"Reißbrett Nr. 26"

Collage of c-prints and drawings on paper on wood

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that nobody is following me
Luis Campaña Gallery, Cologne

The pictures on the gallery wall immediately catch the eye. Someone is digging a hole in the middle of a dense forest - somewhere. The camera moves to the feet, which are clad in brown shoes, then over the sweaty blue shirt, the man digs out the earth with a shovel, the hole gets deeper and deeper, the excavated earth piles up, then the camera moves over the trees, the chirping of the birds becomes very loud - where are there so many birds? - then the bent back again, the shovel, the earth, the sound of the shovel, the forest again, the birdsong - is the man digging just one hole, or are there several holes? - the tousled hair, more earth, tirelessly, the camera moves around, the man sinks deeper and deeper into his hole, earth then the image freezes, the man freezes for a few seconds, then it starts again; shovel, earth, chirping... What you are watching is a 6-minute film entitled Loch by the young Austrian artist Hans Schabus, who is digging there himself. It is the first time that works by this artist, born in 1970, have been shown in Germany. At the beginning of the year, he attracted attention with an exhibition at the Kerstin Engholm Gallery in Vienna. His film draws all the attention to itself; only gradually does one notice the two curtains covering the side windows. They are brown, printed velvet curtains that reproduce a scene from the film. And how strange, behind one of the two curtains stands a man, perhaps the one who shoveled the earth in the movie? No, but he has forgotten his shoes under the curtain, or left them there on purpose?
There are few works by Schabus to date, but those that have been made in the last two years, such as the films 100 Laufmeter, Passagier or the project Die Schachtel im Zimmer have something in common: they are always allusions or parables to the artistic process. To the conditions, the circumstances, the situations in which artistic works are created. The studio often appears, as in the film Passenger and in the project The Box in the Room, as a place of artistic confrontation where clear traces of this confrontation can be found. These traces are then observed, as in "Passenger", by a camera mounted on a model railroad, which travels through the studio on tracks set up at a height of 2.7 meters, or documented in 27 framed photos, which are kept in a wooden case specially built for these photos.
The project is also a document of an artistic process, of which the film Loch, shown in the Campaña gallery, is a part. As before in his studio, where he builds objects from individual pieces of wood, puts them together and takes them apart again and documents this, here he "builds" with the earth. The result is a square hole and a pile of earth, as the film shows. However, the events in the film are only one aspect of the artistic process examined by Schabus. In an adjoining room of the gallery, plans are on display showing the exact positions of the camera, the cuts and the soundtrack underneath the film on large drawings. The film has no original soundtrack; the sound was added to the images after the fact.
At first, the viewer does not realize that this is not original sound, although he intuitively knows that something is wrong here. Only gradually does he become aware of the contradiction between the real action and the artificially produced sound. This contradiction between reality and the recreated reality is also an allusion to the artistic process. Isn't the ability to bring the real event into a context with the artistic action, which allows the real event to appear in a new light, the prerequisite for any artistic activity?
But where is the boundary between the real event and the artistic action? Can the boundary be experienced at all? Perhaps by replacing the artistic action with a real event? Or the real event by the artist's action. What happens in the movie Loch? Is the person digging there an artist? Is he digging or is he performing an artistic act? Just because he's digging doesn't mean he's an artist, you could say, alluding to the title of the Cologne exhibition "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that nobody is following me".
Is he digging or is he artistically active? By posing this question, Schabus achieves a strange reversal of the artistic process, which is normally only of interest to the extent that it strives for a work of art as the result. With Schabus, the process of creating a work of art is the work of art itself. But be careful! Just because we see an artist digging a hole does not mean that an artist is digging a hole.
(Noemi Smolik, Kunstforum, Bd. 153 Choreografie der Gewalt, 2001, S. 365, translated with deepl.com)