Edgar Schmitz – Surplus Cameo Decor
18 October 2012 – 14, December 2012
Cooper Gallery
exhibition in three episodes: review in three parts
episode 1: palasthotel, 18 October – 6 November
Before seeing Schmitz Surplus Cameo Decor in reality—in as much the
setup of palasthotel can be termed as such—I began
talking to someone who had already been to the preview, commenting upon the
discrepancy between the sparsity of the set-up and the apparent superfluity of
information encircling it. The conversation that ensued streamed into questions
of encounters and experiences of art, the role of art in relation to the
institutions that circumscribe it, and the responsibility of the complex
discourses surrounding art to reflect it rather than support or even
swallow it (or is it art's responsibility to fulfil its promises?)
With such questions in mind, as
well as the shards of information that had already been presented to me, I did
not enter the eponymous palasthotel as a distracted viewer. The initial
encounter with Schmitz' gallery-come-backdrop was one of engulfment; the
scene is both decor (setting the scene) as well as being tangible and
(temporarily) inhabitable. This element of the decorative—coming across in the
scene's ambient backdrop snapshots and the mesmerising bronze glow—is not
something viewers normally experience in an embodied sense. Decor is either
meant to indulge a certain sense of ambience without being an element in
itself, or simply exist to be looked at. The scene that has been occasioned here
allows the incomplete elements that normally become engulfed by the mastery of
the whole to exist together in semi-real / fictional time. The ambience created
by the interplay of these lofty super-signifiers—the seductive bronze two-way
mirror taken from the Palasthotel in East Berlin, the neon reflection that is
at once glamorous and sleazy, snippets of isolated conversation and suggestive
filmic stills—creates such a saturation of stimuli, the viewer cannot help but
be in some way immersed (albeit within the bitter-sweet reality of being in the
German Democratic Republic of foreign travel under StaSi surveillance in the
semi-fictional palasthotel).
This isn't to say that the viewer
wouldn't leave the exhibition feeling slighted by the scene's persistent
oscillation between suggestion and promise. I would say that the exhibition
doesn't deliver completeness, and with regards to the conversation that
pre-empted my visit, part of the pleasure of this exhibition is in the
overlapping and intersection of 'remote' dialogues infiltrating the present
scenario and the snippets of incomplete meaning within it. In the same way that
Schmitz' manipulation of reality interrupts the fictional scene—the use of
real, borrowed and notorious material, the references to veritable historical
and political moments, as well as the durational existence of the exhibition in
real time including real 'celebrity' appearances via Skype—I would say that the
art work resonates beyond its material manifestation and 'ambient attitude', enveloping
the discursive and fluctuating networks of understanding that surround it, and
muddling the distinction between art and discourse.
Rather than making viewing
arduous and confusing, I think the first episode of Surplus Cameo Decor allows
its viewers (should they choose so) to indulge in and accept a certain level of
mystification and incompleteness. The episodic duration of the exhibition
itself makes space for an experiential process, which in turn affects the
responses that ensue - in which there is a real and persistent sense of there
being more-to-come.
