – the process which produced one such, styrofoam, and its brand name were trademarked by the American firm Dow Chemical in 1941. The cooled material which results from expansion and extrusion is a rigid, tough and lightweight material, effective at thermal insulation and damping, and thus widely used for building insulation, packing materials, and food containers. Very slow to biodegrade, there are number of environmental and health controversies which surround its ubiquity.

Dirk Von Lowtzow has suggested that uniformly inaccessible titles given to the styrofoam paintings - which contrast with the matter-of-fact ones that Slominski uses for other bodies of work - can be read as vague puns.

The String Xhbyz (the title of a 2006 exhibition at Metro Pictures of works with titles containing the same letters), for example, assonates with ‘exhibit’ and ‘bye’.¹⁰ Urbaschek reports Slominski as refuting this interpretation.¹¹ By contrast, reviewing the Serpentine show, Jennifer Allen noted instead that the consistent combination of letters and numbers “suggested locations on a map of the universe.”¹²

¹⁰ Dirk von Lowtzow, ‘Im Schönen Abseits der Folklore’, Texte zur Kunst, 63, September 2006
¹¹ Urbaschek, Op. cit.
¹²Jennifer Allen, ‘Andreas Slominski: Serpentine Gallery’, Artforum, September 2005

Or perhaps co-ordinates on a board. The presence of the over-sized chess pieces in the composition might be framed as a further indication of or allusion to Slominski’s game-playing.

They may also remind the viewer of the French artist Marcel Duchamp - widely recognised as the progenitor of the Conceptual tradition of art upon which Slominski’s work incontestably draws – who surprisingly gave up art-making for chess-playing in 1923.

Yet the pieces are not a full set, are grossly over-sized, and appear radically out of any context, so it is not clear what game they might be used for, or what rules might apply. Instead they suggest the possibility of arbitrary, absurd activity.

In the same interview about Slominski, Groys observed: “What we really don’t know, is what art is supposed to look like […] We constantly come up against the question: What is the norm? What is dictated to us by society? What is expected of us? It’s an open question.”¹³ For all its references to entrapment, it is paradoxically this openness that xWSy7z seems to inhabit.

¹³ Groys, Op. cit.

Study

“There is always something glacial in Slominski’s work”, writes Massimiliano Gioni in an aphoristic essay on the artist of 2007; his oeuvre “speaks of life, but it does so with a rather aseptic, almost inhuman coldness”14. The so-called ‘styrofoam paintings’, which Slominski has been exhibiting since 2005, specifically evoke wintry imagery. Dirk von Lowtzow likens the group displayed at Metro Pictures in 2006 to “tales of a hike through an alpine region”, describing the works as “ice-floe-like picture-objects”.¹⁵ The press release for a 2012 exhibition at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris meanwhile described “huge chunks of snow-white polystyrene, rather like icebergs”.¹⁶

¹⁵ Dirk von Lowtzow, ‘Im Schönen Abseits der Folklore’, Texte zur Kunst, 63, September 2006
¹⁶ ‘Oeuvres récentes’, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Marais, 4th February – 29 February 2012

As Slominski’s work often accrues this language of cold, the climactic content of xWSy7z (2008) seems to stare us in the face – or hits us, perhaps, like a blast of Arctic air. If even his most luridly coloured works in this series (like those in the 2012 exhibition) draw comparison to glacial masses, how else can we read the pronounced whiteness of xWSy7z, an unbroken blanched expanse quite unique among the styrofoam paintings Slominski has exhibited to date.

Winter pursuits – most prominently, skiing – and their equipment and ephemera are central to several works from which Slominski’s reputation is by now inseparable: his 1996 action at Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, or Wo sind die Skier? (2000/2007), say, which derives from it (the verb ‘ski’, of course, is the last syllable of the artist’s own name).

Little surprise, then, that in xWSy7z, a shallow channel scooped out of the surface of the main panel in a horizontal loop resembles a track cut into day-old snow. With this in mind, the arrangement of triangular polystyrene cut-outs begins to recall icicles, stalactites and stalagmites - begins to suggest an enclosure, teeth at the mouth of a mountainous cave.

