I guess Robert Kusmirowski just wasn’t made for these times. Although
his work – comprising sculpture, drawing, architecture and performance
in roughly equal measure – keeps pace with contemporary art, it comes
with a knowingly antiquated sense of work ethic (in 2003 he rode from
Paris to Leipzig on a 19th-century bicycle, dressed in period garb) and
craftsmanship (from an early age he painstakingly forged bus passes and
postage stamps for his entire family). In his installations he showcases
his uncanny ability to craft replicas for illusionistic effects of
decay and ageing, though he does it more in the spirit of the
19th-century artist than a Hollywood special-effects technician. But in
contrast to artists such as Gregor Schneider or Mike Nelson, Kusmirowski
doesn’t go to great lengths to disguise his tableaux’ institutional
setting; the edges of his interventions are clearly visible. Attempting,
as he puts it, to ‘build an aura from scratch’, he insinuates his own
constructions into existing ones, using accumulations of found objects
and faux replicas, creating an amalgamated, indeterminate patchwork of
history and its simulation, not unlike the post-Communist landscape of
his native Poland. The result is less about the relationship between
traditional craftsmanship and artificial simulation than the disjunction
between the installation and its context.
With his latest large-scale instalment, Ornamente der Anatomie (The
Ornaments of Anatomy, 2006), in Hamburg, Kusmirowski attempted to evoke
the presence of Dr Vernier, the mad scientist and author of the
eponymous book. At the exhibition’s entrance I encountered an old door
mounted in a fake white wall, introducing the recurring theme of secret
worlds hidden behind closed doors (though I didn’t get to open any doors
myself here). The corridor opened into a vast library lined with
shelves crammed with books scavenged from used bookshops or public
libraries. I thought for a moment that this could be the Kunstverein’s
new library: but the obvious disjuncture between the proportions of
Kusmirowski’s constructed shelves and the height of the building itself
made the shelves look as though they were struggling to fill the space.
The books included pulp paperbacks, old copies of Rolling Stone and
obscure technical volumes, including one called AIDS 1999. I was drawn
to a three-ringed binder temptingly labelled ‘Information’, though I
didn’t dare remove it. Among the shelves were spot-lit nooks with small,
vaguely cultish art works. In its archiving of the arcane the place
resembled Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology, but it lacked its
thoroughness: rather than being able to dig deeper into the world
Kusmirowski created, I was bound to bump up against the illusion. When I
tried to open the card catalogue, I couldn’t pull out the drawers.
Apparently the library was just for effect.
The atmosphere was more palpable in the next room, through a secret
(already open) door in the library wall. This huge, locker-like space
looked like a witch doctor’s den cluttered with medical miscellanea –
though the perfect squareness of the space still suggested its role as a
former white cube. The walls were covered in a pinkish fake marble,
evoking a kind of soiled grandeur. Scientific arcana mingled with thrift
store finds and cleverly faked relics, including a broken ceramic
skeleton in a glass case, a musty velvet chair and an open drawer filled
with disused doorknobs. But these items were all pushed to the sides of
the room, as if to encourage looking rather than rummaging. A wooden
desk was topped with a grotesque anatomical drawing of a baby opened
down the middle, tiny animal skulls, unidentified specimens floating in
jars and X-rays labelled with Polish names in red marker pen. In the far
corner a large metal cage held an operating theatre, with a surgical
table with two frighteningly realistic decaying bodes surrounded by
electric drills and old prosthetics. The place harked back to a time
when medical science wasn’t governed by ethics. It gave me the creeps.
Kusmirowski’s work rests heavily on our ability to detect the aura he
is trying to summon. Unfortunately, the séance was interrupted every
time I had to mentally sort the real objects from the forged ones, or
each time I saw through the installation to the building’s architecture.
Although Kusmirowski sets himself apart from artists making similar
installations by allowing his scenarios to collide with the
institutional framework, I found myself wishing that he had gone
further; his work comes off as conceptually inconsistent. At the opening
of the exhibition the artist stowed himself away behind a portrait of
Dr Vernier, with only one eye exposed to spy on unsuspecting visitors.
Similarly, walking through the show, rather then sensing the ghost of Dr
Vernier, I was all too aware that the absent person here was
Kusmirowski.
Christy Lange
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