DAMN° 86 – A Private Pulse for Lonely People
As an installation and performance artist, Nile Koetting builds obscure scenarios. He assembles mundane objects and animates them among sound, lights, and performers making them more lively than mere products. These hyper-liminal spaces look like dissident nichés hidden in a greater, imagined metropolis; they have a bizarre tranquillity.
Koetting speaks to me from Berlin’s Galerie Wedding as he instals his upcoming show Polyharmony - Downtime Salon 23-24. He tells me his work is rarely finished before “outputting”. Dithering on completion is his way to avoid being a mechanically reliable “content provider”. It’s also his way of working differently with common objects—water coolers, paper shredders, plastic house plants, inflatable pool rings, storage boxes, suitcases, and so on—which may too easily be considered “readymades”. Ultimately, Koetting has doubts about their readiness.
“They are performers, and performers are not always ready. This is why my work is not simply installation art. These objects need to perform just as much as the other performers that I work with. My challenge is to connect with them, I look for ways to communicate with them so that they will understand me. But it isn’t an easy kind of communication, it isn’t seamless or intuitive like how we are told interactions are supposed to be with these sorts of products and devices. To achieve my art I often have to negotiate with them, or to direct them more sternly. Sometimes, when they are being stubborn, I don’t even want them to be there but they have to be, I need to respect their limitations.”
Popular culture is a necessary condition of Koetting’s work. In his 2015 exhibition Sustainable Hours at Maison Hermes Le Forum in Tokyo, Koetting exhibited a series of objects that were recommended for purchase by an online shop—an air conditioner, smart speakers, a clock, and other similar things. These common, plasticky objects are not “found objects” in any Rauschenberg-like sense, conversely, they are objects that found the artist. “I am an artist and I am being led to the materials of my art by an algorithm, by a shady mediator, this is part of the object’s makeup, its material, it is part of the object’s performance.”
Reading this aspect of Koetting’s work through Roland Barthes’ well-know essay Plastic—one from his 1957 collection on popular culture, Mythologies—it’s as if Koetting is continuing on from what Barthes calls the “terminal form” of plastic. This is the form that plastic takes after its “transmutation” from the “raw” to the “human object”. In Koetting’s works, the transmutation is ongoing, the terminus is a myth. Consequently, a semblance of original rawness remains because he is uninterested and (perhaps) unable to readily grasp the culturally imposed terminus of an object’s utility for humans.
Koetting grew up in Japan with his American father. He was always, to some degree, an outsider (gaikokujin). “Socially, not being considered part of the culture you grow up in is awkward. Culturally, it makes everything mystifying. Nothing is native. Where others saw tradition or ritual (like a tea ceremony) I saw protocols of movement. I have had the same experiences when studying in Helsinki and now living in Berlin too.”
Despite popular culture being a necessary condition of his art, the objects Koetting uses are not there to “evoke” and pervert a sense of collective cultural understanding because that implicit understanding is already lacking. As such, the process of taking a common object and setting it off kilter in an unusual context (namely: the white cube) can not sincerely be part of Koetting’s wheelhouse. Uniquely, in Koetting’s work, his treatment of these everyday products renders them more like objects “invoked” rather than objects that “evoke”. That is to say, they are exhibited as objects that have been called forth; they are particular instances of their own, rather than general references to something other. These objects exist as mysterious protocols.
WIthout common cultural traditions of understanding being encoded in his objects, it’s as if they have been digitally copied and pasted from one unknown place to this slightly-less-unknown place. “Not copied and pasted, I would describe the way these objects come about to be something more like dragged-and-dropped.” It’s as if each object has been dragged from a stock folder of anonymous, popular 3D objects and dropped into place: this time in a gallery in Berlin. In this way, the exhibited object's referent is never rendered in imagination because Koetting’s art doesn’t make it necessary, or desirable.