With a few exceptions - Aktzeichnen (2006), say, the absurd life drawing sessions staged within his retrospective at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen - the body rarely figures in Slominski’s work. At most, his well-known and multifarious traps imply a subject, a quarry (“Slominski’s oeuvre is infested by phantom corpses”, Gioni notes).¹⁷ The styrofoam paintings too are largely unpopulated by signs of human activity, filled instead with still material and inert debris.

¹⁷ M. Gioni, Op cit

Thus the humanoid form that dramatically interrupts up the white space of xWSy7z is remarkable. Where the human figure does make an appearance elsewhere within this body of work, it does so at a remove, mediated, a representation of a representation - in a scene on an easel, for example, which is stuck to the surface of xMPoy1z (2009), or in the form of a wooden doll, awkwardly posed at the bottom of x0Ky103z (2008/2010), or the religious figure engraved into the surface of what seems to a the fragment of a frieze or plaque in xXy4z (2007/2010).

An intriguing possibility thus presents itself: that the figure in xWSy7z also appears to the viewer as a representation of a representation of a person (Slominski’s Styrofoam paintings themselves, Kirsty Bell has claimed, are a kind substitute, or “stand-in”, which “resist being read as the real thing”).¹⁸ As if the artist has modelled it not from life but from an existing, Ur-figure. Does it not, in fact, recall nothing so much as a figure from indigenous aboriginal painting, marked on a piece of bark, or splashed onto a surface of rock?

¹⁸ Kirsty Bell, ‘Andreas Slominski: Museum Boijmas van Beuningen’, Frieze, 110, October 2007

There is something raw, primal about the figure, which appears not just un-clothed, but almost skinless. The surface of (his? her?) form is alive with iridescent rivulets of contrasting colour, so that, in the right light, the figure appears to be made of flame or lava.

In ancient greek myth, the Titan Prometheus stole fire from the Gods to grant its secret to humanity. Like Slominski, Prometheus was a trickster, who fooled the Olympian gods into accepting bones for their sacrifices, by cloaking them in fat; he too was familiar with traps, ending up chained to a rock, a vulture’s prey.

“[T]hey were distinct from animals”, John Berger writes of the Cro-Magnon artists of the Chauvet cave paintings discovered in France in 1994; “[T]hey could make fire and therefore had light in the darkness"¹⁹

¹⁹ John Berger, ‘Past present’; The Guardian, Saturday 12th October 2002

The charcoal used to mark the walls at Chauvet was probably wood burned in the same cave, Berger speculates. Of course, thousands of years and several continents may divide these fires from the arrival of humankind in Australia, let alone the bark painting tradition that continues in Australia’s Arnhem Land today. Yet such distances don’t seem to register in the drastically flattened frontal space of the Styrofoam paintings, whose compositions seem often to enact a contraction of time as well as space - the divergent clocks which appear in examples like xHBy59z (2005) seeming, Allan says, “to fuse discordant measures of the cosmos: lights-years with dog years”.²⁰

²⁰ Jennifer Allen, ‘Andreas Slominski: Serpentine Gallery’, Artforum, September 2005

In a 2010 essay on the imagination of early man and contemporary art, Tom Morton draws attention to the fantasy of just such a fusion of discreet temporalities – the recurrent imagination of the prehistoric confronting the contemporary. Morton cites the more than 130 cartoons published by The New Yorker that are driven by the “transposition of a modern anxiety to the Palaeolithic”, as well as the late 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series Captain Caveman, its titular hero:

“[D]iscoveredfrozen in a block of ice by a group of gorgeous girl detectives”, this latter scenario being the premise of popular films including Encino Man (1992).²¹

²¹ Tom Morton, ‘Out of the Cave’, Frieze, 134, October 2010. The reference may be obscure to many, but Evan Wright reports an US patrol commander in Iraq known as 'Encino Man’ for his incompetence in his Generation Kill (New York, Penguin Putnam, 2004)

