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A text that seeks to represent an idea of the work of André Marose is, in a structural sense, nothing less than the artist's work itself, which is largely concerned with the struggle of the artist with his work, his sources of inspiration, and the possibilities for its reception.
Marose opens his work up to discourse, process, and to his own life, by shaping the institutional, media, and individual conditions of his work (homepage, magazines, exhibitions outside the artistic context etc).
The text André Marose uses to comment on his work often consists of images, which when read in series become a text.
The large-format photographic work "Exhibition (Index)" from 2008 is, on a visual level, a list of works by the artist made on the occasion of the installation of his solo exhibition "Too Contemporary" at Galerie Metro.
The artist photographed a part of his work in varying stagings in the exhibition space. Thus the artist's intention to expose becomes itself the object of exposition. He offers the viewer an understanding of his work by leaving a choice from among a variety of his works and their various stagings. Just like the artist would do himself for an exhibition.
Here, the artist is consumer rather than producer, passing on his criteria of selection and composition to the viewer. This way the viewer, as a consumer, is on the same level as the artist, contrasting consumption as destruction with consumption as a form of communication.
The artistic product engages the viewer / consumer and his or her selection criteria into a further debate with those of the artist, an engagement which leads the artistic material into a process of permanent transformation.
Marose's work reveals the social and individual conditions of, and possibilities for, the emergence of personal taste in a consumer society. Taste, according to Kant, although subjective claims objective validity, and requires a society in which personal taste can give rise to social networks, which in turn reinforce personal taste. It is a testament to the close interconnection between civilization and culture, ethics and aesthetics.
In this sense, it could be argued that it is not art that Marose produces, but rather a high-level communication on a visual level in order to live and further develop sensual and emotional experience.
As a part of Maroses confrontation with his own working practice and the possibilities of mediating his work he is constantly concerned with the funtctioning of the system his work is located; the art system.
In the video work "HUO" (2008) one sees the name of the curator Hans Ullrich Obrist seemingly on the back of a glass door through a mystic haze. From time to time, while the writing revolves around itself, the initials "HUO" appear. The curator used these initials in his numerous interviews with eminent representatives of the art world. Then, a scream sounds, as though to frighten someone.
Hans Ulrich Obrist represents the art educator par excellence. His ubiquity in art magazines, exhibitions and conferences, and his intuition and his knowledge of the latest trends in contemporary art transformed him from a curator as catalyst of the artistic process, to being the driving force of contemporary art himself. In the framework of Marose's solo exhibition "Too Contemporary" Hans Ulrich Obrist stands for the contradiction of a curator who is more contemporary than the art he is curating.
"HUO" expresses Marose's humorous personal experience of always finding the curator had been there before him, where he had initially believed to have discovered something new. In this context the reverse lettering makes the whole setting readable as the interior of the contemporary--a diffuse nebula in which the artist attempts to situate himself.
While "Exhibition" blurred the boundary between the artwork and its mediation, this work blurs the boundaries between artist and mediator. On the one hand, the mediator is placed on the same level with the artist and the viewer, on the other hand the possibility to distinguish between those has been eroded. The name (HUO or the name of the artist for instance) replaces these categories, and has become the pivotal criteria of distinction. In this reduction to the name however art is reduced to media culture, wherein the only thing that counts is the rate of attention that someone attracts.
Marose's preoccupation with the conditions of his own work leads him inevitably to sound the depths of the origin of his art work. The confrontation with his sources of inspiration for the artist is at the same time an antidote to the absurdities and constraints of the art world.
The video "Souveniro Della Biennale di Venezia" (2005) confronts the art world with a moment of inspiration.
A point of light expands and stretches at night in the shallow rippling water. Voices can be heard in the background. A gondola passes through the point of undulating light, tearing it into a thousand pieces. Before the water calms and the fragments of light coalesce, the video abruptly ends.
Marose's film answers the over-stimulation and the hustle and bustle of the art world contained in the voices in the distance with a moment of contemplative absorption. This snapshot at the same time fixes the transience of the moment, and its enduring beauty--Something essential that for the artist exists beyond trends and discourses. The film stands as a metaphor for the discursive back-and-forth, the differentiation and divergence of views, the swarm of perspectives freshly experienced at the Biennale.
The works in the series "Drawing Unrealized Projects", which the artist has constantly expanded since 2005, consists of designs and ideas for possible projects, whose common denominator is the creative use of the various obstacles to artistic work: Whether it's the lack of inspiration or various reasons like money, time, ability for a work not being implemented.
