Christian Jankowski: Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst

Right in the hall behind the museum's entrance, where openings are usually held, stood a cardboard doll theater painted in gestural azure strokes and placed behind sum of two units spotlights on a rickety tripod of bamboo extremitys The curator's opening remarks and an improvised dialogue with the artist, in the broad accents of the Baden region, were staged here as a kind of bore and Judy routine. A videotape of the circumstance ran on a monitor upon a nearby tabletop on sawhorses, which also contained a volume opened for visitor comments: "Of course, the world itself is a tautology. Still, greatest in quantity acts of self-referential art draw near across as boring and self-important. on the other hand not here. 'Art is not dead, it just scents funny.'"

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In this work, as in others, Christian Jankowski uses a popular medium to take upon the discourses of the art world as if--a la Jean-Francois Lyotard--he had to explain postmodernism one time more, this time to the kids. From a point above the cash register at the museum entrance, where in supermarkets individual would usually find a security monitor, Jankowski not absented the video Die Jagd (The Hunt) 1992 in which packages of sugar and toilet paper are vanquished with curve and arrow before landing in the shopping cart as trophies. At the speck where the visit to an exhibition revolves into a purchase, the artist himself intrudes into the shopping brake as an archaic hunter. This anachronistic action may serve to remind us of the anachronism of the individual artist in the age of highly technologized media. on the other hand with his various collaborations, Jankowski deliberately breaks with this character for artists. Telemistica, 1999, has become well known: A series of Italian TV fortune-tellers predict the artist's succes at the Venice Biennale. The consecrated Artwork, 2001, was a television homily by Pastor Peter Spencer in the Harvest Fellowship meeting-house in San Antonio, Texas. Jankowski's greatest in quantity complex collaborative project was the seven pageants of the art world in the film Rosa, 2001 in which parts of the film Viktor Vogel--Commercial Man (2001) by dint of Lars Kraume were expanded by the agency of Jankowski with the help of Kraume's film ship's company "What's the value of art? What part does longing play in the arts? Where are the limitations of art? What do art and humor have in common? What is beauty in art? in what manner free is the free artist? Do art and system of exchanges influence each other?" With similar fundamental questions, put to the art industry, Jankowski throw backs on his own praxis, in which serious inquiry is indistinguishable from travesty. flat the genres of his consummately scripted and shot films take their catchword from the functions of the art system: The Matrix issue 2000, made for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, is moderated by the agency of children in the style of museum docents, while art criticism and theory find their counterpart in the Texas sermon

It may be that after the narcissistic '80 and '90 there's not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of left to say about the market that hasn't already been said. Still, Jankowski dislodges all the cliches here from their affirmative or cynically critical anchors and subdues them to a liberating dose of self-irony. "When you make an artistic mistake as an engineer, it can have dramatic consequences!!!" according to individual of the numerous text-based textiles hanging upon the wall or thrown into piles as in a laundromat. Liberated from the pathos of modernity and the effusive giddiness of party agriculture art could certainly have issues once more. Why not dramatic ones?

--Hans Rudolf Reust

Translated from German by dint of Sara Ogger.

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