Franz Ehmann’s work is staged at the end of a story. A series of menus denoting the last meals of prisoners on death row painted on black paper, like instructions written on a blackboard. Can there be a more evocative sense of an ending? These panels are memorials of a sort, although anonymous and even comic. We are what we eat, up to the point of death. Yet these meals tell us nothing of the ones who, in solitude, enjoyed them. Nor anything of their deaths, nor the crimes they committed that led to their execution.
These menus are estranged signs of an individual’s death, and the contents of the last decision that this individual could make. A most personal decision too, reflecting an almost incomprehensible judgement of taste: after all, any interpretation of the significance - or estimate of the value - of such a choice will sound banal and trivial. One prefers junk food, perhaps as comfort food. Another chooses a healthy snack, perhaps out of habit or even to try something new. A final gesture of liberty at the scene of a penalty that is absolute? There is no point to such a choice on the brink of execution. There is no point to any choice. In a grim way, these menus are summative statements on a life: last words and a testament which amount to nothing in particular. As such, their absurdity eclipses their poignancy.
It’s because of their ‘unexpressionism’ that we can’t actually describe these written panels as paintings; not like the brooding, anxiously religious pronouncements of, say, Colin McCahon that they superficially resemble or even parody. Instead, these texts are what is left of a practice of painting itself on death row, when painting is stripped of its conventions of figuration, of symbolic form, of expressive facture. With an actual corresponding meal prepared and placed below it, each of these menus is a title or didactic panel accounting for an object. Specific as that object is, it repeats its caption rather like the way the manufactured chair in Joseph Kosuth’s famous One and three chairs is presented as an instance of the dictionary definition of a chair, photographically enlarged and placed on the wall beside the chair.
Except, of course, that Ehmann’s menus are handwritten - the way they might appear on a specials blackboard in a restaurant as a sign of the chef’s particular offerings for the day. And the meal is hand-made, again as the literal offering by a chef. Although, in this case, the chef is enacting the last wishes of a person now dead: someone who cannot eat what is offered, and thus the meal is wasted. It will sit there for the duration of the exhibition and rot, like food left at a temple for a god to eat or flowers left at a grave. That the meal is left uneaten makes it - like the flowers wilting in a lonely cemetery - an effort at proof that the offering is a sacrifice, not an analytic concept. It will be consumed by time - in the absence of the god. In this case, it is the time of the exhibition. Art, as Ehmann sees it, explicates its essence in this end time. Offered to an audience to the dead (to dead history, that’s to say) - who cannot consume it, art is an absurd gesture.
Ehmann’s practice of art is evidently steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, even if that’s lightened with the kind of baffled black humour by which Samuel Beckett’s characters keep themselves company or occupy their downtime in the narrative dead-ends they inhabit. His admiration for Beckett’s theatrical style gives an edge of the sad clown to Ehmann’s performances: as he peeps guardedly out from under a trapdoor in a floor covered with broken egg shells, or sits ruefully in only his pants at a bare three legged table like a zombie patient in a run-down clinic waiting for attention, or as he mimics a life-size photo of himself holding antlers to his head and leans forward as if trying to strike up a dumb dialogue with his mirror image.
“Like the staging of Waiting for Godot,” he explains, “it boils down to almost nothing: just a tree, a bit of rubble for the landscape, a road. The waiting room of life.” This is also the scenery of death row: a cot, a table, a light bulb. Pared down to the most economical functions of imprisonment, and the barest signs of life. A terminus rather than a transit lounge. To live on death row is, in effect, to have already died. And so the occasion of one’s last supper is also a paradoxical celebration.
As a last meal, ordinary fare becomes extraordinary. The special abundance of this final meal - which, no matter how Spartan, will be treated as a feast - is an omen that we finally realise has been encoded all along in the narrative of our life, lurking there like a worm. Our last meal is the ironic fulfilment of our desire to live because it annihilates the routine meaning of food as nourishment: it is the end of nourishment. Choosing one’s last meal is the choice that a mortal finally makes to die. In this sense it is the morbid archetype and epitome of all cuisine, revealed in the everyday meal as much as in the banquet as their common, secret destiny. Their core value. Eat, drink and be merry.
In this view (which can be Epicurean as well as Stoic), all eating - whether in moderation or to excess - is a rehearsal for the last supper that kills one’s appetite. As such, the food presented at a last meal is a correlative of the food of the gods. Gods who have immortal bodies don’t need to eat, since they have no needs. Their desires (to love or hate us earthlings) aren’t prompted by somatic investments. If they consume the dead animals, vegetables or humans sacrificed to them then it must be a signifying act beyond anything physiological, and not participating in the corruption, decomposition, impurity of those bodies. Because they are already full beings, the gods on Olympos or in Valhalla don’t need to fill up on anything just as they don’t need to defecate. They eat or drink to signify their indifference to the qualities of food.