It is not only from these caveman cartoons that bodies are found disgorged from the ice, history thawing into the present. The so-called ‘Tyrolean iceman’ known as ‘Ötzi’ was discovered in 1981 in the Alps between Italy and Austria only partially deteriorated, fragments of his grass-woven cloak and the contents of his last meal (bread, chamois and deer) still intact enough for analysis. Lost climbers, ambitious mountaineers (think again of von Lowtzow’s invocation of ‘a hike through an alpine region’) reappear from receding glaciers – five years after Ötzi’s re-appearance, the body of Johannes Naegeli, a 66 year-old man who vanished near Mt. Oberaajoch in 1914, was discovered under six feet of Swiss glacier, his body and clothes preserved through 72 years of natural refrigeration. W.S. Sebald ends the first chapter of his novel Die Ausgewanderten (1993) describing Naegeli’s re-emergence:

“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”²²

²² W.S. Sebald, The Emigrants, London, The Harvill Press, 1997

Von Lowtzow writes of Slominski’s “strange tendency to evaporate, leaving nothing more than an imprint on the surface”.²³ So many of the forms foregrounded in Slominski’s work are traces of actions, processes or efforts now ceased. At a 2003 Serpentine Gallery exhibition, Traps, Clocks and Skiing, a ski-slope built directly into the gallery and then dismantled before the exhibition’s opening was given lasting form only in Kerze (‘Candle’), 2005, formed from wax scraped from the now- vanished skis. For the exhibition 2. April in 2004 Slominski hired a local carnival float to toss candies into Berlin’s Galerie Neu from the street outside, the stray remnants being the resulting exhibition’s only contents.

²³ Dirk von Lowtzow, Op. cit.

It is hard to parse this solely as an “almost classical interest in ‘giving shape’” as Dominikus Müller does, and say nothing of the sense of mutability and barely-suppressed pathos inherent in such gestures.²⁴ At times, rather, Slominski seems almost spiritually invested in the permanence or perishability of substance. In Christian Patristics, the flesh of the peacock did not decay, and thus the bird became a symbol of immortality: Slominski’s Pfauenei (1994) comprises only the residue of the titular peacock egg, which the artist has smashed against a gallery wall. For a 1996 exhibition at Portikus in Frankfurt, Slominski filled the gallery with the sail of windmills dug-up at and transported from Lower Saxony, whose vast planks, over the course of the exhibition, were sawed into firewood and burned in a small oven. The institution’s press release spoke with Wagnerian grandeur of the “a metaphor of a lost world” in which “a cyclic transformation process of elemental forces (wind-fire- ashes/smoke) simultaneously announces a new beginning”.²⁵

²⁴ Dominikus Müller, ‘Vanishing Acts’, Frieze d/e, 7, Winter 2012
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Polystyrene makes xWSy7z a highly flammable object. Unlike the wooden sails of Portikus, however, if it were burned at less than 1,000 degrees centigrade, the smoke released would be toxic. Absenting such incineration, polystyrene is highly inert and very slow to biodegrade, being resistant to photodecomposition.

Though its production involves the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) - chemicals with Global Warming Potentials 1,000 times greater than that of Carbon Dioxide – Slominski’s blocks of polystyrene can be expected to outlast the next few hundred years of environmental turmoil. In a sense, polystyrene is the inverse of the peacock’s egg: whereas the latter was held to be immutable, but (per Slominksi’s demonstration) is quite comically vulnerable, the former is trated as disposable, yet in every landfill is revealed to be stubbornly durable.

If London were to flood, or freeze, xWSy7z could stand a chance of remaining intact, one dogged corner emerging, like a scrap of Ötzi’s cloak, or the toe of Naegli’s boot. Or, like the 1943-minted penny which Slominski found, shiny in the dirt by the edge of Buchenwald in 1996. The artist displayed the coin in a glass vitrine in the centre of his exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Weimar that same year. During the exhibition, Slominski had the gallery’s windows left open, so that drafts would stir the miniature windmills also installed inside.²⁶

²⁶ Nancy Spector, ‘Berlin Detours’, Parkett, 55, 1999

Look again at xWSy7z: what chill wind blows through it? And does it blow from the future, or the past? And why does the clichéd image of Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) seem now to shimmer behind Slominski’s primeval form?

In nomadic cultures, Berger writes, “the notion of past and future is perhaps subservient to the experience of elsewhere. Something that has gone, or is awaited, is hidden elsewhere in another place”.²⁷

²⁷ Berger, Op. cit.