Index

A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On

Office Hours, Los Angeles 

curated by Brody Albert
May 2 – June 14, 2014

www.officehours.la

For the exhibition A SCULPTURE MEANT TO BE LIVED ON, a commissioned computation of the helium remaining in the atmosphere from Robert Barry’s “Inert gas series: Helium. Sometime during the morning of March 5, 1969, 2 cubic feet of Helium will be released into the atmosphere” is juxtaposed with contemporary earth-scaled art concepts.
The piece is visually inspired by crystal structures used for climate engineering in the oceans and the stratosphere. Environmental and institutional questions also arise, as it traces power relations between white cubes and blue marbles.


Making a connection between outer space and the ocean floor—both of which possess vast mineral resources, including manganese nodules and metal-rich asteroids—A SCULPTURE MEANT TO BE LIVED ON poses political questions about the sharing of common goods found in globally-governed territories. Faced with an increasing shortage of resources, asteroid and deep sea mining are losing their status as a purely abstract model, and will very likely soon become the frontiers of the near future.


The white cube of Office Hours, located in a former warehouse building, asks geologically how art — which also has its origin in a kind of shaping—contributes to the supposed co-shaping process of the Anthropocene epoch, a period when it is claimed that humans have become a geological force. The exhibition’s axial experimental set-up establishes a system of coordinates to question processes of formation, both in an art context and on a global scale.

Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
handout
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
handout
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
X-AXIS Globalism: For the first time, economically-productive space would be controlled by the whole of humanity.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
X2 The Los Angeles-based company Deep Space Industries plans its first test launches for working in outer space this year. Deep Space Industries has also announced plans to support Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik in installing satellites in Earth orbit for the virtual currency—an emerging site for virtual mining.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
X1 The 1960s saw the discovery of the potential of ocean-floor mining of polymetallic-rich manganese nodules. Seen as a vehicle for social change by Third World negotiators—a way of sharing control over economically productive spaces—the ocean floor has become a site for developing international laws and policies of distribution which focus on sharing resources mined from globally-governed territories.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Y-AXIS Science: white cubes flirting with blue marbles.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Y2 Climate engineering: Releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which reflects the sun’s rays back into space to weaken global warming. A theory based upon volcanic eruptions which in the past have led to induced winters.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Y1 Ocean nourishment: Carbonate and iron fertilization is applied to accelerate the ocean’s capacity for absorbing and downwelling carbon dioxide. Visually informed by trigonal and rhombic crystal structures used for those purposes.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Z-AXIS Art: Revisiting different earth-scaled art projects from the 1960s.
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Z2 Computation of Robert Barry’s helium atoms in the atmosphere (from: Inert gas series – Helium: some time during the morning of March 5,1969, 2 cubic feet of Helium will be released into the atmosphere), limited edition print featuring computations by Dr. Johann Zöchling, Katrin Hornek, Office Hours, 2008/2014
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Z1 Monolith, 1900–2001
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On
photography by Katie Shapiro (daylight) and Katrin Hornek (night), Stefan Zenzmaier (X1 + X2)
Katrin Hornek A Sculpture Meant To Be Lived On

For the exhibition A SCULPTURE MEANT TO BE LIVED ON, a commissioned computation of the helium remaining in the atmosphere from Robert Barry’s “Inert gas series: Helium. Sometime during the morning of March 5, 1969, 2 cubic feet of Helium will be released into the atmosphere” is juxtaposed with contemporary earth-scaled art concepts.
The piece is visually inspired by crystal structures used for climate engineering in the oceans and the stratosphere. Environmental and institutional questions also arise, as it traces power relations between white cubes and blue marbles.


Making a connection between outer space and the ocean floor—both of which possess vast mineral resources, including manganese nodules and metal-rich asteroids—A SCULPTURE MEANT TO BE LIVED ON poses political questions about the sharing of common goods found in globally-governed territories. Faced with an increasing shortage of resources, asteroid and deep sea mining are losing their status as a purely abstract model, and will very likely soon become the frontiers of the near future.


