The Exposure Project: Florian Slotawa

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Florian Slotawa

Fellow Exposure Project member Eric Watts recently turned me on to the work of German artist Florian Slotawa, whose work is currently on view at P.S.1. His environmental sculptures of hotel rooms and domestic spaces recontextualize the objects that permeate everyday life. A parallel could (I suppose) be drawn between Slotawa's work and that of Alejandra Laviada. However, I see his work more as a contemporary extension of land artists like Robert Smithson, James Turrell and Richard Long whose images exist to validate their fleeting and ephemeral works. As John Chilver observes in an article he wrote entitled Contingency and the Paradox of Composition: Florian Slotawa:

"Here, the photograph is both an artwork and a document, that is, both a primary and a secondary work: it is both a framed, tonally nuanced picture and simultaneously a document, a piece of evidence that registers an absence, an event that has passed. The event's clandestine aspect heightens the resonance of the photographs' evidential nature. They don't just document a performative intervention, they register a very particular transgression. Imparting knowledge of the transgression makes the audience complicit, however reticently. What's more, the act's seeming ineffectuality too has an affective charge. For it seems to rhetoricize its own inconsequentiality: room furnishings are shifted around and then painstakingly put back where they belong—although, of course, the intervention questions where they in fact belong. So, then, has anything happened? Has nothing happened?

Slotawa, the hotel guest, accepts the furnishings and fittings as a kind of inventory, as a given limit, while refusing their configuration. This is a question of dwelling insofar as the remade rooms declare themselves as zones of subjective identification and occupation. They deny the impersonality that's assumed to be a condition of the hotel room's function as a hotel room."