Alfons Koller: Imagine That!
Kara Walker
Koller emphasizes that all these works are for sale–most have price tags on them–and that fact seems a part of their meaning. Here one is invited to buy a piece of concrete that levels a floor or fills a corner. But if it’s installed in one’s own home, it’s riven from the context for which it was made. Koller critiques the very act of collecting.
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Koller also challenges the preciousness of art directly, playfully, humorously in some works here that are not part of an installation. The Fake and the Original Together in a Box is a large, shallow box lined with cork: on one side is mounted a van Gogh postcard labeled “Original” while on the other is the same van Gogh postcard labeled “Fake.” Of course both are fakes, but the elaborate frames around each card and the oversize box that contains them add to the joke. DŸrer’s Bunny Went for Plaster Into a Box, in a similar case, presents two plaster casts of a cartoony rabbit on the left and two molds for the bunny, also in plaster, on the right. By giving cast and mold equal emphasis Koller equates process with result, negative with positive, image with its inverse. He isn’t quite saying that all art is created equal, but he’s coming close.
Once again, these works do not succeed as aesthetic objects. Koller’s various styles are not expressive, the apparent variety disappears, and by extension all art styles start to seem alike. And while the frames may suggest that these paintings are precious, each has a small paper price tag marked $100 dangling from it. Adding to the aura of a thrift shop is a large table strewn with small, low-priced plaster casts of bunnies and chairs near a receipt book.
In this way the world of Walker’s silhouettes expands to incorporate the entire gallery, becoming a sprawling black-white visual field that suits the magnitude of the subject. At the same time, if the black silhouettes stand for the skin color of Walker’s subjects, one is tempted to identify the white walls with the largely undepicted oppressor. While this is not the only or even primary reading of Walker’s use of white, she does lock these two opposite absolutes in a perpetual struggle, or dance.