The white cube of Office Hours, located in a former warehouse building, asks geologically how art — which also has its origin in a kind of shaping—contributes to the supposed co-shaping process of the Anthropocene epoch, a period when it is claimed that humans have become a geological force. The exhibition’s axial experimental set-up establishes a system of coordinates to question processes of formation, both in an art context and on a global scale.

Katrin Hornek dt.

Katrin Hornek’s work playfully engages with the strange paradoxes and convergences of living in the age of the Anthropocene, that is, the new geologic epoch where the effects of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism are written into the body of the earth. Both her artistic and her curatorial practice assert an understanding of the entwinement of nature and culture, implicitly arguing for more complex formulations, ones that reflect the ways in which our bodies, cultures, materials, and thoughts are all composed of the other creatures and rocks and air and water that make up our world. What Hornek highlights are the often uncomfortable juxtapositions between these things, and the ways in which we are both constituted and restrained by contemporary politics and materiality.

 

To be made up of the Earth is not necessarily easy, as the body stones of LÍTHOS (and especially the thought of passing them) demonstrate. Or to try to encourage the remains of long dead organisms in a séance, now morphed into oil and plastic, to speak to us in our present. What can we learn from those dead voices? And what might they tell us?

As an artistic strategy, Hornek follows the stories and traces of the material world, following the flow of discourse on plastic or the transformation of the environment. She explores this relation by tracing the development of the Colorado River system, highlighting the ways in which the river was used as a colonial and nation-building project through the »All-American« waterway. IF ARCHITECTURE COULD TALK shows the beautiful and unsettling ways in which the yurt figures as a cultural domain across Mongolia, juxtaposed with the often uncritical appropriation of this former nomadic architectural form by people in Austria. Tellingly, the documentary ends with one of the Mongolian speakers saying that “things go where the free market prevails.”

Hornek artfully, and with a critical eye, displays the many contradictions and failings in our conceptualizations of our place in the world, among this vast, proliferating network of other-than-humans and their demands. Throughout, Hornek insightfully engages with these sometimes difficult realities that work to engage the viewer and make us think again, while combatting naiveté and political depression.

Text: Heather Davis

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Katrin Hornek’s work playfully engages with the strange paradoxes and convergences of living in the age of the Anthropocene, that is, the new geologic epoch where the effects of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism are written into the body of the earth. Both her artistic and her curatorial practice assert an understanding of the entwinement of nature and culture, implicitly arguing for more complex formulations, ones that reflect the ways in which our bodies, cultures, materials, and thoughts are all composed of the other creatures and rocks and air and water that make up our world. What Hornek highlights are the often uncomfortable juxtapositions between these things, and the ways in which we are both constituted and restrained by contemporary politics and materiality.

 

To be made up of the Earth is not necessarily easy, as the body stones of LÍTHOS (and especially the thought of passing them) demonstrate. Or to try to encourage the remains of long dead organisms in a séance, now morphed into oil and plastic, to speak to us in our present. What can we learn from those dead voices? And what might they tell us?

As an artistic strategy, Hornek follows the stories and traces of the material world, following the flow of discourse on plastic or the transformation of the environment. She explores this relation by tracing the development of the Colorado River system, highlighting the ways in which the river was used as a colonial and nation-building project through the »All-American« waterway. IF ARCHITECTURE COULD TALK shows the beautiful and unsettling ways in which the yurt figures as a cultural domain across Mongolia, juxtaposed with the often uncritical appropriation of this former nomadic architectural form by people in Austria. Tellingly, the documentary ends with one of the Mongolian speakers saying that “things go where the free market prevails.”

Hornek artfully, and with a critical eye, displays the many contradictions and failings in our conceptualizations of our place in the world, among this vast, proliferating network of other-than-humans and their demands. Throughout, Hornek insightfully engages with these sometimes difficult realities that work to engage the viewer and make us think again, while combatting naiveté and political depression.

Text: Heather Davis

DESIGN: dontcry.work

CODE: reisenbauer & balcinovic - diagnosticdigitalism.net

 

all content and work © Katrin Hornek, 2022

translations: Brían Hanrahan, Katrin Hornek