Ambrosia, manna… whatever it may be called it is an immortal food, a food without qualities. It may taste sweet, but only in a superlative sense that ironically cannot be measured by degree. There is no comparison possible because it is pure and absolute sweetness. It is the sweetness that all mortal things have in lesser form. Thus, any of our encounters with a pleasingly sweet thing in our mouth could be measured as a shadowy, relative, lite version of the sublime, radiant, immortal sweetness that can be tasted only at the terminus of somatic pleasures. From this perspective, a true food is distinguishable from the common, routine, life-sustaining substance processed by bodies. We might first think of the Communion’s bread and wine. But a true food would negate the mortal body that consumes it. It would be a poison administered as an execution, an exemplary execution like Socrates’ cup of hemlock that, for Plato in the Phaedo, serenely affirmed the philosopher’s vocation to sublimate bodily existence, civic duty, erotic attachment and so on into the immortal forms of thought. “To philosophise [to pursue truth] is to learn how to die”. Anything else is pseudo-philosophy; for Socrates, that meant the seductive rhetoric of Sophistry, whose practitioners had merely a knack for persuasion akin to the skills of a chef cooking up a pleasing meal.
For an artist like Framz Ehmann who is also a chef, art and cuisine likewise face this challenge of terminating their rhetorical pleasures in order to utter a truth. Strange as it may sound, there might be a Socratic impulse in this exhibition, in an alliance between aesthetics and a principled death. How are criminals’ deaths “principled”? By the institutionalisation of their death through the rules of imprisonment and execution. The menus and the meals that signal their anonymous executions become an allegory of the institution of art. In Ehmann’s show, the exhibition, the gallery, the market - these forge the prison house and death row of the artist. He is waiting his turn. But the story hasn’t ended yet.
The use of unconventional materials is a hallmark of Franz Ehmann's work and practice. 1 Eggs, wax and milk, for example, appear in many of his works and installations. All are forms of secretion with high symbolic value. The latter provides a rich field of interpretative potential, not the only route, but a useful and valuable one in coming to terms with the complexity and diversity of Ehmann’s work. Ehmann, however, does not play strategic symbolism, or the sly deferral to cultural histories - the game of the modern mystic - generating or invoking obscure lexicons as a means to an end. It is interesting to note that within contemporary practice, artists have deferred to mysticism in the absence of true conviction, to orchestrate texts for what has been lost or forgotten in a secular industrial world, embracing ritualism in the hope of some salvation of soul and spirit. Rather, Ehmann is in search of a means by which symbol can lead to allegory. How, then, do we establish connections to a cultural world (or worlds) that do not subscribe to historical causality and determinism.
Ehmann's work is not about making things - the creation of object/tokens that can be admired or scrutinized for their aesthetic , irony or originality (the new) - but the manner in which the meaning and symbolic properties are maintained and amplified, without deferring to pedagogical equations. Milk has powerful symbolic meaning for most cultures: it is the first food and hence a fluid of eternal life, fertility, and abundance. In his Worldly Spirit-Worldly Pain performance component (September 1998) Ehmann's hands and arms are bound and he kneels, transferring milk by mouth from one bowl to another. The act is a form of blessing using milk rather than water as a purification ritual or baptismal ceremony (rites of passage).
For many cultures eggs are an earth creation symbol and although equated with fragility, are also used in metaphors of prosperity. For the most part, Ehmann uses brown eggs, though not in a premeditated way (he uses what is available and mixes brown and white). Brown eggs, nonetheless have a harder shell and also carry certain (organic-colour¹ associations (as brown sugar is ‘raw’ and ‘white’ is refined). The first wax known to humankind was beeswax, and its use in the production of art and objects may well predate recorded history. 2 In its ‘natural’ state, wax is a by-product of bees making honey (honey, as a symbolic food substance is often ‘paired’ with milk). When beeswax is used to make candles it is not merely a source of illumination, but as the wax melts through burning it becomes emblematic of the union of flesh and spirit (fire and light). 3
In conversation with Franz Ehmann at the time of his Worldly Spirit-Worldly Pain exhibition and performance, the topic of his other vocation came up. I asked an obvious question about the source of the cracked eggshells covering the floor in his installation titled September Eve, and learned that Ehmann has been trained and worked as a chef. One need not be professionally trained to crack an egg, but cracking hundreds on a regular basis requires practice, a confident grip and precisely aimed motion to the edge of the (right type of) bowl. Making use of the shells however, requires a different set of perceptual and intuitive skills. Ehmann has applied what may be considered lateral thinking and free agency (association) in extracting visual and symbolic impact from what is all too readily discarded in everyday life. Ehmann's work considers a type of fundamental perspective on life and leads to the remarkable aspect of an "unremarkable" nature .
