Wallworks
photo: Ira Schrank, Sixth Street Studio
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
(2009)
Tillman Kaiser
b. 1972 Graz, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna.
Inkjet print on paper, cardboard, china ink, and wood
Wall 1- 13 x 29 feet, Wall 2- 13 x 20 feet
Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles
Tillman Kaiser takes you through a playful romp across European modernism by revisiting tropes from various movements including Dada, Futurism, and Geometric Abstraction that are then formally linked to wide ranging references to sci-fi urban spaces, experimental geometries, and art deco theater buildings. His works are near replicas to those pasts but then bend to more contemporary references as though remnants of a future that never happened.
Working with the intersection of distant utopias and found objects Tillman Kaiser’s The Shape of Things to Come reactivates our nostalgia for a past that is one generation removed from the present and the memory of the future that had been conjured up during that period. The installation is situated on two perpendicular walls, one featuring a photomural and the other a wall sculpture that recreates an outdated modernist utopian vision of the world. The photomural is an appropriation of a cover design by Richard Powers used for the science fiction novel Expedition to Earth which the artist found at a street market in San Francisco. (The book was written in 1953 by the celebrated author Arthur C. Clarke, who also wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s movie.) Kaiser appropriated the image, and then manipulated it by hand—erasing text, over-painting areas, and reordering the composition. The book design echoes the stylistic tropes of the Surrealist paintings of artists such as Jean Tinguely, Roberto Matta, or Salvador Dali. The image, created before photographic images of the earth from outer space were available, maintains the fantasy speculation about the landscapes of other planets that suggests an optimism that would now be considered naïve. Kaiser has created a wall-sized sculpture on a perpendicular wall which is a physical manifestation and a creative invention of an element that could have been included in the science fiction painting. Its formal aspects reference art deco’s preference for the elongated triangle as a building block for sculptural form-making. The crystalline shapes, like the facets of a diamond, are built into a lumbering blackened object that projects from the wall in a friendly confrontation with the viewer as if reaching out from its confines in an effort to connect with the oversized organic masses depicted on the other wall. The shining flask at the sculpture’s center entices and directs our attention like a miner’s flashlight that provides light from the depths of darkness towards our next searching step. Something has indeed landed in the galleries, but it is only a flimsy handmade cardboard sculpture by an artist coping with the failure of modernism’s utopianism.
Kaiser’s recent solo exhibitions have been held at Wilkinson, London and Honor Fraser, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include, Unreal: Altered Perspectives in Painting, the Saatchi Gallery, London, and Jan Koch, Tillman Kaiser, Danielle Tegeder, Klaus-Martin Treder, Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin.
— Betti-Sue Hertz