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POP SONGS AND COWBOY DREAMS
It all starts with some chalk lines in a leafy suburb. Looking from the top floor, you can see assorted white rectangles and squares, similar to the white markings on a football pitch. The green lawn is the canvas. At ground level, all you can perceive are some random chalk lines that don't give away the overall design. This is a work by Tilo Schulz in Leipzig, his hometown, commissioned for the Media Biennale in 1994. Schulz knows well the neighbourhood because he grew up there, and is well aware of the implications and the effect that this subtle intervention may have among the neighbours. The designs are literal copies of some originals on a blackboard and are related to a more extended concept of painting that the artist uses to describe his work. But this is not merely a literal formal rendition. These drafts or chalk sketches are only visible from the buildings situated right opposite, so that the audience is a selected number of people: the inhabitants of the estate. This "painting in an extended field" questions the whole idea of art in a public space by using models that raise questions about the nature of late-modernist Architecture.(1)
Speaking of how the members of pop band Luna and Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier covered the original Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot song "Bonny & Clyde".
This simple intervention already shows the potential of Tilo Schulz's work for analysing a series of conditions and is typical of his later work.
A common denominator shared in all his projects is that they always manage to convey a certain degree of mediation and communication. Mediation between ideas, works, the public and different audiences, artists, conditions, wishes...
Very often Schulz reflects on other artists' work and ideas, and also questions the structures used by the art system. He develops strategies to mediate art and to analyse the conditions of production and reflection within an institutional context.
For this purpose, Schulz makes a preliminary, precise analysis of the structures wherein to place his work, creates aesthetic models and methods of expanding the knowledge and the development of the idea of mediation.
The interventions start from the peripheral conditions around the artistic activity, to focus on a system that highlights and reveals its structure and meaning without neglecting the visual and aesthetic aspects or his personal interests.
I will mention as an example one project at the New Fairground in Leipzig in 1996/97, where a group of artists were invited to create a site-specific work. Schulz took the responsibility of communication - both critical and pedagogical - of the works, speaking to different audiences from inside and outside the art world. He established this mediation through the co-operation of different educational institutions and workshops, lectures, guided tours, articles in local papers and postcards.
Another key work by Tilo Schulz that would give us an insight into his methods is "a reopening of sture johannesson. by tilo schulz" at Y1 in Stockholm in 1999. For this occasion, the artist recycled and re-contextualized posters by the nineteen sixties Swedish designer of psychedelic posters Sture Johannesson. Subtly Schulz took the posters down, painted the walls sky blue and re-hung them more carefully in the same position. A printed postcard introduced the show. In the sixties, many political artists encouraged their colleagues to reconsider Folk culture, changing their canvases for the political poster, with all its possibilities. To re-open a Sture Johannesson exhibition without Sture Johannesson himself is a way of introducing again this discourse from the past, to reclaim from the context of the Swedish art world a peripheral character, to point at a specific interest in the possibilities of graphic design and to focus on posters as media. Through this intervention, institutional patterns, rhythms and codified meanings were questioned, just re-framing conceptually some posters that were already there and making things visible from a different perspective.
This low-key altering gesture reveals one of the keys to Tilo Schulz's production: his interest in other artists' work as part of his own creative process, concepts such as display and the awareness of how presentation is tied to the change of taste in time and gives meaning to the slightest alteration.
Of Glasgow's Belle and Sebastian's musical phenomenon at the end of the 90's. In 1996, they recorded the album "If you are feeling sinister".
Another feature in the work of Tilo Schulz is the presence of discursive aspects and meta-levels of knowledge that have pre-eminence over practical, every day questions; bits from advertising and graphic design, directing in a multi-layered reading. More than just the possibilities of the structure, this artist is interested in questions of gender, sexuality and developments in the realm of the social, with the help of fiction.
Almost none of his shows and projects in public spaces include any original artworks. This art without originals is a substitute for the art exhibition, an illustration of the term "display", as understood by Tilo Schulz.
This important feature is taken to its ultimate conclusion, almost gilding the lily, in the exhibition "How to make a group show without inviting anybody" at the Dogenhaus Gallery in Leipzig in 2001. The artist bought three copies of sculptures by the 19th century artist Frederic Remington on the Internet: Three small bronzes of a cowboy, a mountain man and a trooper, all on their horses.
Tilo Schulz is interested in Frederic Remington in a broad sense: Remington's body of work includes illustration, painting, sculp- ture, poetry, fiction and non-fiction, with the American West always as his reference and source of inspiration. Remington travelled to the Wild West at the end of the 19th century, with the intention of exploring and illustrating the conquest and its heroes: cowboy, lumberjack or gentleman. But the era of discoveries and exploring a new civilisation had already vanished. Remington created an iconography of the West: male archetypes, roles, attitudes... what would later come to be known as a western male identity.
Tilo Schulz follows the mechanisms of such archetypes. He is attracted to the figure of the cowboy from a personal point of view, but this figure may also work as a contemporary model to explain current modes of behaviour. "How do these archetypes still resonate today? How are they part of a historical basis to our everyday lives, as well as of the cultural production?" The title of this piece is "White square and three horsemen" (2001) and alludes to the possibility of developing a whole system starting from an artwork that already existed.