While traveling on the Toronto subway, on 10 February 2000, my eye caught the following poem excerpt, titled "Proposal for a realistic existentialism":
I'm serious. Everything I do
Is an assertion of what I am,
And if I bewilder you,
It's because I vary.
Nevertheless I'm a gift
Offered with no conditions
To you. Since I damn well exist
You do too.
Milton Acorn (Canadian. 1923-1986)
There is more to Acorn than defiance -turning the intellectual-esoteric on its side out of contrariness, yet transformed into artful wisdom for everyday transit life. Acorn declares a mutual existence and dependency rather than the Descartian first person, "I think, Therefore I am" equation. But Acorn's use of 'bewilderment' suggests an unconventional behavioural streak: in order to verify your existence you have to accept mine. The cultural and social implications of such impudence need not be overstated, but an unspoken truth of enlightened solitude in a world that is apt to turn an individual's pain or suffering into a media-mediated event. 4
A section of video in Ehmann's Worldly Pain, Worldly Spirit has stayed with me. The artist is seen sitting on a train looking ahead, oblivious to the passing scenes. Motionless and in transit. There is a poignancy to this image, a truth to the understatement. We know and have been there and have observed the same in peripheral view. In another segment Ehmann places a hand-made sign in a busy public space that reads:
Artist at work.
Begging is my craft.
Please give money.
The poignancy as an expression of need is not the usual pathos of down-on-the-luck pan handling, but an assertion. Begging is honorable - one spirit (a worldly spirit, accepting pain) petitioning another. It is, in the words and music of African-American Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936 - 1977), a volunteered slavery. 5
Another material, blue pigment, re-appears in Ehmann's work. His Blue Room of Humanity, first installed in 1997, consists of a space occupied by words and phrases written with blue pigment. The act of entering into this space results in an unconscious intervention -- to disturb the pigment, to Œeradicate¹ phrases and leave, if only temporarily, your own Œprints¹, which in turn are re-disturbed by the next visitor. To say that the space is transformable is true that words and meaning can be fleeting - but not the only truth. Rather, it is a space and experience that is unstable in terms of artful conventions. Here, Ehmann's symbolic use can be appreciated in an immediate and palpable way. Blue is the colour ascribed to a type of inner pain. It is the colour of metaphysics most often associated with issues of the spirit and intellect. 6 It is the color of sky, heaven and water: an ‘accumulation of emptiness ... to penetrate the blue is rather like Alice passing to the other side of the looking glass.’7 The ‘blue notes’ in music are usually the flatted 3rd, 5th, and 7th, but the Blues - as ‘type and style’ - are not merely a hurting lament, but born of Afro-American slave spirituals. The spirit is uplifted in adversity. 8
Blue is true.
You have reached the point of departure
Into a realm of critical analysis.
Please, explore
-Paul Willenberg webpage 9
Navigating symbolic eddies and currents is not, in itself, the whole work, but a chosen and deliberate vocalization of another essential circumstance. Ehmann was born in Austria and moved to Australia i.e. born into one set of cultural/historical circumstances, and finding himself negotiating a very different one. In current cultural nomenclature, he leads - or has chosen, or has no choice but to accept - a nomadic existence. That is to say, he is tied to conventions but is aware of more. He understands this personal foreignness, but as evidenced in the temporality of his work and practice, not to describe some nomadic condition, but acts within a nomadic state. In his last interview, the Jewish Egyptian-born writer Edmond Jabès (living in Paris at the time of his death), discussed ‘the Jewish existential condition, which is a condition of wandering and exile.’
‘While working, I prefer the literary form known as the aphorism, that is to say a shattered, nomadic writing ... Everything gets done in a sort of immense dialogue in time and outside time. The questions get asked, and that is why I chose the rabbis, because they are the great interpreters of the Book. But in actual fact this Book doesn't exist, it is something beyond the text, beyond everything.’ 10
‘Beyond everything’ reveals the vastness of knowing and not knowing the way. Ehmann's work is that idea of a vast dialogue of materials. The repetition is not, therefore, the reinforcement of motif-signature, but stories spoken again. If Ehmann's work precludes stylistic categorization it is because there is an absence of style, or more to the point, style is irrelevant to his way of thinking about art in the world.
