Everything, or in any case quite a lot

Kay Heymer

The situation of contemporary art is an ambivalent one. Either, everything seems possible, or, exactly this candour tends to supercharge art with themes that have not a dreg to do with its forming and properties. Work on the form, the genuine domain of visual artists, has long (since the 1910s’ Dadaism) lost its cherry and all formal discoveries reputedly happen to be already made. You can do everything but you have to know what you’re doing. As art is in need neither of progress nor the outdated, it can be made, at any time, gaining its relevance directly out of its formation – as if there has never before or always been artistic creation. Today, artists work with an unlikely blend of innocence and rip-offs.

Madeleine Boschan is such an artist, her works have everything: independent, though, with a strong sense of tradition, manifoldly intertwined formation, seductive, spiritual vigour, presence and enduring impact. Repeatedly, she has employed found materials – steel tubes, machine parts, or blinds. The significant difference being that she, at any rate, thoroughly works through her sculptures and provides with a fresh coating as well as neon light for a ›finish‹ that makes her works appear new and perfect. The sculptures are free from patina and historic ballast, yet at the same time, just as sinewy as African or Oceanic ritual objects whose foremost concern was, too, the most effective persuasion or overwhelmment of their audience possible. This functions best with new and seemingly perfect artefacts – the Africans never understood the Europeans’ fondness for old, patinated things.

With Technicolor: a) Feld, b) Fläche Madeleine Boschan has created an impressive group of eight sculptures, self-contained shapes in brisk colours, which penetrate and seize a whole new terrain other than her former ones, being wiry or thorny. Emanating from the black floor of the exhibition space, she devised a succinct colour concept based on cinema’s technoid theory of colours. The sculptures themselves are eccentrically moulded bodies, irregular modifications of stereometric objects, with individual and distinct shapes. Every sculpture has its own colour and, consciously or not, ties in with the post-minimalist abstraction of artists such as Richard Tuttle; whereby, the lasting validity of Lucy Lippard’s »Eccentric Abstraction«1 , a notion of style coined in 1966, is affirmed, once more. Madeleine Boschan, furthermore, refers to Franz West whose colourful metal sculptures constitute another possible point of reference. Nonetheless, West’s colours are more natural and his forms more organic with their bulging welding seams reminiscent of the elaborate scarifications of certain African peoples. Such associations and stylistic comparisons do, in fact, help to define a new, independent position. Ultimately, the differences matter, not the similarities.

Her sculptures unite conceptual clarity with an intuitive course of action. Girding them in colour almost is a meditative, ritualistic act, absolutely empathisable while beholding the works. They are handicraft, compiled and incurred by an uncompromising artist. Madeleine Boschan has embedded apertures into her sculptures in which, just as in reliquaries or magical Congolese artefacts, a variety of objects is kept – a thermometer, a compass, or other measuring apparatuses to determine the work’s specific time and place. She fabricates secular reliquaries leading lives of their own or, at least, claiming to do so.

Quite a few of them manifest a tautological dimension. If they record their own position and the climatic conditions of their surroundings, this appears like a reversal of Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961). Yet, this unmasking, tautological dimension contradicts the apparent affinity to outer-European ritual objects, thus, it is fascinating to figure out how much or how little belief as opposed to hard-boiled control and manipulation is at stake, here and there.

Madeleine Boschan’s works are to be situated in a zone where Existentialism converts into analysis. The point of transition is not to be identified accurately, therefore, her sculptures remain vivid and present like all compelling ritual objects. In future, their age will become more and more negligible, because just as the masterpieces of Egyptian art they will constantly seem novel. Insistently, her sculptures advance into a tradition of spiritual sculpture where among numerous others the giant masks from the Baining in New Guinea and the nail fetishes from the Yombe in Congo, Constantin Brâncuși, Louise Bourgeois, and Franz West welcome them.