Tilo Schulz talks about three formal levels: 1) Each bronze sculpture stands on a base or platform; this is then stuck onto another one, 2) provided by the company that produces the sculpture, which itself stands on, 3) a third platform, added by Schulz himself, as a way of presenting them as his own work and as a metaphor about the different levels of meaning and about authorship, to which the title of the show itself refers.
This interest in how role models and identities are constructed is already present in the themes that constituted the series "Sunrise over the yellow stripes" at the Westfälischer Kunst- verein in Münster in 2000.
Tilo Schulz continues to work on the production of Frederic Remington by adding a progressive system of symbolic platforms and also references to songs and texts (a text by Jack Tracy about Lee Hazelwood and his album "Trouble is a lonesome town"(1963), or the Coen Brother's film "Fargo" (1996), where "Bronco Buster" (1895) and "The Cheyenne" (1901), two sculptures by Remington, appear).
This notion of ultra-communication has led Tilo Schulz to the use of fictional characters that he presents as real, both as associates or colleagues, and as part of his effort to reveal the thoughts and the interconnected networks inherent in his work. He uses, for example, self-interviews where he hides under the pseudonym Antonia Lock.
This fiction/reality axis is the base of "The Real and the Fake" (1999), a work in the form of a leaflet. In Schulz's words: "The Real and the Fake" revolves around the moment in which the reception of familiar things changes to the extent that one's previous understanding of the work is demolished. (...) Using a few discreet moves, the artists force visitors to abandon the impression they have just acquired of the artistic idea. This actually results in a new work, the reception of which forms an element of the work.(2)
Once again, Schulz uses others artists to describe a series of works that form a virtual art show. The footnote substitutes the artworks themselves. The blue leaflet describes works by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, Nathan Coley, Kri?tof Kintera and Antonia Simmons, are the objects and the work itself. This leaflet is placed on some shelves specially designed by the artist: The idea of display again. So how can we read, within this context, the Institute of Theoretical Research logo printed on the back of the leaflet, as well as the spatial displays? Is it real or fake? Is it a simulacrum? The categories of perception become thus categories of production, and vice-versa. Fragments of meaning are presented as aesthetic experience and as a way of spreading knowledge.
Like in Lawrence Weiner's statement: "the work can be produced by the artist; the work can be produced by somebody else, the work doesn't have to be produced", here, the decision is up to the recipient/receiver.
It's no longer about the state of "production", but about "post-production", a state that, like a virus, spreads meaning.
In this work we get, on the one side, a reduction of the art work experience to mere information (inherited from sixties and early seventies Conceptual art's debate), and on the other, the actual art work by the artists themselves, its description and interpretation, the original memory of the original art work and also the memory of the original through the mediation of the second author. Once again, we are in the presence of a minimalist, ultra-conceptual gesture, not too different from "reopening of sture johannesson". And to crown all this, a revelation: Antonia Simmons is part of Tilo Schulz's gallery of fictional characters, a fact that introduces a change to our idea of "Visitors", when reading the brief accompanying text.(3)
From his early beginnings as a painter, Schulz has been interested in discussing and measuring the preliminary conditions and the many possibilities that face the artist when producing an artwork. Therefore, all of his practice falls within these margins where things are not what they seem, creating situations of social confusion that eventually lead to interchange and analysis. Is what he calls "discussion instead of object production".
Of how Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout became a pop legend with songs such as "King of Rock'n'Roll" or "Cars and Girls", and how he eventually paid homage to the figure of the Cowboy in "The Gunman and Other Stories".
In "Sunrise over the yellow stripes", Tilo Schulz presents a great variety of collaborators and different audiences. This project starts once again from the acknowledgement of the conditions offered by the host institution: A collective exhibition entitled "Inside Out" at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, the presence in the show of another two artists and the continuous negotiation with the show's curator to give shape to the project's structure, a project spread over time.
Up to now, all is clear: the idea of appealing to different target-groups, through events or lectures held outside the Kunstverein, but related to this centre through a media campaign, and creating a flux of different audiences between the art space and other spaces spread all over town.
Once again, the project seems resolved from a structural point of view, but something crucial is missing: its content.
Schulz decided to focus, as prospective contents for the events, on subjects that interest him from a personal view: A lecture on women and football; homosexuality and public spaces; the myths surrounding youth gangs; even a Country music gig entitled "Cowboy Serenade - Fiction and Reality of the American Cowboy in Folk Songs and Texts". The artist describes the background to its subjects in terms of male and female societies.
The overall choice of subjects can also be read as a self-portrait of the artist through the choice of subjects that interest him as an individual.
An informative display in one of the corridors at the Kunstverein shows a blue wall painting that reminds us of the one at "Reopening..." there were also display boards and a shelf placed to accommodate the leaflets announcing the lectures and events. Both structure and contents complement each other and develop in a slow process of re-adaptation.
Of how Galaxie 500 made a record that sounded like what would eventually become Teenage Fan Club, and how Saint Etienne made a compilation titled "Smash the system, singles and more", a double album with old singles and b-sides, everything packaged with an ice-cream coloured cover.
In "The Return Of Display - What Does Exhibiting Mean In 2030?" one of his latest projects (2001), Tilo Schulz accepted a commissioned project from the art structure D.A.E in San Sebastian.
Four curators, artists and art critics were invited to present their ideas about exhibiting in general in the year 2030. The guests were Charles Esche, Carles Guerra, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt and Lisette Smits. The texts and proposals were published as posters that were distributed in different spaces around town: on the street; as part of a design pattern; in fashion and music shops; bookshops; libraries; museums; art galleries - where they could be picked up for free. At the same time, these texts were shown on D.A.E.'s website and a tight network of previews, interviews and press articles was established.
This project encompasses some of the aspects that form Schulz's previous works: 1) A reflection on exhibition as a medium without a conventional show, developing a platform where he invites collaborators to "e.w.e - exhibition without exhibition". 2) Posters and graphic design applied to displays and wallpapers, as shown in "body of work: the ideal exhibition", or in "reopening of sture johannesson". 3) An extended temporality and a study about different target-audiences and viewers, as shown on "Sunrise over yellow stripes". 4) A site-specific intervention in the city with the use of text, or his perception of the public space as display, (like his intervention for Manifesta 2, in Luxembourg).
The artist is interested in the exhibition as social convention, and as a phenomenon inherent to our culture. He wonders whether in the future, exhibitions will be still a part of art, or whether society (whose paradigms are Big Brother, CCTV, fashion design and a new, technological picture), will collapse in such a way that there will be no need for the idea of exhibitions, as we currently understand it in art circles.(4)
The four texts resulting from "The Return of Display" are not so much a specific idea of an exhibition of the future as more a series of speculations, possible future scenarios, brief essays, science-fiction texts and literature.
Beyond its structure, the overall project occupies a space between literature, art and design; between fiction and reality; visibility and invisibility; today and tomorrow, now and then; utopia and post-utopia.
Of how Morrissey recorded "Suedehead" and about the lengthy titles in The Smiths's songs.
Schulz utilizes different working practices typical of visual arts, advertising, marketing and information design. The communication of art in the semiotic jungle of visual culture is one of his objectives, as is the development of ethical and aesthetic models of reflection. It is as if, to construct his discourse, he needs either to produce or to bring forth models for debate.
In all the works discussed in this essay, it's impossible to separate the object from the distribution channels (texts, posters, leaflets, lectures, form, layout, or other interactive elements).
Tilo Schulz is part of a generation of artists who do not limit their activities to those regarding art production: He is artist, curator and author all in one, stressing the fact that we live in a time where the figure of the middleman is pre-eminent. If we look at his work as a whole, we can only stress the fact that we are in the middle of a process of post-production, re-contextualization, analysis and back to scratch.
Despite him not calling himself a designer, Schulz uses a very personal, instantly recognisable style in his graphic design, close to a Modernism that uses simple forms and elements. He then remixes all this, with a tendency for meta-design.
He also enjoys Literature and pop music, and he doesn't hesitate to use any reference, no matter how intimate it seems. This is his human touch to a dominant discourse.
Translation: Itziar Bilbao Urrutia
1 "I was rebelling against the city space's decoration as a form of public art. Instead, my proposal was to activate the people". (Quote from a conversation with the artist).
Those people, Tilo Schulz writes, "didn't perceive the chalk scribbles within an art context at all. Instead, they were perceived as an intervention that related to an existing situation within the estate, about insecurity, or, in some cases, they made them speculate as to their possible practical uses". (Quoted from "Painting and discourse as a model", by Olaf Nicolai. Kunst in der Neuen Messe.)
2 Taken from the original leaflet "The Real and the Fake", in the exhibition "After the Wall", Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. He shares this project with other artists as "e.w.e", "The Return of Display" or "Body of Work: The Ideal Exhibition", the possibility of exploring, questioning and criticise the limits of the exhibition as medium in contemporary art. He also shares with them its mediatic form, such as posters, multiples, leaflets, etc.
3 "You suddenly find yourself standing next to somebody and strike up a harmless conversation. They give some additional details about the works on display, insider information on the exhibition. Or they may elicit initial reactions from 'real' visitors. Yet can we still talk about reality at this point? The only way of perceiving Simmons' visitors as art is to question their motivation. They then explain that this question-and-answer game or the chance meet-and-chat have been deliberately set up - and themselves constitute a work of art." (Original extract from "The Real and the Fake").
4 Like in "exhibition without exhibition". The Catalan artist and writer Carles Guerra talks about Schulz's work and about this project in particular, describing it using the
formal comparison to a doughnut, "a persisting image was a doughnut - shaped one, specially in "e.w.e." All the communication around an event that does not exist sees a formal representation in a doughnut - like structure. The tone in the different discourses, the interpretations, the representations and the ideas replace the central event of the exhibition. It's as if the content had been generated around an empty void". (Quote from material in "The Return of Display", D.A.E. San Sebastian, 2001).
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