Jabès continues:
‘The idea of nomadism is that a certain place becomes too small for you, that you have to get out of there. It isn't even in order to gain freedom. It's an inability to create a place, to create your own place. That is the nomadic stance.’ 11
The mythic proportion of what Ehmann proposes and how it is interpreted is humbling. The Blue Room of Humanity is not a thing to admire for its formal or even interventionist qualities (in the way that Walter De Maria's Earth Room takes on a spatial pictorial quality), but a place in which to enter, ask questions, and leave with other questions. So too for Worldly Pain, Worldly Spirit. The temporality of pigment and eggshells is not the art making, but in the realm of oral traditions. Read quickly they cannot be fully appreciated. Ehmann’s use of writing and text inscriptions is meant to leave the same transitory impression.
For his hybrid object-installation Wishlist, Ehmann places cracked eggshells inside a boat - a symbol of voyage (voyages of the heroic, the damned and fools), transition and the passage from one world to another, physical and spiritual, as in ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology. In the Adelaide version (1999), eggshells cover the interior hull of the boat. In the Darwin version (2000), the eggs rest/ride in a separate boat within the boat, and the hull of the larger vessel is arranged with rows of wax fingers, in various colours, cast from his own hand. The finger also has symbolic meaning, as symbol of life or death and other cosmological variances.
There is a video component; a text submerged (drowning) in milk, yet not the milk of human kindness. After a few minutes Ehmann introduced a wish list written onto his left hand. Slowly he submerges his hand in the milk. The text is a mixed bag of wishes: ‘I wish I was a politician, I'd give the land back to the Aborigines’ - wishful thinking; ‘I wish I was a sailor with ... someone who waited for me¹ - a dream wish; and perhaps (by necessity), the inevitable death wish, ‘I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off.’ 12 As Ehmann explains, ‘with the text I usually want to communicate but by the act of one's own hands we are signing off on things we or I do not understand. I move into the area of an interzone, the territory of the border, in-between. Language in this case becomes blurred and on an ethical ground slippery and has no solid literary function anymore.’ 13
The text may not enrich or correct, but underscores the conundrum, and impossibility of absolute truths, and reminds us of the unanswerable: ‘I wish I was the verb to trust and never let you down’. 14 In brief, nothing changes, but is always changing. To return to Milton Acorn, ‘since I damn well exist, you do too.’ In this context, Ehmann’s borderline analogy is apt. He slips across a constructed, arbitrary border like the fugitive in the night, but to assert his presence rather than conceal it. The fugitive is often seen as the unwanted foreigner, but as Jabès explained, as she spoke of the issue of anti-Semitism, signs of difference are unsettling to those who subscribe to homogeneity (cultural sameness): the foreigner is ‘also a person who lives a condition of foreigness in the most profound way, because ... he has been asking himself about himself, about his existential condition ... and as a human being.’ 15 The boat in Ehmann's work therefore, is an appropriate visual metaphor. Ideas are smuggled on board and serve as a form of communion with the worldly spirit.
Footnotes
1. The terms of convention must always be qualified in modernist and contemporary art practice.
2. Encyclopaedia Americana, International Edition 1996, Vol28, p.515 (Grolier Incorporated, U.S.A.)
3. The preceding symbolic references are taken from: Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (Penguin Books) 1996 edition.
4. One such stirring of contradictory passions was the Elian Gonzales custody battle in Miami, Florida (1999-2000) -- not so much the rightness of son to be reunited with his father, but the spectacle of conflicting ideological wounds, and the positioning of correctness and rightness on the political spectrum.
5. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Volunteered Slavery (1969), Atlantic recording R2 71407
6. The exhibition, All About Blue (Canadian Society for Asian Arts, Vancouver, B.C. 1999, Writer, Margo Palmer), proposed that blue is "the colour that changed the world." "The appearance of blue in the world is the story of magical materials like indigo, cobalt and lapis lazuli; their discovery and dissemination across cultures and across time." p.7
7. Dictionary of Symbols, p.102.
8. See Rahsaan Roland Kirk, I Talk With the Spirits (1964) Limelight recording 82008
9. www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~pwillen1/lit/
10. Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Journeys and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1991. Curator, Sarit Shapira. Edmond Jabès interview by Bracha Ettinger Lichtenberg. pp.250-249 (Note: the book is bilingual, Hebrew and English, and pages numbered in reverse.)
11. Ibid., p.246
12. The last line ‘I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off", and title of the work, is taken from a Pearl Jam song, "Wishlist": from the CD titled "Yield", released February 3, 1998 (Epic 68164). The song also appears on a limited edition single "Brain of J(live)." recorded lived at Melbourne Part on March 5th, 1998.
