Melvin Moti

Art and kitsch, high culture and mass culture, art work and culture industry – the time-honoured delimiting gestures of bourgeois distinction have persisted well into the present. Even the countless mass-cultural gestures of the contemporary art scene hardly change this distinction. But Melvin Moti’s work seems to effortlessly avoid these oppositions. He puts the question differently: not so much ‘Is it art?’ as ‘What actually is it in the end?’

At his first gallery exhibition in Berlin, ‘Eigengrau (The Inner Self in Outer Space)’, Moti presented one work from 2011 with this same title (Eigengrau – intrinsic grey – is the colour the human eye perceives in total obscurity). The work consisted of a 35mm film installation, a series of framed colour photographs and a limited edition artist book. Together, the elements of the exhibition – film, photography and print – presented exemplary crafted artefacts detached from their respective social histories: British vases, Iranian wood carvings and a Thai figure in gold leaf, all of them from the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). But in Moti’s case, the artefacts have not been detached from their contexts for the sake of an increase in museal distinction, as was once done at the museum.

On the contrary, Moti’s selection seems arbitrary, his artefacts appear to be independent protagonists of a cultural history without distinctions. So it seemed only logical that the 35mm film screened at the start of the exhibition should have shown these very objects floating freely for 19 minutes, orbiting like meteors in a zero-gravity space populated with model planets. This universe appears to encompass each of its objects with the same intent interest – yet without establishing any sort of hierarchy between them. In the artist book, Moti’s photographs of the items from the V&A collection are printed without frames. And the adjacent captions are not his but those of the museum, where the contextless fetishization of objects engenders an interior space with as little fresh air as the outer space in Moti’s film.

By parading the principle of decontextualization as an artistic gesture – carried along by the analogue sci-fi aesthetic of the 1970s, by glowing colours and plays of light – Moti’s aestheticization of the contextless took on a life – and a context – of its own. He wrote a number of texts to accompany the show, entangling his work in a complex net of references. The invitation referred solely to the exhibition title; the press release concentrated on the role of the V&A; whilst the essay in his artist book traced an array of distinguishing characteristics in cultural education. Thus the artist himself made more than enough material available for a historical, social and cultural grounding, but the disconnectedness and contradictoriness of the texts did not allow the information to be hierarchized. This exhibition, along with the texts, was nourished by an intent fixation on its own constituent elements.
Translated by Jonathan Blower