Petra Elena Köhle/Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin “Kunst-Luftschutz-Massnahme”
Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Dump Time / Artists
Petra Elena Köhle / Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin (CH): Detail from “Kunst-Luftschutz-Massnahme”, 2011
picture credits: Photothek des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, Munich
Kunst-Luftschutz-Massnahme (Art Air Raid Protection Measure)
Installation, photo projection on glass, chalk drawing, bricks, a string, slabs of concrete, sandbags, and wooden boards, Photo: photographer unknown, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München, Photo Study Collection
During the past months, the artist couple Köhle / Vermot repeatedly worked with photographs documenting measures protecting works of art during WW II. Their work produced for Shedhalle focuses on one of these photographs, too. It was in the academy in Florence, where statues, in particular Michelangelo’s “David”, were protected by concrete formwork. The picture leaves the impression that “grand art” had been put in an artificial coma. Like pupated larvae, the work of art seems to be waiting to see what will happen. The picture shows forcefully erected monumentality on the one hand, and dreamlike withdrawal on the other hand, leaving the viewer in suspense. The artists approach this outdated “vision of a rescue” like psychoanalysts, trying to interpret die quality of single parts as hubs of hidden meanings. They laid out parts on the floor of the Shedhalle reconstructing single parts of the picture: the slabs of concrete, showing the weight of the material, the wooden boards with which the rotundas were originally recreated, the circles on the floor that traced their position in the room of the academy. Whatever was vertical and strained upwards in the picture, is now shown in pieces and horizontal in the Shedhalle. In between, precariously slanted, the fragile glass picture, illuminated by the light of the 21st century. What does this analysis yield? Above all it shows that nothing man-made will last forever, that everything has to be looked at from one’s own, or, to put it with Walter Benjamin, the epoch-specific perspective that it has to be brought to light again. By connecting these different times and spaces, here the Shedhalle, there the academy in Florence, new things might happen. “Kunst-Luftschutz-Massnahme” (Art Air Raid Protection Measure) leaves open what kind of things might happen because – as the diverse fragments and character of the single parts demonstrate – everything is potentiality.