| Thomas Locher |
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-> Works in the Exhibition  Thomas Wulffen Thomas Locher – In the Shell of LanguageIt is a kind of house or a room in a house. There are entrances and passageways and a sort of window. The structure of the sculpture, if we want to grasp it as such, is easy to decipher. The wall parts are inscribed with texts of various lengths. Their structure, however, can be deciphered only after a long reading. The title of the work is Der Satzbauplan [Sentence Structure] (1992), and is in a specific way ambiguous; it refers as much to the sentences, which the viewer can read, as to the constructed structure, the construction plan (Bauplan). It is, so to speak, a three-dimensional image of a construction plan and at the same time a kind of image of language. The imaging of language and its structural order has the danger of getting stuck in a self-referential loop. Moreover, language is endangered from another quarter. Thomas Locher described this threat in his text for the catalogue of the exhibition Prospect 89: “‘Language’ is today the goal and object of the most diverse investigations in the most diverse disciplines. This interest means the end of its immediacy. What is being done in its name, the manner of its profanation, the way we are taking possession of language, is a portent of a danger: its disappearance”. [1] The work of Thomas Locher has always been, on the one hand, a critique and, on the other, a saving of the phenomena. He thereby deliberately draws on traditions in philosophy and contemporary art. Peter Weibel has related Locher’s work equally to minimalist art and to the analytical linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. [2] Directly approached, Locher’s art may be understood as conceptual art in the true sense. It works with concepts about concepts. A work like Die Grammatik [Grammar] (1990) works with concepts from the theory of grammar, and at the same time presents their structural order within the picture. There is not, however, an identity between the concept itself and the image of the concept, although at first glance we want to suppose something of this sort in the work. What appears in the perception of the discrepancy is a kind of dis-illusionment, the discovery of an illusion. The work complex is brought into being on the basis of this illusion; the works seem to get along without concepts, although they present work on concepts. In the one picture are bouquets, in the other various fields of color. The connecting element is number. The objects are counted, but in a manner that creates an impression of inscrutability, because no intelligible order emerges from the counting. In fact, these works are about a kind of presentation, perception, and ordering. Numbers are a medium of ordering like words. We perceive the world through numbers. This mode of access became even plainer in the so-called Lexikonbilder [Lexicon Pictures]. Here a given object is resolved into its components and numbered. This operation is a double abstraction. The picture images the object. We perceive the image as an object because we are no longer aware of the distinction between image and object. Then the numbering carries out a further step, which signifies a sheer ordering without naming. The so-called Astralonbilder [Astralon Pictures] carry out this classification ad absurdum. They assign different numbers to the same colors. Or is it about the position of the individual colors in the picture? What system lies behind this ordering? Or what order lies behind this system? Whoever answers these questions is moving in the region between art and the theory of knowledge. [...] [1] Martina Detterer, Prospect ’89. Eine internationale Ausstellung aktueller Kunst, exhibit. cat. Frankfurter Kunstverein und Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, p. 136. [2] Kölnischer Kunstverein (ed.), Wer sagt was und warum. Vier imaginäre Räume. Thomas Locher, exhibit. cat., Cologne, 1992. Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg" Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009 ^
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