Don Quixote
Like the arms of a huge steel octopus, the struts and supports of Michael Beutler’s installation, Not Yet Titled (2006), spanned all of the exhibition’s four zones: a kind of stage-set for each section. Reaching from floor to ceiling and framing the entire space, the construction looked stable and functional, as if it could take the weight of spotlights or loudspeakers. When touched, however, the whole gigantic structure started swaying: Not Yet Titled is attached neither to floor, ceiling nor walls. It rests on water, in four nondescript tubs in which the level of the liquid is just high enough to accommodate the supports: columns with pools instead of plinths. An extremely wobbly affair, it is cobbled together out of cheap metal, printed plastic sheeting, black pond-liners and grimy water.
In this group exhibition of works by 22 artists – Nicolaus Schafhausen’s début as director of Witte de With and the first show at the new venue, co-curated with Sophie von Olfers – cheap materials reigned supreme. The overall effect was like a cross between the art of engineering precarious structures and the improvisatory prowess of the DIY enthusiast. This was rendered all the more disconcerting by the fact that the gallery’s windows offer panoramic views of the city: cranes, diggers, fences, shells of buildings and the skeletons of dismantled old tower blocks which appeared as extensions of the ramshackle installation. Ubiquitous reels of cable, flimsy stands holding lamps, and steel cabinets for the video recorders replied to the hustle and bustle of the building site. In the case of Ryan Gander’s free-standing fibreglass wall A Slowing of the Spectator’s Eye (2005) it would come as no surprise to see someone cart off this element with its Brutalist décor for inclusion in some kind of prefabricated concrete structure.
But the eye soon adjusted, as the stage set for art here was subtler than it initially appeared. While diggers eat their way through the soil and the city outside gets denser by the day, art does not simply establish an abstract order but creates space for instabilities. Johanna Billing’s DVD projection Magical World (2005) features a choir of boys and girls from Zagreb, Croatia, with rattles and triangles, singing the soul classic by Sidney Barnes from which the piece takes its name. This group show was bedded on a sound that at times feels just as wobbly and home-made as the watery anchors in Beutler’s installation.
Occasionally a rumbling could be heard from another corner. For Thunder (2005) the London artist Hannah Rickards stretched a recording of a roll of thunder to a length of eight minutes and asked composer David Murphy to transcribe it into a suite for eight instruments, only to compress the resulting recording back to the original length of the thunder. In another corner time was interfered with in a different way: World Trade Center (2006), Chris Moukarbel’s pirate version of the next Oliver Stone blockbuster, was made in the artist’s studio using fragments of the original script: it includes a dialogue between two firemen trapped by a terrorist drama in what may be their final hour. By the time the film opened at cinemas worldwide in August the exhibition was already over.
The hero of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote (1605–15) – the seminal precursor to the modern novel – is a romantic figure of great sadness. However, his demise is due less to windmills and highwaymen than to his belief in chivalric epics. This motif figures in this exhibition in the way that art appears so fragmentary as to make believing in it potentially dangerous. At the same time the works were not so much exhibited as staged – only after the closing credits of the video works did lamps come on to light the tiny paintings by Christopher Orr and Anj Smith. This is an unfair settlement between media: time-based video works and painting only came to the fore at intervals, freeing both from the triviality of permanent presence. During his time in Frankfurt, with shows such as ‘Emotion 1’, Schafhausen already demonstrated that contemporary art can also be staged like grand opera or theatre – as part of a calculated interplay, the works develop an articulacy that goes beyond their individual impact. While elsewhere inner worlds are in great demand, with personal mumbling and psychological kitsch on display, as if every artist today has a wound, ‘Don Quijote’ threw the windows wide open to reveal a half-forgotten secret – the outside.
