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Ulrich Vogl, Kaktus (Cactus), 2012, cactus, glass with water, pedestal, acrylic hood, 144 × 30 × 20 cm. Courtesy: Ulrich Vogl
ULRICH VOGL (*1973) lives and works in Berlin.
His works often find their beginnings in everyday objects and places,
reflecting their individual stories and moods. The works are reduced to the
essentials, often cinematic or time-based, and always low-tech. His preferred
methods of expression are installations, sculptures and wall pieces. They may
be tiny or large, introvert or space consuming. When the works succeed, Vogl
calls them ‘cognitive catalysts’.
The mirage of holiday calm is rarely captured as well as in the fleeting moments between waking and dozing off on a couch at a beach hotel. And on the final day of your vacation, while losing yourself in the flickering reflections a pool spits onto the walls and the muffled splashes of yelling children, you ask yourself: Does it have to end? What if I, in the same manner I dry and fold my swimming trunks, would calmly fold this quiet place into my suitcase and bring it back home with me? Furnishing one’s garden with the ritzy abandon of a marbellan poolside would certainly reproduce those flittering reflections, splashes and yells, and maybe, that serendipitous moment. But as Peter Handke writes in his Versuch über den Stillen Ort (1989), you don’t find the placid places, they find you.
This ill-fated attempt is humorously mused upon in Urich Vogl’s Pool(2010/2018), in which the optics of our summer vacations are mechanically reproduced in the reflection of a rippling pool filtered through a kitchen window. One might find a moment’s respite in Vogl’s work, as the glistening game of light and shadow conjures up that beach hotel. And while the ensuing feelings of warmth and leisure may subsist for an instant, they melt away as soon as becomes aware of the machinery that maintains the charade: a tiny, water-filled basin emulates the pool, the window cross is bits of tape strung to a mirror, while the rays of the sun flood from a lamp that would feel right at home at a Hollywood movie set. The constant hum of the table fan that whisks the water’s surface into shape finally breaks the spell.
Vogl very deliberately provokes such processes of perception within his viewers. t [Eng.: “Rhine weel”] (2016) was a public installation commissioned for the 600th anniversary of the Council of Constance. A revolving hamster-wheel projected its shadow onto the wall of Constance’s hallmark gate tower, the Rheintorturm, aided by sunlight during the day and spotlights at night. The perpetual production of this “film machine” didn’t cease for an entire year. Baffled residents would ask each other if the strange structure had always floated in front of the familiar tower, and if they simply hadn’t noticed until now. In keeping with filmic tradition, these works are similar to what Hitchcock called “MacGuffins”: Objects of desire that inspire action. And while the action is palpable, the MacGuffin crumbles into absurdity as soon as one asks to define it. Both the MacGuffin and Vogl’s Pool are procedural thought machines as much as they are film machines.
There is a sense of transparent lightness and associative playfulness inherent to Vogl’s works. But where Pool clearly evokes that holiday calm, the other contribution to Troubled Waters proves more enigmatic: A cactus and a glass of water unceremoniously placed on a plinth covered by a glass vitrine. The austere ensemble shows no signs of eccentricities: the cactus potted in a plain plastic pot, the glass of water, a glass of water. Even the standardized measurements of the plinth seem inappropriately appropriate. And for those of us who thought to seek refuge in the title, Kaktus (2012) only raises the question as to why the glass of water was so bluntly omitted.
Next to the mirage of Pool, the water seems to invite a cooling sip—only for out our temptations to be dismissed by the glass vitrine. It blocks our access by mockingly turning its contents into objects of art. The cactus bears the brunt of this transformation as it, in spite of its hardiness, is doomed to wither of draught under the lifeless light of the white cube. And so the work unceasingly reconfigures itself as strung between our mundane associations and its involuntary role as a sculptural still life—subsisting in that distinct perpetuity that defines Vogl’s œuvre.
