translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
260109: MUMOK Museum modern Kunst: Peter Kogler
MUMOK Museum modern Kunst: Peter Kogler
The topological monolith and its residents
This retrospective clearly demonstrates the evolution of Peter Kogler’s work analogous to the development of technical developments: in 1981 he drew a series of rats as white shadows with a shaded china ink background onto an empty carton picture frame; in 2008, a digital project lets the same rats run across the black monolith of the MUMOK.
Peter Kogler’s early works are dominated by charcoal drawings and sculptures made of carton. Anthropomorphic sculptures are assembled out of small carton cubes or triangles. A human being is merged into constructed space - as a red brick wall with black shadow beings integrated into the roof. The strung-out five-cornered gable house already implies the one-dimensional direction of movement, inspired by Fritz Lang’s and Sergey Eisenstein’s expressionist film architecture - “Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet” (Robert Wiene) and “The Last Laugh” (F.W. Murnau).
With the oftentimes serial and pattern-like character of these early works, Kogler seems to have waited for the switch from charcoal to silicon. It was around the mid 80s that the new digital media enabled him to create the computer-generated patterns with their easily recognizable themes: pipes, gyri, and ants, morphological structures cover entire exhibition halls. Soon Kogler’s original source of inspiration transforms itself to its own involvement within contemporary architecture. He boldly creates architecture-embracing film on public buildings. They transform the building into an excessive “scream”, the “dernier cri”, from Nietzsche’s “Last Man”, which nobody can revoke from.
An ant once walked across the newspaper… Peter Kogler made it the icon of consciousness of one-dimensional progression in an entwined space, which is always flat; as flat as the Ricci-term in Einstein’s understanding of space, which led to search for the higher dimensionality in three-D.
Kogler’s first computer animation “Without a title” (1993) is a tracking shot through a hole. The net-like structure of wads of smoke, his newest computer generated wallpaper, seems consecutively logical, by making the mathematical structures of higher dimensional inner parts of the Calabi-Yau manifold of mathematicians – this complex entwined hole accessible. Kogler’s virtual interior design finds its peak in the omnidirectional projected computer animation of moving grid structures, which condense, become soft, liquefy and finally dissolve into streaks – supported by Franz Pomassl’s
dramatically accentuated music.
Like no other artist, Kogler presents the view of the world as Peter Sloterdijk describes the “inner and outer world of foam”. Kogler represents the Pop Art of topology. The white lab rats in the maze are now ants that don’t know top from bottom – just like topological architecture brings forth disoriented buildings, to which one no longer finds the entrance.
One may dislike Peter Kogler’s work, because one dislikes this kind of world, nevertheless he visualizes one-dimensionality with a monumentality for which one can be thankful.
Renate Quehenberger
MUMOK Museum moderner Kunst
1070 Vienna, Museumsquartier, until 01.02.09
www.mumok.at
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260109
mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
1070 Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 52 500, Fax: +43 1 52 500 13 00
Email: info@mumok.at
http://www.mumok.at
Öffnungszeiten: Täglich: 10.00–18.00 Uhr, Do: 10.00–21.00 Uhr
mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
1070 Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 52 500, Fax: +43 1 52 500 13 00
Email: info@mumok.at
http://www.mumok.at
Öffnungszeiten: Täglich: 10.00–18.00 Uhr, Do: 10.00–21.00 Uhr