Painting as communicative Einrichtung - Bilder-Commons - Image Constellation
Panel by Philipp Schwalb
In 1919, 103 years ago, Florine Stettheimer embedded her own paintings
in the painting Studio Party (Soirée) as furniture, as an integral and functional element of her salon practice in New York
City. These relational images supported the communication between guests, scenes, paintings, and other images, while exposing
a contemplative, cognitive, and interactive setting for a social figuration. A few years later, the art historian and museum
director Alexander Dorner commissioned El Lissitzky’s “Abstract Cabinet,” a room with a reduced, holistic, usable, and abstract
design dedicated to the relationality, presentability, and function of images. Visitors were allowed to change the position
of some of the paintings, thereby creating new constellations and experimenting with the flexible uses, different perspectives,
and changing meanings of artworks. Dorner was explicitly interested in the social and interactive components of artworks,
their relationships to each other, and to their surroundings. In 1974 Michel Asher removed the wall dividing a gallery’s office/storage
and the exhibition space. 4 years earlier Pierre Klossowski published La Monnaie vivante and developed the idea of a painting
as a coin with three sides. In Mind of My Mind (1977), Octavia E. Butler outlined the role of the artist as a telepathic medium
and art as a generator of psychedelic, emotional, and educational translations.
The
hinge between these two passages is Painting as communicative Einrichtung, as a specialized form of painting critical of institutions,
as decorative picture, and as an arrangement for different conceptual/philosophical orientations. Uff.
In 2020,
4 years ago, I embedded my own paintings in the painting Books(h)elf (Agnes Martin) as furniture, as an integral and functional
element of my exhibition, reading, and social practice in NYC. These relational images supported the communication between
peers, influences, paintings, and other images, while integrating a contemplative, emotional, and physical setting for a social
figuration. A few years later, I made the exhibition “Die Gift Born” as a display dedicated to a reduced, associative, usable,
and abstract narrative that exposes the relationality, presentability, and the function of images. Most of the images were
carefully treated and visible from two sides. Visitors were allowed to change the position of the paintings, to create new
constellations, and to experiment with the flexible uses, different perspectives, and changing meanings of artworks. I was
interested in the social and interactive components of the paintings, their relationships to each other, and to their surroundings.
This Image Constellation Panel (ICP) is located in the passage between studio and public, between practice and theory, between
aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, and is an instrument between exhibition, lecture, mind-map, and discursive assembly. The ICP
on May 13 2024 is about my methods, my paintings, four exhibitions, adjectives that describe different ways of translation
(into painting), Painting as communicative Einrichtung, and Bilder-Commons.
Philipp Schwalb
lives and works in Rotterdam as an artist, reader, curator, and art educator. Since 2010 he has been experimenting with and
questioning the animation of color and figuration in Bilder, their communication, conditions, effects, and frameworks. Since
2008 he has been involved in several self-organized spaces, exhibitions, labs, sessions, and conventions. In 2018/19 he organized
the Geneva “Convention of more Sense in Leif + Lof 4 ALLe.” From 2017 to 2019, he was a visiting professor for painting at
the Haute Ecole d'art et Design in Geneva. In 2022 he co-organized and curated the “Mural Sessions” in Geneva. In 2022, he
launched Bild as Commons. In 2023 he co-organized I/Economic Sediments, a series of workshops for the collective creation
of image constellation panels. He has exhibited or curated at the following venues: Kirchgasse (Steckborn), New Toni (Berlin),
Le Frac Lorraine, Kunsthalle Langenthal, Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (Cully), Kunsthalle Basel, ZKM Karlsruhe, Kunstraum München,
Villa Romana (Florence), David Castillo (Miami).
