ARTIST STATEMENT

I often work with series of connected, spatial situations and actions that involve almost all conceivable traditional forms of artistic expression: painting, sculpture, drawing, objects, video, photography, performance, etc.

With an interest in stratified levels of creative activity and its varied manifestations, my practice references both the quotidian experience and the endeavours of high culture. While simultaneously embodying the hobbyist and the contemporary artist, I employ traditional craft techniques as well as a conceptualized approach to production.

The opposition between form and content is amplified by an embedding of production into different cultural formats. This may best be understood through my engagement with various cultural institutions in the form of the artist’s commission. This collaborative model of production requires an adaptation of identity within the shifting contexts of each institution. The results reflect both the potential, as well as the limitations, of this power dynamic.

The positioning of such a cultural production always needs the mediation by a producer who can cross or overlap with institutional interests, but also establishes a parallel system of interpretation. It can be executed inside the classical formats (as talks guided tours, lectures or presentations) or get lost in the process of mediation and turn towards another product. But, in both cases, the transport of new means helps to support or torpedo the intended project from an extra point of view and interferes with the institutional/curatorial practise. The foundation of an artistic discourse that does not reference previously articulated theory, but makes step-by-step thoughts and, consequently, creates thinking about practise that is sub-theory.

In my publications, the request for explanation must be read against the autonomy of each particular production so each can independently serve a function before documenting work. This is especially true with the publication project DER RIECHER (translates to: The Sniffler), which started in 1999 and continues as a form where the artist’s writing is embedded into the format of a newspaper. Each number is on a folded piece of paper (DIN A4 or US letter size) and conceives day-to-day information that is presented under continuously changing titles. The function is to discover in a practical experiment what do you do, if you do newspaper: making the making is the radical pragmatism

The continuous dialog between the autonomous object and its varying frameworks, whether they are given or invented, allows an audience to engage with meanings that are never outside, but inside, the constructed aesthetic platform. In a situation where the secret is obviously a trick, the power of knowledge looses control but, instead, asks for a step on the platform to find out about the laid-out parameters and their play.

Bernd Krauss 2010