Kai Althoff
Kai Althoff, Spring 2009, pp 110
Kai Althoff is a 42-year-old German artist who works with an exceptionally wide range of practices and media: his activities include traditional image-making, collaboration, relational aesthetics and the plumbing of the deepest recesses of childhood memory and experience. This exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is his first solo show in Canada. One entire gallery is taken up by a collection of 38 drawings and paintings, work in which the materiality of the images is as compelling as the images themselves. The media are usually mixed or impossibly specific: one of many works called Untitled (2007) is made of “cloth, paper, felt pen and oil on cloth.” This for a work that resembles the back of a stretcher frame, with some rough sketches, a drawing that elegantly lists the dates 1976 to 2008, a figure with a bicycle and shreds of torn yellow cloth, stained red (red, so visceral and lurid, is a dominant colour in much of Althoff’s work). Similarly, Untitled (Red Soldiers) (1997), made of “Biro pen, graphite and highlighter on paper laid on board,” depicts a mutton-chopped gent in a kepi hat holding a similarly dressed figure by the back of his coat. The louche tone is roughly what we might imagine to be that of a Toulouse-Lautrec after-party. There is no single drawing style here—save chaos and finely considered primitivism—no one method of finish.
This works, then, as an emblem for the entire show, each aspect of which is qualitatively distinct from the others. Two projects share another large gallery: on one side, I Will Be Last, a dance collaboration, has left behind a set-like arrangement of props as installation (Bacchic wineglasses bearing streamers, mock high-school lockers decorated with trading cards and porn ephemera) and a video showing the dance performance. On the other side, Althoff has curated into his installation a project by the California artist Travis Joseph Meinolf, The Weaving Place. Gallery goers are invited to sit at one of six modernist styled weaving stations and make their own works. As a woman taking her grandchild around kept saying, “Here you can touch anything!”
These sites of collaboration and audience participation are thankfully book-ended by another gallery containing sculptures, including a portion of an installation that Althoff made with Lutz Braun for the 2006 Berlin Biennial. This work, Kolten Flynn, is made up of three vitrines that are draped in red foil and full of a child’s paintings, drawings, pens and other abandoned materials. A large cage rests on a lumpy resin stand; inside the cage is a green, lion-like creature. The design of a hand holding a key is repeated on the cage’s bars as if to mock the imprisoned lion or, perhaps, the perplexed gallery goer, who searches for an interpretive key.
Indeed, it is the meaningless excess of Althoff’s drawings, paintings and sculptures that is finally more compelling than his turns toward open-ended collaboration or drawing the viewer into making his or her own art. As demonstrated in a current Epson printer ad that urges us to make our own masterpiece, neo-liberalism is all about demanding our participation. Althoff’s art works best when it relaxes, and lets us relax and look at the pictures.
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