Making Things

2016

Making Things, 2016

Cast aluminium

The Factory is empty.

All workers have left long time ago.

Taking away their tools, their stories.

The artist enters the empty place.

He brings his own furnace.

Sand and aluminum. One ton of sand and one ton of aluminum.

Nothing else.

Using the sand, he makes imprints of the leftovers. A piece of wood, a nail, maybe even a single shoe.

Then he heats the furnace, melting aluminum. With liquid aluminum, he carefully fills the imprints in the sand. Remaking those lost objects is like summoning ghosts. The ghosts of the tools, the ghosts of the workshop.

Little by little new shapes appear, first single objects, mainly tools. Then, from those ghost tools, he makes more complex imprints, making more complex objects.

Someone could recognize a table, a working bench, a ladder on the wall.

Nothing is complete, everything looks like a shadow, a metallic solid shadow.

When there is no more aluminum, or when the space is not empty anymore, he stops.

The furnace cools down. The work is done.

There are shadows in the factory, shadows of tools, working machines, reminiscence of its former activity.

Or just of any human activity?

“For his exhibition at Kunsthalle Arbon, Gonzenbach drew inspiration from the former function of our exhibition space. The old industrial building became for him a symbol of humankind’s creative drive: the processing of raw materials and the making of ‘useful’ and ‘usable’ objects and goods is an essential part of the identity of civilised, modern society. The fictional workshop that the artist has, from this perspective, cast in a tonne of aluminium directly in the exhibition space is, on the one hand, a homage to this human creative impulse. At the same time, the homage undermines the very object of its reverence by resisting usefulness and profitable productivity — that is, one of the essential aspects through which humankind defines itself as a ‘higher being’ within nature. Gonzenbach’s workshop also illustrates that every act of creation is in reality an act of transformation. Thus, with this meticulous cast of a fictional production unit, Gonzenbach questions the self-image of humankind as much as that of the artist. He gives form to this questioning in a mysterious, seductive installation that feels at once familiar and foreign, noble and shabby, meaningful and absurd, ghostly and poetic — and never without Gonzenbach’s trademark touch of humour.”

Deborah Keller, May 2016