Misbehaving Materials Ooze and Decay in a Gallery in Berlin

In a dark basement in Berlin, an ancient slime mold, physarum polycephalum, spreads across the blockchain. The organism, which lacks a central nervous system, also expands over a peer-to-peer organizational model called the Holacracy, and a spiritual mandala designed by biologist Minakata Kamagusu, modeling a decentralized worldview. All a part of an artwork by Jenna Sutela, the old, gooey stuff mirrors, feeds on, and overtakes these modern, human-made, non-hierarchical structures inside hanging, plastic spheres.

Titled Orbs, the work captures the essence of the group show it’s a part of Inflected Objects #2 Circulation—Otherwise, Unhinged at Future Gallery, an exploration of life cycles of objects, shattered dreams of material immortality, and the systems of exchange between substances. In fewer words, the exhibition explores various means of circulation; digital, physical, and ideological.

Circulation is curated by Melanie Buehler, founder of Lunch Bytes, a series of talks that took place from 2012 to 2015 to promote a discourse on the subject of art and digital culture. After Lunch Bytes ended, Buehler was looking for a way to ruminate on topics on digital culture for a longer period of time than an afternoon lecture, so she developed the exhibition series Inflected Objects. The show at Future Gallery is the second installment in a series of three. "Circulation” follows “abstraction,” which was explored in an exhibition at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan, Abstraction – Rising Automated Reasoning. The final theme, which Buehler will research and develop in the future, will be “performance.”

Walking through the gallery, Buehler tells The Creators Project that she’s interested in asking the question, “How does internet culture and technology influence artistic production today?” In theory, it’s a simple inquiry, but in practice, it opens a giant can of digital worms. For this installment, she was inspired by myriad forms of material autonomy, and was thinking about what we expect from objects, and how their materiality can betray our expectations—from a painting that started to drip again after years of being finished and dried, to a contagious glass disease eating away at an archived artwork, to a plastic sculpture that spontaneously imploded.

It’s easy to see how “circulation” is relevant to online culture, but Buehler is interested in more than just retweets and viral memes, although those are certainly part of the equation. “Everything needs to circulate. There is an imperative to be circulating in order to stay alive today, in order to mean something, be it a Twitter message, a consumer good, or an artwork,” she explains.

In the case of this show, circulation extends into the physical realm. Three sculptures by Nina Canell, a series called Shedding Sheaths are made of plastic casings that once covered underground fiber optic internet cables. The abstract plastic works demonstrate the physical toll of online circulation. Worn down and no longer able to help deliver high-speed internet across the globe, the cable shells ended up in a recycling facility in North Korea, where they were destined to be shipped to China, before the Swedish artist intervened and turned them into found object sculptures, where they are now exhibited in Germany. The squashed plastic looks physically exhausted from this journey, and their global trek illustrates that online sharing, seemingly immaterial, requires and perpetuates the circulation of physical materials.

The idea of circulation also extends to our physical bodies and chemical makeups. Two works from Juliette Bonneviot’s sculptural Xenoestrogens series lean in corners of the gallery, and Boehner explains she was drawn to them based on an interest in the nature/product divide; “How materials can belong to our bodies but can also be fabricated.”

One gray rectangular silicon mold was once displayed on a wall, like a painting, before it started to seep back into a liquid form; now, part of the piece is its ability to adapt to new exhibition settings. The flexible mass, whose rubbery tactility complements Canell’s nearby sculptures, is comprised of a mixture of different xenoestrogens, materials that contain or mimic the hormone estrogen: lead, cadmium, aluminum, aspirin, oestradiol, soy, and pesticide, encased in silicone rubber. Synthetic versions of the female sex hormone, like those found in contraceptives, make their way through human digestive systems and into water streams, and can affect, for example, cows that humans use for milk and meat; humans re-ingesting their waste after it has circulated through the ecosystem. Bonneviot’s Xenoestrogens represent a narrative of seepage; not to mention unnerving the viewer, who realizes they are composed of some of the same chemicals as the sterile-looking sculptures.

Other works in the show comment on the mortality of artworks themselves, due to their material limitations. Rubén Grilo developed Everfresh Paint, an oil paint that never dries, and Tamen Pérez made a few very wet paintings out of it for the show. Marianne Vierø’s Great Transformation is an exact, 3D-printed replica of constructivist Naum Gabo’s 1927 Construction in Space: Two Cones. Vierø found the work broken in the archives of the Philadelphia Museum of art, and recreated an exact replica, scattered plastic crumbs and all. “When should you think of a piece as finished, and what should you allow it to become? Does it say something about the dreams of this material, that it eventually shattered?” questions Buehler.

Everything has a life cycle, and artworks, despite expert conservation efforts, can’t last forever. The highly theoretical show throws into question the monetary value of a work of art, especially with works that will wilt, like Bea Fremderman’s Untitled (Clothes), a series of found clothing works, planted with sprouts, that litter the floor. After a few days, the works were already wilting and turning brown. Future Gallery, however, is a commercial gallery, so maybe a clever collector will find a way to keep these objects in circulation.

To learn more about Future Gallery click here.

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