The Architectural Association at Bedford square was hosting a talk with Jeff Kipnis and Tobias Rehbergher. Jeff Kipnis is a Professor of Architectural Design and Theory at the School of Architecture at Ohio State. He is also a filmmaker, curator and critic. Tobias Rehberger is a German artist who creates environments where furniture, sculpture, design and all other kinds of media come together. His work is created with the help of friends, family and people he has never even met so that what is produced contains elements of the artist as well as the people who helped create it.
I had never heard of Rehberger and did some research on him before going to the talk. After doing some research and looking at some of his works I found out that Rehberger had an interesting way of making his work. For one he never confines himself to one discipline so he creates paintings, furniture, cars, garages, videos, installations, and posters. Most of his work is done through group participation and the notion of the singular genius artist is not something he is interested in, instead he questions notions of authorship through his work. The openness of Rehberger to incorporate all kinds of media is something that draws my attention when looking at artists and the ways in which they make the work, which is why I decided to go to this talk.
Jeff Kipnis invited Rehberger to talk at the AA because he realised that although Rehberger has worked with many different kinds of people he had never invited a critic to participate in any of his works. So Kipnis asked Rehberger to join him in this talk after spending little time with him and not knowing much about his work (Kipnis admitted to only reading three or four paragraphs online about Rehberger) and have him do a presentation on works he has done in the past 15 years which Kipnis will later criticize.
Rehberger chose several works to present and he talked about the processes which his work took in order to come about and explained his reasons for doing each piece and the choices he had to make. An example of Rehberger working with other people is the sketches he drew of cars such as the porsche, VW beetle and the Mclaren which he then sent to a factory in Thailand to produce as a real functioning car. The workers only had the drawings to work of from and any decisions left to be made from then on were left by the artist for these workers to make. Rehbergher likes to let the element of chance to happen in his work and does not take control of all aspects which is part of the way he works.
He has a humorous way of making criticisms on certain aspects of contemporary art and the way in which it is displayed. He took suggestions from visitors of a show on how to make the gallery space better and one suggestion was to change the floors to wood as it looked better and sounded nicer when you walked on it. Rehberger did precisely that but painted the floor lime green which reflected onto the paintings on the wall and affected the colors on the painting. It was his attempt at removing the neutrality that the exhibition space is supposed to have.
Location is something which Rehberger has dealt with in his works. He did an installation in a long dark tunnel in Tuscany where he installed light fixtures that gained its energy from the amount of sun shining in Monte Video in Uruguay. Another example is his orange box installation which is painted black on the inside and is completely dark except for a small lamp on the corner which is controlled by a 16 year old boy in Germany who has the exact name as Rehberger.
He also deals with the absurd and showed us images of his 85 year long movie which is simply colors changing because the eye cannot see through all the pixels reflected of of the screen and so the only thing we can see is a screen which changes color from time to time. He wanted to create a movie which no person could ever watch in their lifetime. He is also interested in functionality and introducing sculptures onto everyday life and so he created his handicap sculptures where disfunction is seen as a function in itself. He almost never designs anything for what its actual function is which is the complete opposite of the way I work and is something I find fascinating.
As he went through the slides there were always some that he passed over never stopping for more than a split second and I never got the chance to see what it is he was deciding to leave out. At the end of the talk Kipnis points that out and Rehberger says that they are images of eggs in different locations and is meant to be a ‘sorbet’ or palette cleanser to give us a break between the works.
After Rehberger completed his presentation Kipnis went on to talk about how art has had to look at conventions of authority and the ways had to undermine it. He gave the example of Rauschenberg. He also pointed out that just like Rehberger we need to look at the comdey side of art and not just the tragedy. That is not to say one must disregard it but find a balance of the two. He was also interested in looking the way that art has become laborless art and yet at the same time squanders labor.
He also wanted to consider the critic as a performer and so  he had to konw something about the work and also had to not know about the work which is why he decided that what he had already gathered from his brief research of Rehberger was enough and he would leave his presentation to be seen only at the time of the talk.
There was good chemistry between the two and the audience could easily see that. However, I wished it was a smaller crowd to leave room for more audience participation and questioning but instead the questions turned more into the discussion of tragedy and comedy in architecture where Kipnis did most of the talking and there was only one question directed at Rehberger. I wish there were a better chance of exchange with the artist at the end of the talk.
commonconstructions 