'Service 2'
Position (Berlin/BRD)
October 3 - November 8, 2009

click here for photo’s of the installation

click here to watch the project’s genesis
click here to watch all designs

Position – the artist

‘Position’, of course, is not the artist’s real name – it’s a ‘nom de plume’, an artist’s name, but also a ‘nomen est omen’: something of a brand name.

Born in 1977 in Potsdam, in the then German Democratic Republic, the artist teen-ed in the nineties, during the first years of the German Reunification, when suddenly all perspectives changed. The initial opportunity to express himself was graffiti. By nature, graffiti artists work in public space and in a scale and size that demand to be seen and to be reacted upon; on the other hand, they tend to operate ‘behind the scenes’, often under cover of darkness, literally preferring obscurity and anonymity, and known by a nick name at best.

After fulfilling his military service and after some years as a student of Philosophy and German Literature, he decides to study ‘real’ art. As a student of artist Frank Badur at Berlin’s University of the Arts he gets acquainted with the conventions of contemporary art and gradually learns to appreciate that point and line and colour can be powerful and effective visual means even when totally non-representational, culminating in the 20^th century into Abstract Expressionism, Colorfield Painting and Minimal Art.

As a student, his works rides a delicate balance between ‘paining’ and ‘object’, between ‘flatness’ and ‘spatiality’. At present, he often experiments with (seemingly) two-dimensional shapes in three-dimensional environments, thus exploring border regions of perspective and perception. In 2007, he graduates with Honours, and subsequently engages in a Masterstudy (2007-2009).

In the end, however, he comes to the conclusion that academic notions of art and of being an artist are too sterile for him as an artist, and too far removed from the real world. Being born and raised with graffiti, he takes up position. Rather than starting out from the tabula rasa of virgin canvas or pristine surroundings, Position as an artist is always on the lookout for given situations to … Neither are developing and presenting an individual style, a unique artistic ‘ego’ his prime professional goals. Since a couple of years he has been experimenting with projects in urban space that explicitly seek passers by to contribute: he calls that ‘collective creativity’. Rather than as an autonomous artist, he defines himself as an intermediary, a ‘service provider’.

This he demonstrated very clearly in his ‘Service’-project for the group exhibition ‘Planet Prozess / Zwischen Raum und Kunst’ in Berlin (2007). Using a simple computer software, visitors were given the opportunity to sketch visual proposals for a number of leftover urban spaces, selected by Position – facades of abandoned buildings, deserted nooks and street corners, non-spaces under bridges and viaducts, etcetera. Position then actually executed these proposals on site, layer over layer, while documenting various phases of the project, including the impact of wear and tear by climate or vandalisation and/or the contributions by graffiti artists, and simultaneously feeding back this visual process to the exhibition audience through computer monitors – also as starting point for ever new contributions. Position described this ‘Service’-project as a public facility for ordering visual interventions in the urban environment, himself the intermediary between his audience and the final image as a collective effort.

Position and Het Plafond

The 2007 Berlin ‘Service’-project led to an invitation to Position to come to Rotterdam, to do a project at Het Plafond. It, too, is a ‘niche’ within the urban fabric, almost a public space, and anything but a ‘white cube gallery’. It would also offer the opportunity to once more seek direct contact with members of the audience – analogue passers-by at the sidewalk as well as digital website visitors – and invite them to participate & contribute to the final design of the project. Once more, Position himself remains backstage, limiting himself to defining the project’s procedures, rules and conditions.

"Soon after September 25 I want to travel down there to you, and I will then spend one week  to realize the art project. I would like to work from Monday till Friday, transforming one design each day into your space; thus, after one week a process of change might be shown.

I will be using the three primary colours plus black and white, thus planning five distinct interventions. I plan to employ opaque tape in the space itself, and transparent adhesive tape on the window. Observed from one specific position, all elements will merge into one single image.”

from an e-mail by Position, June 23 2009

“By which criteria can we define abstract imagery beautiful or rather not beautiful? Should it always be the artist’s ego to autonomously define, execute and control all aspects of an artwork? This emancipation of the artistic ego was the basis of Modernism, culminating in American Abstract Expressionism by the middle of the 20^th century.

Today, new principles underlying artistic expression can be explored. In his project ‘Service 2’, Berlin based artist Position formulates and accommodates the visual identity of a collective, virtual scheme of collaboration. Visitors to his website may, by using a simple drawing software (‘Painter’), design abstract shapes for a mural in Het Plafond’s space. Within one week, Position will take up these visual proposals and elaborate them into a reality in three dimensions. The final artwork will thus be the result of collaboration with anonymous Internet users that profited by the ‘Service’ provided by Position. Thus, this project takes a stance within the poles of individual conceptualisation, mediated processes and collective visual preferences.”

from an e-mail by Position, September 21 2009

‘Service 2’ for Het Plafond

In defiance of the space’s name (Het Plafond = the ceiling), this project doesn’t employ Het Plafond’s ceiling. Once in Rotterdam, confronted with the actual space and the specifics of the location, Position decided to start out from the gazes of the passers by on the sidewalk, constructing his installation upon the horizontal alignment of the space’s whitewashed back wall, its large shop window and the space outside. Standing on the sidewalk and looking from the viewpoint of an imaginary passer by, Position defined a plane on the windowpane that in perspective corresponds with the white back wall, but that also shows parts of the space’s floor and left wall. During five consecutive days, Position then offered that plane to a virtual Internet-audience, to anonymously draw two-dimensional shapes, in daily changing colours. Out of the wide collection of visual options thus generated each day, one shape was selected daily – by throwing digital dice: once more, Position circumnavigated his artistic ego. Instead, he limited himself to merely executing the shape-of-the-day into two distinct modes: first as a flat shape in two dimensions of transparent adhesive foil on the window, and secondly as a line drawing out of coloured tape stretching out in three dimensions across the space’s floor, the side wall and the back wall. This process was repeated five times during in the week preceding the opening, generating a many-layered installation as the result of artistic collaboration of Position and his audience.