13. e-mail to the author 13 April 2000
14. Ibid.
15. Routes of Wandering, p. 254
Some work sets out to tell us something. Quite plainly and quite simply. This work is 'about', the artist says, drawing breath, and then proceed to enumerate a list of issues, concerns, sometimes reading for which the piece operates as a conduit for: amalgamating and rearticulating the component strands of concern. Right at the moment this manner of constructing work is in the ascendant (which in itself is not a bad thing) probably largely because its easier to teach it that way in art schools and makes for a clearer and more limpid tutorial; further up the food chain it is easier for those curators who are not confident with the more amorphous forms of art to deal with a work where they can articulate its concerns as a point list: It is about.....a) b) and c) they are able to say with certainty and confidence, not letting on their worry about the more foggy stuff. Another reason for this ascendancy is that other ways of approaching the matter of art work can be easily - and often accurately - caricatured as a scenario in which the artist feels that the practice consists of the articulation of concerns and emotions too deeply felt or mystical for them to even hope to articulate, but which they strive heroically and against overwhelming odds to bring to view, like Prometheus bringing fire down to us mortals from up high. Such attitudes have historically been responsible for an awfully large amount of man-made (usually masculine) tosh cluttering up the wall and floor space of an already crowded planet. However, when presented with yet another measured, deliniatable work referring to a particular Lacanian concept, art-historical event, or a work which could happily and effectively be described rather than made, one cannot but think that maybe it is time for the pendulum to start its inevitable swing the other way. After all - we may reason trying to put our finger on the source of our dissatisfaction, our feeling of lack, of thinness - is not the very idea of 'The Aesthetic' predicated in realising that the realm of conceptual thought solely is inadequate to understand or express the plenitude of human experience, and so to try and find ways of generating a philosophy of somatic, sensational life. 'The Aesthetic' Nietzsche writes in the modestly titled 'Nietszche contra Wagner' is 'applied physiology'.
Certainly the somatic provides a constant throughout Franz Ehmann's work. He works with materials that are excreted by bodies, materials which are absorbed by bodies, materials which enclose bodies. He works with casts of body parts, with his own body, with objects which echo parts of the body, and throughout, ideas of nurture, shelter, growth and death are both suggested by and part of his practice. We have the smell of beeswax, the rustle of aprons, in some of his works the limpidity of milk. His practice is one of accretion and allusion, where certain areas are suggested, triggered, in a way not a million miles distant from the effect of Prousts madeleine dunked in tea had upon his narrator . It is a poetic approach rather than an illustrational one or that of a straightforward linear narrative. The work here is called 'Almost There' and the hesitancy of the title: its unwillingness to claim boundary, the tentativeness that it manifests in colonising space, echoes the works' operation, and the way that the component parts play upon us: never claiming full meaning -they never insist that THIS means THAT. Rather they hint and indicate, resisting the total transubstantiation of their own materiality into the miracle of meaning. Nurturing is obviously central to this work: although not the soft boundlessness that Freud posited as the childs memory of the womb (where there is no gap at all between desire and the satisfaction of that desire), but rather the more complex, wounding, operations of desire of our later life, where satisfaction is contemporary with lack, each playing against the other in an uneasy dialectic. The menu pinned on the back wall of a work seems to offer some avenue of satisfaction, of nourishment, as do the aprons. Aprons are worn by cooks. Cooks prepare food and they feed us, they are at the heart of the hearth, the home the family. Here however, the aprons are not fully functional, they have sleeves that deny the arm access, there are strange props in their pockets that usually, probably, have no place in a modern ikea kitchen. The comforting meals written on the cloth on the back wall are in fact a list the dishes prepared as the last meal requested by death-row prisoners. The ultimate comfort foods perhaps, but futile, bodily comfort against the awful end, the void that at some time confronts us all and makes impossible our making sense of it all as, after a certain point, we will have no senses at all. A stark conjunction that suggests the inevitable triumph of Thanatos over Eros. It seems fitting to point out here that Ehmann's 'trade' (outside those of artist and gallerist) is that of chef, so these batteries and undertakings are intimate to him.
Home is in the work as well. We have it in the small ideogrammatic houses, like Hotels from the Monopoly set, that have been formed out of beeswax. These are resting precariously on other blocks of wax and against them they have framed paintings leaning. These paintings - originally generic ones of beautiful natural loci, gum trees and all - have mysteriously gained an occluding layer of wax themselves, inscribed with a plain blue line suggesting some clean, abstract horizon. Wax is energy: it converts to fuel, it converts to warmth. Wax has been home to a billion bees and their larvae before they were evicted, their honey comb structures erased and the wax rendered and melted into blocks, before being transmuted into our little shelter. A shelter based on a million evictions. There is something soft and warm and sensuous about beeswax - it has a smell that acts upon our nervous system in a particular way bringing to mind various thoughts of sunlight, meadows and warm furniture. A house, a home, in theory has some location, but here, particular locations have been erased (by wax) and have been replaced with the signification of a horizon: which is an event rather than a place, which marks the point at which we can no longer see the earth as it curves away from us, leaving us only with sky. Which part of the world forms the horizon is relative to where we stand.
