Following the 2015 exhibition “Florian Hecker/John McCracken” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz, this publication probes the experimental capacity of the white-cube space of the gallery. For the exhibition, two complementary yet autonomous artists were brought into dialogue with each other: German artist and computer composer Florian Hecker, and the late American sculptor John McCracken.
The fiberglass-coated, monochrome “planks” by McCracken spanned the floor and the walls of the building, evoking a juncture between painting and sculpture, while Hecker's computer-generated sound pieces dramatized both space and time. By combining the work of the two artists, a framework was created in which an aesthetic experience occurred between the shifting boundaries and intersections of sculpture and sound as they affected each other within a space consisting of geometric and architectural formations as well as temporal and subjective formations. At the same time, the viewer/listener became more sensitized to the conditions, qualities, and degrees of intensity between the physical and the ephemeral.
The publication includes a curatorial introduction by Christian Egger, and a comprehensive essay by the author and curator of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, João Ribas. The cover has been designed by Florian Hecker using an objectness measure algorithm.
Copublished with Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz
Contributors
Christian Egger and João Ribas
