About the Work of Ottjörg A.C.
2021
A citation by Paul Cézanne that Ottjörg A.C. loves to quote reads as follows: “You have to hurry if you want to see something. Everything disappears.” This sounds somewhat paradoxical given that the French artist lived in a time when media of reproduction such as the camera, the press, letterpress printing – all by principle committed to preservation and therefore challenging oblivion – were gaining momentum. But Cézanne also lived in the midst of an industrial revolution and thus of a formidable process of social, economic, ecological, technological, and political transformation which was changing the face of society by the day. The artist had a seismographic sense for this situation and his close scrutiny of the circumstances led him to express what was already true in his day and even truer now, more than one hundred years later.
In this process of change, which has expanded faster and is more precipitated today than Paul Cézanne was ever to experience, Ottjörg A.C., as an artist, takes on the role of conserving and exposing things. In his works, he tracks and interprets social processes, persistently unfolding them in front of our eyes with a political undertone. This attitude reflects the influence of his teacher, Alfred Hrdlicka, with whom he studied sculpture. But the configuration that Ottjörg A.C. chooses to visualise these processes has not the least in common with the expressionist furore of his former professor. Instead, it is based on the conceptual ingenuities of Marcel Duchamp, who revolutionised modern art like no other and on the notion of “social sculpture”, as required of the artist by Joseph Beuys. In his combination of archaeological research and political readymade, Ottjörg A.C. finds highly singular forms of expression. These are manifest in his oeuvre as a highly sensitive and well recognisable signature.
Ottjörg A.C. travels all five continents of the planet in the company of his camera. In a way, the device replaces a sketchbook. He takes photographs of whatever strikes him as being particularly memorable. And this leads to a body of artworks. Perhaps best known are his intaglio prints of school desks and scratchings. The latter are from the windows of buses, suburban and underground trains that have been scratched by youths. They originate from twelve metropolises, including Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and New York. What unites them despite all their differences – just like graffiti – is the protest of young people against a world that is administrated and controlled by adults who often have zero understanding for young dreams and utopias. The same applies to school desks from around the world that Ottjörg A.C. likewise uses as printing blocks. The tags and images they bear document both the fears and hopes of their defiant authors.
At the same time, they manifest a dialectic of power and impotence that runs through all societies. The young authors fight back with their scratchings, thus momentarily liberating themselves from their helplessness, regaining identity, and exercising a power of autonomy through protest. Ottjörg A.C. has recognised this like no other, it is therefore only logical for him to draw on similar subtle gestures of revolt as manifestations of civil disobedience within other contexts of state repression. Indeed, the artist can be seen in a film (What is the Intention of a Monument?) in which he adds images of youthful revolt to stately public monuments in Porto Alegre, Brazil, referencing them as the actual Marcas Urbanas.
In their often informal subjectivity, these urban marks demonstrate an extreme counterpoint to the pathos of the monuments glorifying history and reasons of state. Through them, a private gesture contests a public statement and criticism replaces affirmation. But this background is not always immediately obvious to the recipient. The same goes for when Ottjörg A.C., in another film (Rediscovering China), stands in front of Chinese walls and columns and, in the form of painterly rubbings, reveals their physiognomy to passers-by, who would otherwise not have taken any notice of them. They show an interest in what the German artist is doing but are initially confounded by his intervention. For many, however, there is occasion enough to ask him what his work is about. The ensuing conversation is one of Ottjörg A.C.’s most important motivations. In this, he is at one with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon who, in a conversation with the author of this text, once described the ultima ratio of his works with the phrase: “For me art is a means of communicating with people.”
This communication does not seldom lead to significant results and insights. It also helps the artist to sharpen and better articulate his own point of view. As was the case with one of Ottjörg A.C.’s recent projects, Corona Dollar Creazione (2020), in which he made a shoulder bag out of 500 US American one-dollar bills. His inspiration came from a trip to Columbia in 2019, when at a market he discovered bags woven from Venezuelan banknotes. The money had lost its pecuniary value but had gained new value as a design material for bags, which Ottjörg A.C. incidentally found highly aesthetic. This exposes an interesting contradiction: the banknotes used in the fabrication of bags implicitly refer to the much older barter economy that was once overcome with the help of money as an abstract means of payment. This aspect also did not fail to make an impression on the artist.