There are homes too in Ehmann's use of eggshells, wrecked homes, as these eggs are now empty, more likely to be cracked open and voided by a cooks hand than broken by an emerging chick: a sort of abortion for nourishment. As with the beeswax we are between two states, between exile and nurture: eggs are also sustenance as well as shelter, either for the small chick suspended from its yellow sun or for us and other scavengers as we suck their protein down.
Ehmann's practice presents us with layers of binary flicker: a complex dialectic flicker, that is based in an intense materiality, where our response takes us one way, and then another in our constant reading. The materiality is if you wish the somatic: this is the matter of the body which we read and respond to with a layer of the nervous system that resides in, monitors, the body: this is the physiological event which provides the first part of Nietzsche's equation. The second part is provided by a system of allusion, of symbolism - a currently unfashionalble language rooted perhaps in the europeaan models of thought of which Nietche is part. The symbolic however is purposely vague in its operations: it is an engine for the generation of understanding (think of the Freudian construction of the symbolic) as much as a reading. With Ehmann's practice, we have an idea of 'what it is about' but at the same time we are only 'Almost There'. In this articulation, we are never 'There' entirely, where we can give up the tension of trying to make sense for the calm harbours of understanding. Not only is the practice a commentary 'on this world', it is equally 'of this world' with the lumpy muteness that this world possesses unless it is being read. It is through his willingness to engage with ideas of the symbolic, and to present us with conjunctions and oppositions, momentary syntaxes of arrangement and superimposition, that Ehmann suggests ways that the phenomenological world can be momentarily given form and some sort of 'sense', by our volition and our understanding: a sense that stands apart from the matrixes and approaches presumed by quotiidian contemporary practices.
The focus of this article are four installations by Franz Ehmann mounted between June 2000 and June 2001. They are presented in chronological sequence, but not to suggest that the works represent a linear progression. The nuances are described in some detail as a means of uncovering the interwoven complexities of Ehmann’s practice.
Open Panorama (Existenz)
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane: 15 June - 22 July 2000
Existenz is a bicameral, multi-element installation. A constructed
temporary wall, finished in natural wood, divides the space. On it
Ehmann mounts a pair of deer antlers; the attached skull cap fragment
was overpainted with an ‘Yves Klein’ blue. Wax fingers in red, yellow,
blue and black, cast from the artist’s hand, are installed in a tightly
spaced row from the floor to the bottom of the antlers. They ‘point’
to the vernacular, how things in the pre-industrial world were measured
in relationship to the body. In turn, the absent eyes of the deer line
up with a horizontal row of three ‘altered’ pictures purchased from
thrift shops. (The term ‘picture’ is used to describe the pictorial
sentimental as well as the lack of authenticity. They are
reproductions.) Ehmann covered them with a layer of beeswax, like a
heavy varnish, to obscure the image but enhance the object sentiment.
He added a blue horizon line across each.
White enamelled bowls sit on the floor, some with text fragments from
his wish list, written over the past few years and still in progress.
They are private thoughts and asides made public, wishful thinking,
ambient allusions and ruminations. Some bowls are filled with milk,
others with honey, mixing with the words. A dangling bare light bulb
is close to the rim of one bowl, as if illumination of a star, or an
incubator that speeds up the transformation of milk from liquid to a
clotted, soured state. The bowls are spread akimbo and direct us to
the side of the partition wall and to the other space. Here, a video
is projected into a galvanised wash basin (the bottom is painted white
for better image resolution), resting vertically again the reverse side
of the partition. Ehmann’s life-scaled hands are seen washing in
milk, and then covered in blue, washing once again. In Christian
symbolism, this is the washing of sin, but by adulterating the purity
of the milk, Ehmann makes the sin (the blue) visible, and thereby
reverses cultural symbolism wherein washing is meant to draw out the
invisible powers of the water. Blue is also the colour of the
infinite horizon of sky (as he imposes a blue horizon line on the
pictures). Further into the space is a two metre-wide overturned
table, with a second video projected onto the surface. Ehmann is in
performance, stretched out on a wooden floor with milk (purified
blood?), running out of his mouth. Around the table there is an oval
shaped massing of broken egg shells, five metres across at its longest
point. The light from the video projector plays across the egg shells;
Ehmann describes it ‘as if light catching tide and waves in motion’.
Open Panorama (what a perfect day)
Soapbox Gallery, Brisbane: 29 September - 18 October 2000
In contrast to Existenz, this is a proscenium tableau installation, but
Existenz elements make a repeat appearance. Mounted near-to-centre of
the wall, are the deer antlers. Around it is an arrangement of nine
thrift shop pictures. Two of them are overpainted to a black
monochrome, with the same blue horizon line added. Ehmann commented
that the ‘originals’ were so bad that the only solution was to
completely obscure them, what he described as ‘reworking dead art for a
perfect day’. Within the area of a low, yellow-painted platform, are
artist-made and manipulated found objects. On the opposing wall, there
is a hand-written wish text pinned to the ceiling and flowing onto the
floor. Bare blue light bulbs on extended yellow electrical cords hang
in front of the antlers and the text. The space is bathed in yellow
fluorescent light.
On the platform Ehmann placed nine peaked-roof, house-shaped objects.
In conversation, he spoke of their malleable associations; the
Monopoly game board house (hotel) with Gothic inspiration, or the
reliquary box. Conceptually, he refers to them as Heimat (‘homeland’
in German), where the heart is, rather than a named locality. Each is
covered/smothered in a different coloured wax - red, yellow, black,
and white - but one is made of dark brown chocolate, a fairy-tale
‘heimat’. Directly below the antlers, he placed three rabbits in a
row; one wooden, one ceramic and one made from wax (cast from the
ceramic rabbit). Bowls made of beeswax, some mixed with natural
pigments, are situated within the platform area. Off centre is a
galvanised bucket; the inside is burned, blackened with soot, and
filled with cracked eggs shells.
This is a diorama of silence and mix of mythologies and artifacts in
contrast to the anthropological version, which aspires to approximate
the real world. Even the lugubrious wax work museum wishes its
displays to be admired for life-likeness, rather than deadness.
Ehmann’s waxing seals fate, but here are sly and wry aspects; wax
softens in daylight. And while many of the elements are true-to life,
the Heimat houses are Lilliputian, ‘dwarfed’ by the nearby real-size
bowls and bucket of eggs. FT.1 Scale is an important consideration
for Ehmann, and why the Existenz videos are life-sized, in contrast to
the typical spectacle of oversized projections.
By emphasising a yellow aura through light and paint, Ehmann has
tainted (and tinted) the modernist white box gallery space - as he
does with the milk washing video - and given it a ‘sunny disposition’.
He sets multi-levelled associations into play; the pastoral-sublime
to the divine essence as it emanates from the sun. But there is no
sun, and industrial task lighting is often linked to drudge labour.
There is no question that the production of Ehmann’s objects are labour
intensive, even in their simplicity. The (daylight) clarity is also a
sharp contrast to the twilight space of Existenz, a dammerung where it
is neither night nor day. Existenz can be seen as a labyrinthe
experience. If we are the ‘tomb raider’ of our own psyche - as some
psychoanalytical streams would suggest - we turn a corner, confront
an apparition, our neuroses and fears. FT.2
In both installations, Ehmann is engaging the poetic potential of
space, as well as contradiction. We know the fluorescent lighting is
not a perfect day. By the same token, a panorama cannot be open. It
is a fixed viewing point with a peripheral view. The openness appears
in the sign and the symbolic. Ehmann’s floor orientation, typical of
his perspective, makes us look down to take note of what is
underfoot. He also asks us to look up, to see what is in our sight
line, to feel the light and the darkness, and consider the lived
experience.
Almost there...
Artspace, Sydney: 7 - 30 September 2000
Ehmann was given a short production lead time, one of the pressures for
the peripatetic artist. He prepared new elements; sewn (not
store-bought) aprons with wax objects placed inside the pockets, and
disembodied sleeves in small, large and extra large sizes. They were
hung in two rows, as Ehmann commented, ‘as if someone had just walked
off the job ... almost done, almost finished’. Elements from the
previous installations were incorporated in new contexts, adding to the
symbolic meaning. The pictures were leaned against blocks of wax
stacked as pedestals,with an enamelled and wax bowl nearby. Heimat
houses were placed on top and bare light bulbs dangled over top. A
large mound of cracked eggs shells was situated within the area, and a
monitor on the floor played back the Existenz video. Ehmann had
wanted to project the video, but there was no equipment available. He
altered the viewing orientation by resting one edge of the monitor on a
bowl, sympathetic to the tape content. In contrast to the first two
installations, ‘Almost there ...’ was a walk-on stage to be viewed
above and below, as heavenly signs and earthly remains.
Almost there (again...)
