Kai Althoff

So thin is the line between presentation and life in Kai Althoff’s “and then leave me to the common swifts” that we were scolded in the midst of the exhibit for having allegedly stepped in part of the installation, only to have the security guard apologize upon realizing the dirt and dust tracked in by the visitors were mingling with the exhibition’s own. Even the light is dust in this Havisham-esque installation, in which time has lost its place. Presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and curated by Althoff himself, the German artist’s paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures are set within a complex arrangement of domestic bric-a-brac that includes photographs, toys, dressed mannequins, children’s books and shadow puppets. This densely cluttered environment expands upon the artist’s own delicate expressionist paintings, which themselves seem lost in time. Evoking a multitude of historical styles and references, including Prussia at the turn of the century, 1970s German communes and 1990s youth culture, the distinct quality of Althoff’s work is its untimeliness. This very quality allows Althoff to carve out an idiosyncratic personal fiction: the 20th century returned in the form of eccentric counter-narrative.

Billed as a mid-career retrospective, “and then leave me to the common swifts” counters the typified conventions of the retrospective as form, which attempts to consolidate the whole of an artist’s production, sticking the artist to the wall vis-à-vis any number of taxonomic pins. This form is well known: works are hung chronologically, or arranged in relevant thematic clusters, often accompanied by the ever-popular vitrines stuffed with all manner of archival marginalia. Beyond the mechanisms of display, the artist is eulogized through critical texts advocating for the historical significance of their work. At its core, the retrospective seeks to reproduce an artist’s work and subjectivity as historical fact, and, in so doing, recasts the artistsubject and their production as an institutional object. One has the sense that Althoff is all too wary of his own subsumption within the museum, as the exhibition performs a kind of wilful undoing of a career even as it draws its outline.

Sidestepping the museological desire to have him consolidated into historical fact, Althoff presents his work as living fiction. The artist eschews the presentation of discrete works, choosing instead to jumble together the exhibition’s objects into a rumply assemblage. This strategy foregoes any potential for chronological reading and undermines the hierarchal distinction between art and non-art objects. Moreover, the standard accoutrements of a gallery exhibition (which include wall labels and didactic text) through which the museum typically asserts itself are conspicuously absent. Rather than performing the reduction of information necessary to carve a coherent narrative from an artist’s work, the exhibition multiplies the potential readings of the work through the endless chains of association it creates.

“and then leave me to the common swifts” seems at pains to hold itself in and yet apart from the museum. A long white ramp leads up to the exhibition’s entrance, immediately positing a separation from the rest of MoMA’s architecture. The gallery doesn’t resemble a gallery or anything so precise. The space is canopied under a gauzy white scrim, with the lights of the exhibition placed outside this veil as if to mimic the light of a dim sun. This tenting of the ceiling has the odd effect of enveloping the exhibition, holding it away from the museum walls, while at the same time recasting those walls as a kind of outside. The floors and partial walls inside the exhibition, made of long wooden planks painted white, contribute to the exhibit’s amorphous mixture of architectural and display styles; the space alternatively recalls an attic, tent, fashion boutique and swap meet. Paintings and drawings are strewn pell-mell on idiosyncratic structures and shelves at the centre of the exhibition, or rest in close rows and precarious configurations on partial walls at the back of the exhibition. These walls form a series of tight hallways that accentuate the attic-like quality of the space, with several of the works still wrapped, remaining packed and stored, forgotten in the back row.

Echoing the offish yet nostalgic nature of children’s music boxes, the sense of the quotidian tinged with something amiss underlies much of Althoff’s work. His subjects—which range from the hallowed or hieratic to arcane militarism to the entanglements of male camaraderie—point to a glimmering world at the periphery, populated by androgynous figures and outmoded decadence. Within this world, intimacy and social contact are often confronted by the threat of isolation and violence. This sense of threat is echoed within Althoff’s stylistic choices (style being fate in Althoff’s work). His drawings and paintings emit a dull heat, their light coming from the colours themselves as opposed to any classical rendering of light. Stylistically, the artist borrows from an array of 20th-century traditions, including European modernism, art nouveau, outsider folk art and ’60s psychedelia, often employing these elements within the same work. The artist folds the outmoded and amateur into fictional oubliettes.

“and then leave me to the common swifts” can be read as a testimony to private revelation. By dictating the terms for the selection, setting, commentary and reception of his works, Althoff pushes against the conventions of the museum. The retrospective-asform is turned on its head through the artist’s emphasis on the act of creation in the present as opposed to a presentation of the past. In doing so, Althoff undertakes an act of auto-appropriation, creating a fictional counter-narrative within his own work. If the retrospective typically serves to pin an artist in time (history), Althoff seems determined to remain untimely. Performing introversion as a mode of creation, the artist’s oeuvre is lost within itself. ❚

“and then leave me to the common swifts” was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from September 18, 2016, to January 22, 2017.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline is an artist based in New York. He received his MFA from Columbia University. Recent solo exhibitions include: “L’homlette” at Plug In ICA; “Mangle & Plexus” at Katharine Mulherin, Toronto; “Nervous Lattice” at Battat Contemporary, Montreal.

Janique Prejet Vigier is a curator and writer based in New York, where she is a pursuing her graduate studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She is currently working as an editorial intern for Semiotext(e).