I don’t know what people expect when they come to my show. Some look at my work and think it is futuristic, others struggle to see anything at all. I can’t honestly say that I have an aim in my work, but I would like to put people in a different mode. I would be happy if my art could have a pulse in their lives. I don’t mean collectively though, we are individuals fragmented together, my art should be a private pulse for lonely people.
Koetting speaks to me from Berlin’s Galerie Wedding as he instals his upcoming show Polyharmony - Downtime Salon 23-24. He tells me his work is rarely finished before “outputting”. Dithering on completion is his way to avoid being a mechanically reliable “content provider”. It’s also his way of working differently with common objects—water coolers, paper shredders, plastic house plants, inflatable pool rings, storage boxes, suitcases, and so on—which may too easily be considered “readymades”. Ultimately, Koetting has doubts about their readiness.
“They are performers, and performers are not always ready. This is why my work is not simply installation art. These objects need to perform just as much as the other performers that I work with. My challenge is to connect with them, I look for ways to communicate with them so that they will understand me. But it isn’t an easy kind of communication, it isn’t seamless or intuitive like how we are told interactions are supposed to be with these sorts of products and devices. To achieve my art I often have to negotiate with them, or to direct them more sternly. Sometimes, when they are being stubborn, I don’t even want them to be there but they have to be, I need to respect their limitations.”
Popular culture is a necessary condition of Koetting’s work. In his 2015 exhibition Sustainable Hours at Maison Hermes Le Forum in Tokyo, Koetting exhibited a series of objects that were recommended for purchase by an online shop—an air conditioner, smart speakers, a clock, and other similar things. These common, plasticky objects are not “found objects” in any Rauschenberg-like sense, conversely, they are objects that found the artist. “I am an artist and I am being led to the materials of my art by an algorithm, by a shady mediator, this is part of the object’s makeup, its material, it is part of the object’s performance.”
Reading this aspect of Koetting’s work through Roland Barthes’ well-know essay Plastic—one from his 1957 collection on popular culture, Mythologies—it’s as if Koetting is continuing on from what Barthes calls the “terminal form” of plastic. This is the form that plastic takes after its “transmutation” from the “raw” to the “human object”. In Koetting’s works, the transmutation is ongoing, the terminus is a myth. Consequently, a semblance of original rawness remains because he is uninterested and (perhaps) unable to readily grasp the culturally imposed terminus of an object’s utility for humans.
Koetting grew up in Japan with his American father. He was always, to some degree, an outsider (gaikokujin). “Socially, not being considered part of the culture you grow up in is awkward. Culturally, it makes everything mystifying. Nothing is native. Where others saw tradition or ritual (like a tea ceremony) I saw protocols of movement. I have had the same experiences when studying in Helsinki and now living in Berlin too.”
Despite popular culture being a necessary condition of his art, the objects Koetting uses are not there to “evoke” and pervert a sense of collective cultural understanding because that implicit understanding is already lacking. As such, the process of taking a common object and setting it off kilter in an unusual context (namely: the white cube) can not sincerely be part of Koetting’s wheelhouse. Uniquely, in Koetting’s work, his treatment of these everyday products renders them more like objects “invoked” rather than objects that “evoke”. That is to say, they are exhibited as objects that have been called forth; they are particular instances of their own, rather than general references to something other. These objects exist as mysterious protocols.
WIthout common cultural traditions of understanding being encoded in his objects, it’s as if they have been digitally copied and pasted from one unknown place to this slightly-less-unknown place. “Not copied and pasted, I would describe the way these objects come about to be something more like dragged-and-dropped.” It’s as if each object has been dragged from a stock folder of anonymous, popular 3D objects and dropped into place: this time in a gallery in Berlin. In this way, the exhibited object's referent is never rendered in imagination because Koetting’s art doesn’t make it necessary, or desirable.
I don’t know what people expect when they come to my show. Some look at my work and think it is futuristic, others struggle to see anything at all. I can’t honestly say that I have an aim in my work, but I would like to put people in a different mode. I would be happy if my art could have a pulse in their lives. I don’t mean collectively though, we are individuals fragmented together, my art should be a private pulse for lonely people.