The work "Now" (2006) is the paradoxical attempt to pass on the moment of inspiration to the viewer. On a sheet of A4 paper - written almost unreadably small in a corner - the word "Now", as if to say: "Now," "Finally!". This feeling is conveyed to the viewer, who only after a prolonged approach, is able to read what is written on the paper.
In the context of the group exhibition where this work has been shown for the first time, „Now“ was - amid a variety of works all outdoing each other - a moment of intimacy in which the viewer felt attracted by the small, unassuming white sheet, to decipher the word written upon it.
In a laconic way Marose parpahrases with „Now“ his view of the contemporariness in art as an experience in which the time he lives in densifies to one single moment.
That this moment cannot only be experienced in art but also and especially in daily life, this is what characterizes the specific view of the artist. In the case of Marose the comprehension of this view is always identical with its application. Once more the viewer relates to the artist on the level of the artist.
As there is no difference for Marose between art and life there ist no difference between art and personal matters. Art for him is always personal, and the personal can always become a source of inspiration for art. The connection between sign and meaning of those works of Marose which have a purely personal background elude the uninitiated viewer.
In this way, they become pure planes of projection. These works establish an intimate relationship with the viewer, in which the latter can be involved completey while remaining all the same on his own with his projections.
Thus, the viewer is running - just as the artist in his work - in danger of losing him/herself in his or her own world. Especially in the pieces in which Marose addresses his sentimental relationships with women, the artist manages to transfer his position between projection and reality to the viewer.
In one of the works within the frame of the "Unrealized Projects" Marose gathers together the names of his flirtations, crushes, and lovers in a list. These names are signs detached from what they used to refer to for the artist and now release personal connotations in the reader's imagination.
With reference to the "Unrealized Projects" the question arises, what is it exactly that is unfinished about these names or this list? The artist gives his answer at the end of the list itself: "You're only an idea in my head love, but what if I had never existed?"
The projections, the artist lets himself carrie away by in the face of a real person, detach him from that person, tearing open a rift between man and artist, reality and fiction. And so the surpassing of his own projections remains unrealized, and with it, the establishment of a real connection. With the continuation of this list, the however the complete dissolution into the unreal and artificial of his own projections remains unrealized as well.
In this tension between the desire for symbiosis and the fear of self-loss, the man and the artist both remain unrealized.
The failure of communication, the fear of remaining a prisoner of one's own projections, and the frustration of not being able to get hold of the desired, leads to a sublimated form of violent appropriation, which can go from tender caress to respectful adulation to the destruction of the desired.
The "Wounds" are chance byproducts of the T-shirt Series: "Cause This Night I Will Have Killed You". The series' title is about a woman by whom the artist was abandoned long ago. The "Wounds" (2004) are residues on paper that the artist has placed in T-shirts in order to protect their backs from the color applied on the shirt. This traces render the knife-cut style gestures, with which the artist has applied the colour on the T-shirt in a purely abstract form.
This way the issue is rendered better by happenstance than by what the artists intended. To admit randomness in the artistic process, by staying open to the interplay between intention and chance, for the artist seems to be a way of avoiding the impasse of his own projections.
The work "Too Contemporary" (2007) consists of posters by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and fashion magazines painted over with a black marker. "Too Contemporary" literally means to be to close to the present, making it impossible for the artist as part of the present to gain distance from himself. The artist's reaction to the inability to distinguish himself is to hold on to what inspires him, althuogh he is not able in this moment to dispose about his inspirations for his artisic work.
With a gesture between affectionate and careful scanning and systematic stabbings, the artist gradually conceals the artwork or magazine pages in the process of applying marker strokes. The manner in which the over-paintings are spread out under glaring light, on a white tabletop, is reminiscent of a dissecting table. The objects here, however are not broken down for further analysis, but prepared and preserved to possibly become an archeological site of personal taste in the future.
In lire Vogue "(2008) this over-painting of fashion magazines continues. The gestures have assumed more verve and have beocme continuous. Here the overpaintings take on the delicatness of a veil, by which fashion and models become ethereal, rather than covered. In this manner the artist releases these images of models from their datedness. He attempts to preserve the volatility of fashion and beauty, preserving them in a symbol of their own transience. The delicacy of the veil is an expression of opposition--of an attempt to preserve the fleeting--without destroying its volatility.
Kai Schupke, 2008
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