Jarrett Moran

Michael Riedel, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, 2011. Courtesy David Zwirner.

I tried to write about Michael Riedel’s show at Zwirner last year and threw away the (boring) results. Months later I ran into an artist challenging the void of the iPhone/iPad screen with tapestry, using its weave as an analogy for pixels. I spend most of my life looking at a screen, with increasing reluctance, and the extent to which that medium has absorbed my life’s activities is a problem to which an online art gallery will never be a solution. Now I’m convinced the Riedel show was an attempt to deal with the screen, an attempt to force it into the usual parameters of a Michael Riedel artwork.

Riedel’s imperfect reproductions and recordings often allude to the backdrop of his art space Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16, where he recreated gallery shows, nights of clubbing, etc. that initially occurred elsewhere around Frankfurt. The Filmed Films, for example, were recorded with a camcorder in Frankfurt movie theaters and then screened at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse. In a shaky video documenting what Riedel calls his “first gallery exhibition,” Riedel and a coconspirator sneak into a gallery where the current show, by Jeppe Hein, consists of white partitions moving through the glass-fronted cube in response to motion detectors. Crouching under cardboard boxes shoddily painted white, Riedel and his companion shuffle around mimicking the movements of the partitions. An oblivious gallery employee peeks in and doesn’t notice anything awry. Riedel gives just about every medium this kind of treatment; it would be conspicuous if we caught him ignoring the screen.

Michael Riedel, Moving Walls, 2001. Courtesy David Zwirner.

So Riedel googles himself. Some pages from the MoMA and Zwirner websites come up; he copies the html and drops it into InDesign. It’s frustrating. Riedel’s computer is frozen. Abstract evocations of Apple’s beach ball of death float everywhere. We have just enough information to know we’re looking at the internet on a Mac. Riedel’s canvases depict a screen without actually depicting a screen, or much of anything intelligible at all. Just as a screen is no substitute for an art exhibition, Riedel knows an exhibition is no substitute for a screen. He bolds words like “click,” “print,” and “slideshow” in the fragmentary html, pointing to the absent interface. The hardware itself is emphasized by its absence—the same hardware we once elided (along with the conditions that manufacture it) when speaking of an information economy. What all this baffles is the conventional attitude towards the screen: idly and/or purposefully looking past it in the manner of someone alone in public compulsively manipulating an iPhone.

The recursive narcissism of Riedel googling himself makes these pieces uniquely horrifying. They don’t refer back to life at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse, or if they do, Oskar-von-Miller Strasse now looks like a startup where rows of artists procrastinate on MacBooks. Riedel usually achieves an air of deadpan-yet-sociable jokiness indicating that he’s getting the last laugh; this time it’s hard to know whether Riedel or the screen is laughing.

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

-Sebald, Austerlitz

Top left: Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion, 2007, video still. Courtesy Cosmic, Paris.

Top right: Cyprien Gaillard, Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London.

Bottom: Cyprien Gaillard, View over Sighthill, 2008, photo. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London.