Kris Martin
June 2nd, 2007 — July 7th, 2007
Mandi VIII, 2006
Kris Martin has brought one of the most important icons of art history into the gallery. He realized an actual size authentic plaster cast of the Laokoon group made by Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanadoros.
The Trojan priest Laokoon warned his fellow citizens not to accept the wooden horse the Greeks wanted to give as a present to Troy. As a punishment Poseidon let two sea serpents kill Laokoon and his two sons. Despite Laokoon’s former warning the Trojans dragged the horse into their city, thus causing their own decline and their defeat.
The marble sculpture captures the moment in the attack where Laokoon and his sons wrestle with the serpents for life and death. What Winckelmann named “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (“noble simplicity and silent magnitude”) as a characteristic of Greek art in general, his antagonist Lessing praised as “fruchtbarer Augenblick” (“fertile moment”) between life and death par excellence.
Kris Martin’s Laokoon, however, fights against a void: in his version the serpents are omitted, or rather they were deleted after making the plaster cast. Their faces and bodies are filled with pain and fear, but in Martin’s version they are fighting against an invisible force that seems to be deleted. This tragic moment that has been so often discussed in the history of art misses its source and cause.
Kris Martin’s intervention on traditional icons and values of art is ironic, presumptuous and is at the same time characterized by his own poetry. Mandi VIII is a contemporary metaphor on collective fears of phenomena and developments in our society that can no longer be personified. He has transferred Laokoon into every day life where the anger of the gods appears in various new guises.
IBI SUM, 2007
With the help of very complex techniques Kris Martin constructed a work that functions like a conventional compass, with the sole difference that it always points at the artist. Wherever the artist moves to, the arrow of the compass will always point at him, without actually revealing his coordinates. And wherever IBI SUM moves to, whether it is exhibited, lent or purchased, it will always display the artist’s actual location.
The work could be read by the art world as a (self-)ironic metaphor. Owning IBI SUM means continuously keeping contact with the artist by accurately pointing at his unknown position. It is not an art work that can be incorporated and hung up on the wall. It is a conceptual Eulenspiegel-trick dressed in a highly technological outfit, following every move of the artist, but unable to influence him. Kris Martin integrates himself as an essential part of his own art and has to bow to the rules he himself created.
Furthermore his compass is a reflection on our society becoming more and more globalized, engineered and networked. A world where distances no longer seem to play a role and where all information is available and exchangeable in only a few seconds. Individuals lose their possibility to locate themselves and to define the limits between private and public.
After his death, the compass will display the location of his grave, but again will not display his position. It guarantees the presence of the artist beyond death, thus making the dream of many artists come true: immortality.