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Gallery Jangva Uudenmaankatu 4-6, courtyard 00120 Helsinki puh 6123743 Thu-Fri 11 am - 7 pm Sat-Sun 11am - 5 pm galleria@jangva.fi www.jangva.fi
David Muth is an artist, musician and programmer. Having grown up in Salzburg, Austria, he relocated to the UK to study at Middlesex University, where he received an MA in Digital Arts. He currently lives and works in London, Salzburg and Turku.
His artistic practice combines conceptual and experimental approaches and is informed by his background in architecture. His projects range from installations and responsive environments, through video and experimental documentary, to composition and performance of music.
Muth’s work has been shown on numerous occasions internationally, with venues and events including Musée D’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Kiasma Museum of Modern Art Helsinki, Ars Electronica Linz Austria, ISEA2006 in San Jose, Le Cube in Paris, Montevideo in Amsterdam,Laboral de Gijón, SIGGRAPH2009 New Orleans and the Museo Reina Sofía Madrid.
david@test.at
Settings
The visible and the speakable, the unspeakable and the invisible: it seems that the photographs of David Muth's series Settings explain themselves easily.
The images show domestic environments, scenes of lifeworlds in the country, in the village, in the city. Outside views as well as interior ones, extracts from everyday living environments in various regions and cities: Klosterneuburg, Wels, Wien(Vienna). There are no panorama-like views, but mostly details of architectural complexes that Muth brings into view - whereby we usually have to add the context of the subject by ourselves and therefore are more focussed on the structure of the image.
Thus, we see a garage door, but without the house it belongs to; our attention shifts to the particularities of this unspectacular view - onto details such as the hedge, the floor joint, the gutter. Another image provides insight into an interior: the view looses itself over the particular design of a closet, one is puzzled about the grain of the wood, the door knob - and about what specifics are hidden behind this anonymous design. Or a situation in a corridor: a closed door, with carefully arranged objects in front, a folding chair, empty flower pots on a wall shelf - they all point beyond the image and in their arrangement remind of classical principles of composition in painting. However, it remains undecided whether a certain creative drive has manifested itself here - or on the very contrary its absence lets the setting appear banal on the one side whilst providing it with an ironic charm on the other. Herein, the representation of the human trace becomes an invisible thread that connects us to the collective body of society.
By all radicalism, however, David Muth's unadorned scenes are not subject to any gestures of social display, they remain ambiguous. In fact, Muth declares the image to a venue of discrepancy between actual lifeworld and hypothetical psychogram, hence to a game between fiction and reality, between conventional mode of representation and artistic expression. Thus all shots analogue large-format photographs, which are connected to the original "imprint" that left its traces in this medium (Roland Barthes) almost paradigmatically –communicate the impression of extraordinary tidiness, as if something should have been covered up. It is the incongruity of representation and its effect itself that is of relevance here.The title Settings also emphasizes the constructed character of the images: it underlines the arranged, the staged of the scenes -so that even on the textlevel a vague feeling of the over-tidy, of the manipulated is being suggested.
"In Latin "photography" probably would be called "imago lucis opera expressa", that means: through the action of light revealed, "stepped forward", "risen", (like the juice of a lemon) "squashed" image." (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida)
Patricia Grzonka
DELIRIOUS DEBT CRISIS: DAVID MUTH’S CHRISTMAS PIECE
A traditional paradigm of economics lies in viewing the forces of capitalism as the laws of nature: be it the "invisible hand", be it the centrifugal and centripetal forces of the market which regulate the production and circulation of goods according to Newton's laws of inertia and centrifugal force. Laws of nature appear to be deliria, states of externalization, either to be taken into account or to be ruled out. That's never quite sure. The inhabitants of Finland are known for their elevated risk of suicide, stoic tranquility, dry sense of humour, and their own interpretation of tango. They are also fans of pointless enterprises and absurd competitions. But what is absurd in times like this anyway?
Using a fixed camera view, David Muth films a man who tampers with a strange installation between a garage and a red van in the deep snow of Finland. An engine that should propel a conifer requires his full attention. But it is still warming up, humming a little, whilst the tree appears to start movement by trembling slightly.
Then another man joins in: the machine is tinkered with and hammered on, the drive belt is being helped manually, and finally the tree begins to turn. The men are watching, laughing, and gesticulating towards the camera and off stage. The tree is spinning faster and faster. The engine starts smoking. An attempt is made to save the process, but the tree itself lost balance through the rotation and seems to tilt at any moment. Or to fly. That's it. One is fanning the smoke away, the other one switches off.
"Beneath all ratio lies delirium, divergence", Deleuze and Guattari remark on capitalism, and that "the rational is always the rationality of the irrational". They argue for the liberalization of desire; for
a desire that does not follow a capitalist social order. Since it carries the foundations of the repressive order of power already inscribed on itself, even in the moments of a utopia. "The capital has no exteriority, no other", Lyotard writes in his reflections on Deleuze's and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. In this sense, Christmas Piece is not a pure allegory on turbo-capitalism and competition creating increasingly shorter cycles of commodity production and consumption. For the apparatus surrounding the rotating Christmas tree doesn't function as optimization machine of the productive forces, and the absurdity of the endeavour, as well as the ambiguity of the whole installation are more like sand in the gears of the circulation. The rational of the irrational becomes clear in these efforts of two engineers to win the competition for the fastest rotating Christmas tree. Or is even the cancellation of inertia held out in prospect through the rotation? A catapult that doesn't deliver a flying tree straight to the point and on time, but that attacks it? For now the Finnish experiment appears to have failed, but the desire remains.
Claudia Slanar
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