Excerpts from the opening talk for the exhibition Ottjörg A.C (with Norbert Poredda)

Schul- und Bethaus Altlangsow, 29 July 2001

...With assertion comes questionability, and that is precisely what makes a productive situation. Assertion must not lean on habit and consensus. A recognisable feature of sculpture is that it is no longer bound to tools or material...

The dissolution of the aesthetic, in the sense of a general poetisation of daily life, has long reached sculpture. The “struggle for existence” is now a cultural struggle and sculptural thinking has entered the general cultural struggle. With regard to Ottjörg’s work, the concept of material aesthetics came to my mind, a somewhat misleading term used by the literary theorist Werner Mittenzwei for Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and John Heartfield in their practice of using the material of everyday social life for their poetics. Likewise, Ottjörg steps back behind the anonymous signs and ciphers, behind the material from reality that he finds on the windows of urban underground trains. But he does something with it, in a way that can perhaps be compared to Piscator, in his time, with workers’ choirs. In the scratched ciphers of a teenager subculture, an anarchic impulse is expressed that has its reason in speechlessness, just like the visual arts produce images to express liveliness. It is also the horror vacui, the awe of empty space and blank surface, a primitive but more primal pictorial impulse. I recall that Charles Baudelaire termed sculpture an art of the Caribbean, surely suggesting that it has a root in the raw vitality of what is real. Already in this respect, Ottjörg’s work has everything to do with sculpture, its impulses, and effects. Nevertheless, what he does with this material is highly artificial, so much so, that doubts can arise as to whether he did not scratch the drawings of the printing plates himself. In this case, just as in the other, the story is part of the process of embedding this act into reality and reaching out beyond the aesthetic form – one could also say, coming down from aesthetics. Naturally, the aesthetics are still there.

Jens Semrau (*1951) studied art sciences from 1972 to 1976 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he was awarded a PhD in 1985. Freelance work, journalism, exhibition projects; 1993–2007 he taught art theory and cultural history at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin.