Talent Didn't Bring Me Here
12 June - 12 July
BPA Space
Maastrichter Str. 10
Cologne, Germany
Super Sculpey®, sand, model figures, Styrodur®, wire, wire mesh, aluminum foil, glue, spray paint,
steel table 150x70x125cm
fake food (salad, tomato, meat, lemon, tangerine, bread), ketchup, milk bottle,
children's chopsticks, plastic plate, canteen tray
44x33x15cm
44x33x15cm
Aged Shinzō Abe
Autograph (Prop III), 2020 digital collage, marker, frame
22x32x2cm 
Overview
Photos by Jona Herzig
All images courtesy of the artist and space.
Günther Möbius Talent Didn't Bring Me Here
Compiled, rephrased and written by Brainless Pressrelease Autodidacts
Although Hollywood studios and motion picture visual
effects companies now mostly work
with green screen, CGI and motion capture, physical models are still very often
being built, for example to blow them up in front of the camera (since a real
explosion still looks more realistic than animated) or to shoot with motion
control photography: Today’s computer technology allows the programmed camera
movement to be processed, such as having the move scaled up or down for
different sized elements. As the time and cost to achieve photo-realistic shots
often far exceeds the cost of shooting the live action itself, motion control
is often applied in shooting with miniatures, either to composite several
miniatures or to composite miniatures with full-scale elements.
It has been handed down that in the Middle Ages, but
also in the 60s and even in 2014, whales swam into the Rhine and were washed up
in Duisburg and Cologne.
Miniature worlds are dominated worlds. The cleverer
someone is at miniaturizing the world, the better someone is to possess and
control it. The miniature’s fixed form is manipulated by individual fantasy
rather than by physical circumstances. It offers a world clearly limited in
space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time –
particularized in that the miniature concentrates upon the single instance and
not upon the abstract rule, but generalized in that that instance comes to
transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances.
A globster or blob is an unidentified organic mass
that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water. A globster
is distinguished from a normal beached carcass by being hard to identify, at
least by initial untrained observers, and by creating controversy as to its
identity.
Sight: egg yolk-yellow spinal matter dripping from
vertebrae the size of tree trunks.
The Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), established in
1997, is Japan’s largest conservative revisionist organization and has
approximately 38,000 members. The Association wants to reinstantiate a Japanese
Empire, is prone to Shinto fundamentalism, hostile to gender-free education and
the sexual minority civil rights movement, supports revising the Japanese
Constitution, especially Article 9 which forbids a standing army and wants to
rewrite elementary school history textbooks that would nurture a national or
right-wing consciousness. Besides Abe himself, many of his cabinet and the LDP
are prominent members in the Nippon Kaigi.
The name Gojira (Godzilla) consists of the words
Gorira (gorilla) and Kujira (whale). The Japanese Godzilla film can be
interpreted as a processing of the Second World War lost by Japan, the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the numerous nuclear tests carried
out by the Americans in the Pacific during the Cold War. Since the
manifestations of Godzilla in the genre’s more than thirty films vary greatly,
it is difficult to say exactly what constitutes the monster. Almost always,
however, it is a hybrid of whale, gorilla and lizard coming out of the deep sea
and uses atomic energy as a weapon or in some films even draws all its power
from nuclear energy. Seven years of American censorship during the occupation
had eliminated the nuclear complex from the Japanese public. Godzilla was the
first Japanese feature film and also one of the first films internationally to
deal with the bomb.
The inclusion of human figures as a comparison for
scale offers yet another bridge between fictional and real realms, reinforcing
the incommensurability and immensity of other big things.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings is a Japanese
electric utility holding company which owns the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
where the Fukushima nuclear accident was started by the Tōhoku earthquake and
tsunami in 2011. As a result of the meltdowns, large amounts of water
contaminated with radioactive isotopes were released into the Pacific Ocean
during and after the disaster, which increased the risk that a lot of fish near
Fukushima is poisoned. Parallels can be drawn to the public outrage happened
right after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when contaminated
fish were being traded throughout the country. Despite the fact, that in 2008
TEPCO made two studies in which the effect of tsunami waves was studied on the
performance of the reactors, the company failed to take advantage of this
knowledge and nothing was done to prevent such an event to happen. More than
one million cubic meters of contaminated water is stored in the plant area and
being treated by a purification system that can remove radionuclides to a level
that Japanese regulations allow to be discharged to the pacific ocean. Moreover,
as under American occupation, the Japanese government's hush-hush information
policy on the nuclear complex is proving effective today.