Casula Powerhouse, NSW: 5 May - 10 June 2001
Again, Ehmann was presented with short production lead time, hence the
return to the ‘almost there’ title. Industrial pallets were laid out
on the floor in a nine by five metre area. Over the surface he
arranged white enamelled bowls with wish list text excerpts inside,
some filled with milk; a galvanised laundry wash bucket with milk
covering the bottom; one picture; two Heimat houses; and small piles
of potatoes and raw eggs. The platform was made higher in two section
by double stacking pallets. One of the sections was covered with 90kg
of wax blocks, the size of house bricks. On the other, he placed two
black waxed shirts. On the the far wall of the gallery space Ehmann
hung an element made from the twenty-five aprons from the Artspace
installation. The front pocket of the facing apron was filled with
wax, visible outside of the pocket, and which had three visible bite
marks.
The overview was a landscape orientation, but also an immense
table/room setting. The roughly-made pallets can be seen as an
expression of Japanese ‘sabi’ - the beauty of imperfection. FT.3 At
the opening, Ehmann stationed himself on the platform and prepared
rösti, a thinner version of typical Swiss potato pancake, made with
grated raw potatoes and eggs (from the installation elements), and
quickly grilled. It is peasant food, common to many agri-cultures:
the latke in Euro-Jewish cooking, and kartoplyanyky for Ukrainians.
(The polyglot, ever-morphic culture of urbanised America gives them the
guttural name, ‘hash browns’.) The perfomative aspect, as Ehmann wrote
for the Casula publication notes is ‘a daily routine’ - not a drudge
routine - a commonplace ritual and a form of communion as he
distributed rösti for all to sample. Cooking presents an appealing
metaphor, connected to essential sustenance, but with a sense of
pleasure and some distant connection to the land, the pastoral. Ehmann
placed a uneaten rösti on the picture -- the ‘potato reembracing the
land’. Or, just a leftover.
Thoughts on the raw and the cooked.
At the end of the Casula publication, Ehmann asks, ‘what is my life
worth as an artist?’ Ironically, it is probably valued less by society
than that of a chef. The unavoidable subtext is the predicament of art
that defies clear categorisation. The obsessive categorisation by
historians and curators is a form of overcooking an artist’s practice.
And if not to the art world’s prevailing taste, it is put aside, left
undigested. Ehmann’s work sits at the edge of the current stream of
discourse, perhaps even comparable practices: he works and thinks
differently. The results -- the traces -- are different enough.
Ehmann confesses that English is not his language, that art is not his
language and that writing in his work comes and goes like the seasons.
FT.4 What he claims for himself is food, cooking and life. The first
four pages of the Open Panorama publication show a panoramic view of
his table, it could be a chef’s table, laden with foodstuffs and
cooking pots. There is a herb vinaigrette recipe in the publication.
I’ve never tried, but I should. I also wonder, that in a brave new
world of service industries, if you eat, you should you also be able to
cook. It seems fundamental, but no one ever asked an art (music or
food) critic to drop the pen and prove themselves.
I have written about Ehmann on three previous occasions and contexts.
I said that his work is not about making things -- the way the most
casual of painters or sculptors can still make a resolute thing that
can be described in width, breadth and height. I also described him as
a fugitive, slipping across borders. Ehmann asks us to partake of his
peripatetic state, but also invites us to the meal. We spoke recently
after an impromptu meal that I had prepared. Thinking back, I should
have worked harder at my preparations. To extend the analogy, the
preparation of food requires an articulation of space -- to lay out the
ingredients and bring them together at the right moment, in the right
quantities. My written description is a way of verifying the
ingredients of Ehmann’s installations. They are temporarily charged
spaces with the carefully considered placement of elements. For
example, we may shuffle the furnishings of our rooms; nothing changes
in content, but the way in which we experience these (familiar) things
is altered. The cooked requires more effort than the raw, bloodied
encounter, and cooking only begins with a recipe. Ehmann engages the
raw and the cooked, and speaks like a whisper to the inner ear,
existence, the perfect day, and being ... almost there.
--30--
FT.1 Ehmann’s ‘Heimat’ brings to mind the ‘village idiot’ in Woody
Allen’s 1975 film, Love and Death, loosely based on War and Peace. The
‘idiot’ shows off his home and land -- a model house on a lump of sod
-- which he carries around.
FT. 2 The table and projection overflow is another clue to the
metaphor. In German it can be expressed as ‘das leben auf dem tisch
legen,’ to pour your life on the table.
FT.3 I am not suggesting that Ehmann’s intent is a Japanese connection,
but there is a resonance to a commentary on ‘dark’ food presented in
the dimly-lit room. See Jun-ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows,
(Leete’s Island Books, New Haven, Conn., 1977) pp15-17.
FT. 4 Open Panorama (IMA 2000), jacket flap