Kirsten Pieroth: Klosterfelde/Portikus

In her new works, the young Berlin-based artist Kirsten Pieroth is pertain toed with invention--in particular, with the greatest in quantity famous inventor of them all, Thomas Alva Edison. The drawn out title of Pieroth's Berlin exhibition, "I lamentation that a previous engagement stops me from accepting your kind invitation to dinner at your dwelling on Thursday evening, September seventeenth" is taken from the inventor's correspondence. on the contrary is the reason Edison gives for declining the invitation true? Or is it barely an invention? The artist lay this question to the scholar in charge of Edison's papers, who musing an invention likely; a great-grandson of the inventor concurr Pieroth therefore asked a patent attorney about registering Edison's probably invented reason for his nonappearance. Unsuccessfully of course. on the other hand why? It was, after all, another invention by the agency of a man to whom more than a thousand patents were awarded. Pieroth neared her correspondence in a display case, with Edison's original alphabetic character framed on the wall nearby, below the title Letter of an Inventor (all works 2003)

A photograph of Edison asleep upon a workbench (he famously slept alone four hours a day and used each opportunity to make up for not to be found time) bearing a forged signature inspired Pieroth to bring into view a wooden workbench likewise bearing the signature of the inventor, this time forged through the artist. Next to Edison's Workbench Pieroth placed Edison's Restbench, this time a reproduction of a bench in Edison's garden on the other hand decked out with small, sharp nails that pillage it of its function. As a nonutilitarian reality it becomes, in allusion to Surrealist realitys like Man Ray's iron with nails, an artistic "invention." by the agency of contrast, the safe exhibited in the space is no invention: It was set behind a hollow wall during a remodeling of the gallery. Knowing, however, that a safe was also discovered in the course of a new excavation of the cellar of Edison's first laboratory accommodate withs this object a level of fictional association not entirely alien to the properties of invention or unrestrained of the element of chance. on the other hand can there be invention without accident? Is not invention, including artistic invention, a contingent coincidence of associative processes?

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"From the Laboratory of Thomas A. Edison" was the title of the exhibition in Frankfurt. It consisted of sum of two units works. One was simply a blank piece of stationery from the inventor's laboratory hung in a frame upon the wall. Alongside this were a pair of photographs of a made of wood shed, known as Building #11 which was used as a chemical lab at Edison's Research Center in West Orange, novel Jersey. In 1940 this shed was left to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum broke it down into individual pieces and rebuilded it in Michigan. There it stood until 2002 when it was transported back to West Orange, where it stands again today. The shed has lengthy since lost its function as a chemical laboratory to become an exhibit that unexpectedly finds itself, in its original location, as a replica, if not as of recent origin invention. Taking the photographs of Building #11 as her original Pieroth reproduced the lathes, boards, and window and door frames that would presumably be necessary for a reconstruction of the laboratory shed. They were piled upon the floor of the exhibition space and stacked along the walls. single is free to produce a transcript of the laboratory shed. on the other hand what will this reconstructed shed then be? A transcript a forgery, or an invented art object?

--Noemi Smolik

Translated from German through Diana Reese.

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