Smell: an oppressive miasma of the sourest stench
imaginable combined with rancid grease.
While the miniature object often speaks to the past,
it encapsulates the time of production. Miniature objects are most often
exaggerations of the attention to detail, precision, and balance that is
characteristic of craft and artisanal culture – a culture which is considered to
have been lost at the dawn of industrial production.
The 1930s also saw the advent of factory-ship whaling
in the Antarctic and this continued post-war when the Allied Powers gave
permission for Japanese whaling fleets to fish there in order to overcome food
shortages. And in this vacuum of national symbols (nihonjinron), whale meat has
provided a particularly powerful image. The post-war period saw a free-for-all
race to kill as many whales as possible known as the Whaling Olympics. When the
American occupation authorities urged that whale meat be offered in classroom
lunches nationwide as a cheap source of protein, for the first time whale meat
became part of Japanese everyday life. But as alternatives became available
decades after the war, the demand declined. The government, using whaling as a
symbol of national identity and pride, insists on continuing with whaling until
today and even spends large amounts of taxpayers’ money to subsidise stockpiles
of whale meat which few Japanese want to eat. In fact, Children are being
taught about the history of whaling, the biology of the animals, how to cook
the meat and even have to watch a whale being sliced open in real life. In many
Japanese schools the children are served whale meat as a regular school meal –
but with ketchup, otherwise the children wouldn’t eat it.
Current Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s personal
patriotic vision to remake a “beautiful Japan” that is socially harmonious and
ethnically homogeneous can be read in his bestseller Towards a Beautiful
Country (2006), in which he yearned for Japan to become a truly independent
country unfettered by the shackles of Japan’s peaceful constitution. Besides
the facts that the US withdraw from TPP in 2017 and Trump isn’t bothered by
North Korean missile tests and on the other side Japan is buying costly
American weapons to reduce the country’s trade surplus with the US, Mr Trump
and Mr Abe are regular golf partners and according to Trump have a „very, very
good chemistry“. It is also true that he started showing pragmatist leanings
from the very outset of his second premiership in 2012 and has gradually
shelved ideology in favor of realpolitik based on Japan’s national interests.
Sound: the thunk of meat hooks sinking into rotting
blubber.
Food models, fake foods or food samples are a model or
replica of a food item made from plastic, wax, resin or similar material and
most of all fake food is still handcrafted. These models are commonly used in
restaurant street displays in Japan (shokuhin sampuru) and Korea to represent
the dishes available inside.
Julia Kristeva describes abjection (subjective horror)
as the feeling when an individual experiences, or is confronted by (both
mentally and as a body), one's „corporeal reality“, or a breakdown in the distinction
between what is Self and what is Other. The abject is, as such, the process
that separates from one's environment what "is not me". Abjection
prevents the absolute realization of existence, completing the course of
biological, social, physical, and spiritual cycles. The best representation of
this concept can be imagined as one's reaction to gazing at a human cadaver, or
corpse, as a direct reminder of the inevitability of death.
The latest Godzilla movie Shin Godzilla (2016) leaves
no doubt that the greatest threat to Japan comes not from without but from
within, from a geriatric, fossilized government bureaucracy unable to act
decisively or to stand up resolutely to foreign pressure.
Touch: greasy goo, everywhere. There was even a taste
for anyone unlucky enough to be caught open-mouthed at the wrong time.
A dissonance between our interior worlds that of
course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag
& drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly
doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control.
The miniature assumes an anthropocentric universe for
its absolute sense of scale. The predominant visual illustrations of the
Anthropocene attempt to portray the vast temporal scale of the epoch and /the
enormity of human impact on the planet by simply zooming out, up and away from
the planet, taking photographs from the sky. This transcendent perspective,
which places the human observer in a position reminiscent of the „God trick“,
removes the fleshy, embodied human from the scene. We are all embedded in
material processes; thus, politics and ethics involve scale- shifting modes of
thinking and acting.
Big dumb objects function as science fiction’s
equivalent to a MacGuffin, plot devices which serve to awe the viewer with
mystery and intrigue yet bear little to no narrative explanation. The objects
we face are visually so striking that they quash further inquiries into their
exact raison d’être. The big dumb object, be it tumor or bubble, manifest fear
as a physical object so it can be overcome, defeated by the plot. It is an
effigy, a device to allow our dream-selves to create a monster that we can see
defeated, turned over in hand, felt, and thought.