Deskxistence

Global study concerning the school desk storage medium

Media: means of transport, email, handmade paper, etching press, school desk table tops, intaglio ink
Relics: 618 prints from five continents, dimensions dependent on size of school desk table top

Project description by Andreas Schalhorn, 2016

idea

DeskXistence was realised in several sub-projects from 2007/2008 to 2016, inevitably with sometimes improvised on-site work involving a lot of communication. In 2007, the first stages of the project were combined to form a trip to the Orient under the name of Alphabet Road. It turns out to be a global investigation of the classical school desk as a social and aesthetic storage medium of a special kind. In accordance with the ambiguous term DeskXistence, invented by the artist, the project embodies a special form of sociography, i.e. a form of art embracing different peoples and societies.

Process

With regard to printing and exhibition projects in Sao Paolo (2008) and New York (2009), the artist has also referred to his often large-format colour intaglio prints as scholarglyphs. By implementing common school desks as printing blocks, he operates – in analogy to a number of his projects – with readymades. The virtually ready-to-print carving of the printing block – by no means necessarily with any artistic intention – was previously carried out on a daily basis by school pupils from all over the world who were seated at these tables. The artistic intervention begins with the selection and borrowing of the tables for use in an on-site printing process. Irrespective of whether in Brazil, Lebanon, or China, pupils deface or adorn (depending on the point of view) their wooden school table tops – newer models often have a protective coating – with scratches and scarification. Doubtlessly motivated by frustration, boredom, or wantonness, the markings display definite graphic properties. The DeskXistence prints show that the student’s treatment of the table tops is often not that extensive in relation to their actual size. This can imbue then with the character of mysterious ciphers emerging from nowhere.

The author of these lines clearly remembers from his school days the profane and laborious engraving of the names of pop stars or political groups into the wood of his desk.

Interestingly, a printing press was easily found in each context of intervention, everywhere in the world. In solitary cases, a press was found parked in the basement of an art school or else had been purchased only the previous year. In every case, therefore, it was possible to print on-site – under specific local conditions and with distinct colours or ranges of colour.

Outcome

The artist’s choice of separate colours, which prior to printing are rolled into the recessed lines, has a direct physical connection with the imprint of the tables and the traces incised into them. But the discreet tonalities also show-up around the edges or within the surface itself, in echo of the incisions. This is where, in a way, the interpretative achievement begins, in that the transfer of the selected tables to images is completed in a colourfulness that by no means imitates that of the tables and their signs and lineaments, but emphasises them in a new way.

Several colours can be used for each table: A table can be printed several times in different, overlaid colours, but only once, i.e. in one printing process on each paper support. Already the slightest shrinkage of the drying paper would lead to an imprecision in the rendering of the fine lines. Only two individual and unique copies are produced from each table top in different colour settings. In this way, the incisions and marks of the students, who remain anonymous, gain a whole new visibility and existence – or DeskXistence.

Andreas Schalhorn studied art history, history, and philosophy in Regensburg and Bonn. MA on Joseph Beuys’ The End of the 20th Century and PhD on 18th Century Religious History Painting in Rome. Since 2003, after appointments at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and at the ZKM Karlsruhe, he is curator at the Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin.