Raimund Kummer
On Sculpture, 1979-2017

Artist
Raimund Kummer

Title
On Sculpture

Year of creation
1979-2017

Technique and dimensions
444 photographs, 6,660 boxes; Installation dimensions: 4.00 x 15.00 x 35.00 m

Year of acquisition
2017

In the late 1970s, the Berlin sculptor Raimund Kummer (born 1954) identified phenomena that manifest themselves plastically in real space as fresh material and the subject of art. His interventions in urban space and the associated, simultaneously developed publication forms and strategies owe to an understanding of art that no longer separates the place where the work of art is created and its publication.

“The essence of Kummer's work is the viewer's sensory experience that takes place in space [...] The work Sculptures in the Street be understood stream of consciousness expressed in language in James Joyce's Ulysses . In its incomplete linguistic form, this is fed primarily by the fragment that is important for grief, the unfinished, which in turn nourishes the longing for nóstos , a return of whatever kind to an ideal or a perfection. […] The work On Sculpture (1979-2017) is […] initially an “album” (from the Latin albus for white) in the original sense of the emptiness represented by the boxes that needs to be filled. Here too, the nóstos and, in the progression of the photographs displayed, Joyce's stream of consciousness are crucial for a utopian activity.

Of course, one could claim that traditionally framed pictures on the wall also require a moving activity, i.e. the temporal and spatial aspect is already inherent in their viewing. But we usually ignore the spatial experience that is imposed by the bases or towers of the boxes, whose top opening does not function as a conventional frame. Looking down and walking past plastic bodies conveys a different time-space experience than linear “murals”. These are “walk-in archives” or, better yet, a walk-in catalog raisonné, which resembles a reversal of the miniaturization of the portable oeuvre that Marcel Duchamp published

Boîte-en-valise The photographs are by no means reproductions of works or arbitrary images that simply support the flow of viewing, but rather photographs in the sense of artistic photography that expect you to linger.” Eugen Blume