For Ottjörg A.C., the aim of the project was indeed communication on many levels. In this case, even as part of the preliminaries since the artist collected the necessary banknotes for his bag from friends and acquaintances. Not out of financial need, but out of artistic intention. In the process, he explained the project and asked for feedback. The idea regularly harvested enthusiastic approval, but once also vehement rejection, voiced by his old school friend Oliver. This gave rise to an intense controversy and increasingly developed to be enlightening and clarifying to other recipients as well. Oliver fundamentally rejected the project which he estimated to be on the level of “arts and crafts” and issued the warning: “You don't do arty-farty things with banknotes”. He further sustained that even when it lost its value, money was still “a symbol of existence”. For Ottjörg A.C., these objections, upheld by an old friend, were the occasion for a comprehensive answer, in which he explains his motivation to become an artist and how he understands his art: “Art is not for fun. Art is not entertainment or diversion. Art is a confrontation with life. So you have to address school, money, blood." In opposition to the feel-good art claimed by Oliver, Ottjörg A.C. calls on Franz Kafka to be witness to his piece with the famous maxim: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.“
As a trained sculptor, Ottjörg A.C. could also have told Oliver that in modern art there is basically no material that is not suitable for sculptural creation. That the avoidance of classical materials – such as marble and bronze and others nobilitated by the artworld – is practically paradigmatic for contemporary art. Many unfamiliar and unusual materials have thus already been used in art, be they rubber or wrought iron, building blocks or butter, water or wellness pads. Any rusting or non-rusting steel and plastics of all kinds; car wrecks in the work of John Chamberlain, felt and fat in the work of Joseph Beuys, foodstuffs in the work of Dieter Roth and Rirkrit Tiravanija, or Robert Morris’ steam sculptures, to name only a few. Moreover, the bourgeois notion, which lies behind Oliver’s objections, namely that food and money should not be played with, reaches out to a concept of the sublime that always felt suspicious to modern art. But the proscription of play also brings the classic author Friedrich Schiller to mind, from whom we know how artistic play and games can be and who wrote the following memorable sentence in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man: “Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”
As to the arts and crafts side of the piece criticised by Oliver because of the banknote motif of the bag, the essentials have already been voiced by Pop Art with its levelling out of High and Low and in particular by Andy Warhol, whose painted dollar banknotes were incidentally one of his favourite motifs. When Ottjörg A.C. points out the mediality of art and money in his answer to Oliver (“Money is a medium just as art is a medium.”), he touches on a kinship emphasised by Joseph Beuys in one of his works. The installation Wirtschaftswerte (Economic Values) of 1980 shows GDR packaged foods displayed on plain steel shelves as a counter-image to the oversupply of a Western consumer and throwaway society. Beuys has additionally stamped and labelled the foodstuff in order to highlight the fact that it is an energy carrier. When we eat, we take on energy. Food is thus the basis for life and the source of human creativity. The relationship between the work of the two artists becomes even clearer in a lecture delivered by Beuys in 1978 on the question “But what is capital?”. Here, he explained his system of economic values, highlighting the importance of art as the true capital of human skills. In 1979, Beuys wrote the formula “Art = Capital” on a ten-Deutschmark banknote because he wanted his statement to be taken literally. He wanted the creativity and creative energy of each individual to be understood as the capital and potential of any society.
In parallel to the Corona Dollar Creazione project, Ottjörg A.C. kept a Corona diary. It covers the months from March to August 2020 and mainly operates with pictures, as could hardly otherwise be expected from a visual artist. In between, we find daily commentaries. The diary shows ever new photographs that Ottjörg A.C. took of himself in his apartment in Sofia, on a trip to the Black Sea coast, and in his studios in Berlin and Brandenburg. We see him working on his banknote bag, in thoughtful moments, and relaxing in his leisure time. Or checking a plane ticket he could no longer use because of lockdown and studying application forms for government financial aid. In between, he has sprinkled pictures photographed from TV, newspapers, or the like. They show politicians and virologists, doctors and patients, policemen and demonstrators, people with and without masks, pandemic graphics and the fluctuating share prices in the stock market. All that Ottjörg A.C. took note of in terms of information that moved his mind and his feelings during this period.
To evaluate this as an expression of narcissism would be a total misunderstanding. The artist stages himself in his diary as our representative. What has moved him is likely to have moved us. And he demonstrates how the structure he gave to his doing and being in times of lockdown was the only possible way out of the depressions of those days, however bad they may have been. From Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian poet known for eternal financial straits, comes the saying: “Money is coined liberty”. It is commonly understood in the sense that those who own a lot can afford a lot. The semantic echo chamber of freedom, however, goes further. To understand this, one does not have to go as far as to quote the lyrical tones of Rainer Maria Rilke emphasising the antithesis to owning money: “Poverty is a great splendour from within.” But it can do no harm to realise that true freedom has a lot to do with the ability to occasionally free oneself from the constraints of money. Even if it is only by playfully misappropriating it like the Colombians did for the market. Or, like Ottjörg A.C., by transforming it into art that concerns us.
Michael Stoeber lives in Hanover and works as a freelance writer. For years, he was writing on art, literature, and theater for different media. Today, he publishes exclusively on contemporary art, primarily in Kunstforum International, EIKON and artist. He has contributed to numerous catalogues and authored several books.