Albrecht Schäfer
Modular forms - whether used for a bookshelf, an instant city or a space station - once had enormous ultra-modern appeal. They're still appealing today, encouraging us to contemplate the space between what someone once thought we would be in the future and what we actually are. Albrecht Schäfer has based his un-identical twin modular installations Florina (1998) and Centrum (1998) on two specific examples of the module at work: a toy and a building facade, both of which are from the post-war era. Exploring his source material through an installation that anticipates multiple sites, displacement, alterations in scale and material transformation, he opened up the sculptural potential of his subject matter.
Florina filled a room with bin-lid-sized, inter-linked artificial snowflakes, constructed entirely from meticulously cut polystyrene. If it were not so elegantly made, it might have seemed like winter window-display leftovers. The work is a precise enlargement of a late-50s, West German toy of the same enigmatic name. The original is a kind of flat, plastic, coin-sized industrial designer's flower - a mathematical bloom. The abstract petals of the identical pieces enable them to be slotted together, much like graphic depictions of docking viruses.
The snowflakes were installed as if the work had grown like cancers inside the gallery. Standing amongst the structure you felt as if you could see the paint molecules of the white gallery walls. Florina branched off in every direction, from floor to ceiling and from corner to corner, leaving only a narrow walkway from the entrance of the gallery to the office. Modular structures anticipate their own expansion. Most toys are crude social tools as well as 'enhancers of extended play experiences' (to use child-rearing jargon). Maybe Florina, the toy, demonstrates the 'virtues' of production and reproduction - its harnessed but potentially chaotic creativity seemed to prepare children for the serious businesses of science, engineering and architecture - if not sculpture.
Centrum was a five minute walk away in the ambient attic of an independent project space - Kunstraum Mitte. The installation was also a modular construction, made from approximately 500 A3, cut and folded paper units, which had been stapled together to create a net formation. The result was a scaled-down replica of the facade of Centrum Warenhaus - the biggest department store in downtown East Berlin, designed by architects Josef Kaiser and Günter Kunert as part of the massive, symbolic socialist rehash of Alexanderplatz in the late 60s. The installation, however, was on too human a scale to work like an architectural model, and the facade had been transformed into an abstract, geometric surface.
Its construction from funky, white-painted aluminium modules, which veil the building's ox-blood-red substructure, created the effect of the entire building levitating above its windswept people's plaza. By turning the outside inward, Schäfer created a strange, anti-centrifugal psychological atmosphere. He has also created a porous white cube within the gallery (itself, neither white nor cubic). Aware of its own displacement, Centrum adopted a coquettish posture - detached from, but involved with, the crumbling walls surrounding it.
Both installations were entirely white, the supreme colour of early Modernist architecture, which never actually was what its propaganda purported it to be - pure, rational, clean or the ultimate colour-choice. White evokes an artificial untouched-by-this-world feeling, as if clinical trials have yet to be made on walking, talking, working people. But in the case of the artefacts reproduced by Schäfer, the trials are over and the products are as good as defunct.
To celebrate the end of Centrum, Schäfer organised a special event. DJ Mo (wearing a tie made of pearls), one of the creative forces behind Berlin record label Elektro Music Department, transformed the installation into a decorative mini-club. The music, a mix of sophisticated techno tracks by herself and others, paralleled the installation perfectly. The static facade seemed punctuated by the music's layered, mechanical rhythms and replicated by its internal loops and modules.