The French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan famously defined the “the real” as that which “does not cease not to write itself” [Fr.: “ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire”], that an outside view eludes us as long as we are grounded in its constant stream of events. Vogl embraces this immediacy. Like the unblinking eye of a memoryless video camera patrolling a parking lot somewhere, his works incessantly march on in time, only recording the past through deliberate anachronisms—the outmoded movie lamp, the manufactured memories, that bewildered glass and cactus.
Cactus / Pool
by Gustav ElginThe mirage of holiday calm is rarely captured as well as in the fleeting moments between waking and dozing off on a couch at a beach hotel. And on the final day of your vacation, while losing yourself in the flickering reflections a pool spits onto the walls and the muffled splashes of yelling children, you ask yourself: Does it have to end? What if I, in the same manner I dry and fold my swimming trunks, would calmly fold this quiet place into my suitcase and bring it back home with me? Furnishing one’s garden with the ritzy abandon of a marbellan poolside would certainly reproduce those flittering reflections, splashes and yells, and maybe, that serendipitous moment. But as Peter Handke writes in his Versuch über den Stillen Ort (1989), you don’t find the placid places, they find you.
This ill-fated attempt is humorously mused upon in Urich Vogl’s Pool(2010/2018), in which the optics of our summer vacations are mechanically reproduced in the reflection of a rippling pool filtered through a kitchen window. One might find a moment’s respite in Vogl’s work, as the glistening game of light and shadow conjures up that beach hotel. And while the ensuing feelings of warmth and leisure may subsist for an instant, they melt away as soon as becomes aware of the machinery that maintains the charade: a tiny, water-filled basin emulates the pool, the window cross is bits of tape strung to a mirror, while the rays of the sun flood from a lamp that would feel right at home at a Hollywood movie set. The constant hum of the table fan that whisks the water’s surface into shape finally breaks the spell.
Vogl very deliberately provokes such processes of perception within his viewers. t [Eng.: “Rhine weel”] (2016) was a public installation commissioned for the 600th anniversary of the Council of Constance. A revolving hamster-wheel projected its shadow onto the wall of Constance’s hallmark gate tower, the Rheintorturm, aided by sunlight during the day and spotlights at night. The perpetual production of this “film machine” didn’t cease for an entire year. Baffled residents would ask each other if the strange structure had always floated in front of the familiar tower, and if they simply hadn’t noticed until now. In keeping with filmic tradition, these works are similar to what Hitchcock called “MacGuffins”: Objects of desire that inspire action. And while the action is palpable, the MacGuffin crumbles into absurdity as soon as one asks to define it. Both the MacGuffin and Vogl’s Pool are procedural thought machines as much as they are film machines.
There is a sense of transparent lightness and associative playfulness inherent to Vogl’s works. But where Pool clearly evokes that holiday calm, the other contribution to Troubled Waters proves more enigmatic: A cactus and a glass of water unceremoniously placed on a plinth covered by a glass vitrine. The austere ensemble shows no signs of eccentricities: the cactus potted in a plain plastic pot, the glass of water, a glass of water. Even the standardized measurements of the plinth seem inappropriately appropriate. And for those of us who thought to seek refuge in the title, Kaktus (2012) only raises the question as to why the glass of water was so bluntly omitted.
Next to the mirage of Pool, the water seems to invite a cooling sip—only for out our temptations to be dismissed by the glass vitrine. It blocks our access by mockingly turning its contents into objects of art. The cactus bears the brunt of this transformation as it, in spite of its hardiness, is doomed to wither of draught under the lifeless light of the white cube. And so the work unceasingly reconfigures itself as strung between our mundane associations and its involuntary role as a sculptural still life—subsisting in that distinct perpetuity that defines Vogl’s œuvre.
The French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan famously defined the “the real” as that which “does not cease not to write itself” [Fr.: “ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire”], that an outside view eludes us as long as we are grounded in its constant stream of events. Vogl embraces this immediacy. Like the unblinking eye of a memoryless video camera patrolling a parking lot somewhere, his works incessantly march on in time, only recording the past through deliberate anachronisms—the outmoded movie lamp, the manufactured memories, that bewildered glass and cactus.