Art as Reconstruction of its Experience:
Mediacies in the Work of Thomas Moor
Peter J. Schneemann
(Original: Kunst als Rekonstruktion ihrer Erfahrung.
Mittelbarkeiten im Werk von Thomas Moor)
Translation from german to english: Kate Whitebread
It is a dictum that modernism was inclined to articulate as both
utopia and doctrine: the experience of art is an experience of
immediacy. With concepts of presence and simultaneity, art
history evokes qualities that speak to the discourse surrounding
aura, the original, and authenticity. If the perception of art
is described in a concrete situation, however, framed by institutional
rules and shaped by social rituals, a much more complex
game begins to emerge. Various mediacies, temporalities,
and systems of references come into force. The function of the
frame – the “parergon” – shifts into focus, as well as subsidiary
paratexts, para-images, and other “auxiliary media”.
On the one hand, perception becomes more concrete
in our conduct towards a work of art, in our “interactions”
with it. How closely do I approach? What are the instructions
for navigating between distance and touch? Which senses are
prioritised? How does my own body relate to the physicality of
the work of art? Am I offered a seat? Can I linger a while, or even
reach out to touch? Am I called to perform as an extra within
an interactive setting, which then turns others into spectators?
On the other hand, the idea of an immediacy of perception
as an innocent or pure setting is also offset by an individually
contaminated horizon of experience. Be it consciously
or unconsciously, we situate the respective work within a
frame of reference that is characterised by personal association,
delimited by historical discourse, or entangled with popular
culture and the world of commodities. Intericonic references
cannot be separated from the experience of an individual
work of art, nor isolated from the rituals that we follow in galleries
and museums.
“Presentness” in the contemplation of art is overlaid
with anachronic moments of expectation and memory.
Viewers become acutely aware of this highly complex superimposition
in the increasingly numerous exhibitions and displays
that operate between reconstruction and actualisation.
The perception of art here can be described as an afterlife, a
re-enactment of specific perspectives. The work’s historical
situation is augmented by past processes of reception, by historical
distance, and the contemporary audience’s “horizon of
experience” (Hans-Georg Gadamer), shaped by contemporary
frames of reference.
In the work of Swiss artist Thomas Moor, both these
forms of engaging with expanded modes of perception run like
a common thread through his various groups of work.
His questions
and approaches are reflected in an exploration of very different
media and strategies, ranging from installation settings
to documented performances to painting. The chronology of
these projects yields a surprisingly rigorous narrative: the early
performances delineate a field of observations in the operating
system of contemporary art and playfully adopt gestures
of historical institutional critique, which questioned the rules
of spatial and social inclusion, directed attention to the frame,
and thereby examined the significance of context. The artist
Louise Lawler panned her camera in a way that, say, the seating
bench of a museum or the storage grilles become visible as
part of the institutional apparatus. What power structures and
control mechanisms do we so often prefer to overlook?
In the current debate surrounding the climate catastrophe,
Moor’s thermo-hygrographic drawings Climate
Control (2014–2016) seems particularly topical. The recording
of the artificial climate of a museum space, controlled in accordance
with the obligation to preserve artefacts, itself takes the
place of the artwork.
The interest in a vocabulary of presentation links the Storage
Unit Shows (2012), which connect the place of preservation
with the social element of the exhibition space, with the Mood
Paintings. They cite and displace the exact wall colours of various
exhibition spaces in new exhibition locations. The reproduced
painted surface then attains the status of a modernist
monochrome statement.
Touching Tangibles is the title of a much-noted performance
series that Moor produced as a slide show documentation in
the context of the Kiefer Hablitzel Award at Art Basel.
We see a figure in a white overall interacting with artworks
in exhibition contexts and in private collections. The figure’s
movements develop a semantics of affect, creating gestures
full of tenderness and care. The figure rehearses forms of
touch that would usually be strictly prohibited to viewers. But
the figure in white also has a generic aspect, beyond any individuality
or social category. As a “dummy” it recalls architectural
models of museums, filled with little placeholder figurines of
prospective future visitors. The institution of the museum requires
“viewers”; they are addressed as a target audience and
conceptualised as particular “types”.It appears significant how in the past few years the
physical “interaction” with art has been reconsidered.
Despite
an increasing acknowledgment of the reception process as a
constitutive element of the concept of art, it is striking how
art historical illustration for decades excluded viewers from installation
shots. It is only in recent publications that images of
the audience begin to surface. Art handling – the repositioning,
de-installing, transportation, and installation of artworks
– expands pure contemplation into the dimension of physical
approximation. The sense of sight does not shift the position
of a work, but art handling combines touch with attentive
care. Each handprint leaves a trace of sweat that might damage
a surface. In this context, the white overall seems like a
reference to the mandatory white gloves. Moor has experience
in this field and observes the complex implications of art handling
from an artist’s perspective.
As such he also pays particular attention to the filmand
fabric-wrapping of works. What is often carelessly discarded
as logistical waste Moor employs as a cypher of presence
and absence.
Contact with a precious, fragile work of art charges the packing
material like a relic. In place of the work, the wrapping film
and papers, the “artificial” synthetic materials themselves become
fragile and auratic objects of contemplation – ex negativo.
We search for the imprint as a second-order image. Cultural
history demonstrates a rich tradition of imprints and traces on
wrapping cloth. In Moor’s work there is an additional layer, pertaining
to unlocking the dialectic of value and trash, reminiscent
of works by Jimmie Durham or David Hammons.
Since 2019, Moor has been engaging more intensively with the
medium of painting, which he employs as a medium of repetition
and reproduction and as a strategy for analysis and review.
He focuses on the imagery of advertising and of art history, or
more precisely, the educational media of the history of art. Copy
and reproduction operate in the interstice between original
and repetition, presence and documentation, reality and appropriation,
which is a focal point of his interest as an artist.
Here he traces the stratifications that have accrued in the aesthetic
of the secondary.
The aura of iconic installation shots, copied from the glossy coffee
table books of art history, multiplies in Moor’s large-scale
painting Dome (2021). Giovanni Giacometti’s sculptures populate
the cathedral of art like extras on a stage. The book’s centrefold
creates a false diptych. Between homage and deconstruction,
these icons celebrate the medium of painting.
Moor’s “history paintings of art history” focus on
Giacometti, but the discourses of the paragone here prove less
about a competition between sculpture and painting than between
iconic documentation and the presence of painting.
We are confronted with a chapter in media history
that goes beyond a self-referential game. This becomes particularly
clear when Thomas Moor explores images of nature.
In his series Corporate-Realism (2020) he copies the “nature
labels” that involve us as consumers in the construction of nature
as a commodity and a fiction of aspirational longing. Nature
becomes a design that is always to be understood as a
secondary, exalted, remembered, and imitated image. Revealed
as an ideological construct, the environment is shown
to serve didactic and economic functions through its supposed
depoliticisation – very much like art.
Published 2024 in Value Voyage