Karla Black

Vaseline, lipstick and bath salts are just some of the basic drugstore toiletries that form the basis of Karla Black’s palette, though they are usually combined with materials like chalk and paper to form ominous pastel dunes or mountainous crags of cellulose. In her recent Capitain Petzel (Berlin) show, Black opted for the “barely there” approach: she hand-smeared lipstick on the gallery’s windows, stained towels with bath bombs, tinted glass with eyeshadow. This had the effect of making the exhibition, unburdened by so much as a title, feel lighter than it would have, had the gallery been left untouched. One could either disregard it altogether or let observation oscillate between sensation and recognition. Black uses this back and forth to her advantage. She delves into the fragile construct of perception to show how it is irredeemably snaked-through with connotations, expectations and judgments.

Like every show in the gallery’s glass cube, Black must compete with the backdrop of Karl Marx Allee, which unfolds as an imposing totalitarian timeline, starting with Stalin’s heavy classicism and moving to Khrushchev’s airy modernity. Usually the art performs an exacting indifference to this inevitable stage set, and at other times it battles it with additional walls, or by making itself larger than life. Black’s strategy is understated. She sullies the space and thereby strangely denudes it. Were it to remain pristine and empty, it would stand as an exemplar of East German modernism, but instead it has been rendered vulnerable, maybe even slightly embarrassing, like discovering an old stain on your shirt after arriving at the party. The lipstick smears have exactly this quality; they don’t obstruct the overall view, but petulantly blur it, thereby marring its grandeur. These smudges are reflected in the glass panes suspended by decorative chains from the ceiling, and the Vaseline- and eyeshadow-splotched sheets standing erect in the centre of the space—a repetition that can extend to every dirty Berlin window. Black has also thrown wet, coloured toilet paper against the walls, where it has dried and formed an irregular stucco-like texture, evoking Raufasertapete, the ubiquitous sawdust wallpaper of the German home interior. Bath-bomb-stained towels hang on the radiators, and disco-ball prisms in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows promise rainbows but only disappoint in the grey of the Berlin spring. The ground is littered with yellow, pink and blue cotton balls, or something that could have been pulled out of an Easter basket. The show is an egg hunt of sorts. All the clues lie in details that are more at home in a bedroom than a clean exhibition space.

The vocabulary of materials is not only domestic, it is decidedly middle class. Shadowing Black’s visual sophistication is the aesthetics of the shopping mall, an irony that reveals capitalist victory as embarrassingly quotidian in comparison with the surrounding communist pomp. The combination of visual refinement with mundane materials is a staple of Black’s work. A preference for pastel toilet paper is more than a little gauche, and a fondness for shimmering lipgloss is acceptable only in teenage girls. Yet it would be wrong to think that she thereby renders art down-to-earth. Her deliberate manipulation causes her source material to occupy a different place altogether, and in this contingency Black demonstrates how malleable our everyday objects really are. Even as the most expensive of luxuries can be reconfigured into sheer stuff, cheaply made goods can be elevated into instruments of contemplation.

It’s the alchemic spirit of painting that guides Black’s approach. Pieces are obviously handcrafted, colours bleed into reality and threedimensional works function more like textures than sculptures. When she uses clay, it functions like a gel medium. It always covers something; is hand-kneaded and gestural. The glass panes hanging from the ceiling are framed with it, though some are additionally coated with gold or silver leaf, emitting a double aura of luxury and cheapness. The glass itself is stained with gloss, eyeshadow and other pastel-tinted beauty products. Easily missed, and in the end not really necessary, are the painted white doors installed throughout the space, each with a glass inset vandalized with pink and red shades of lipstick. The overall saccharine effect falls somewhere between confectionary and cosmetics, both products whose marketing strategies revolve around the benefits of treating yourself. Painting is not without connotations of self-indulgence, too. Its physicality renders it sensual, causing it to uncomfortably balance between critical contemplation and perceptual abandon. As if to bring this point home, Black has included sheaths of paint suspended with ribbon. The colours range from pastels to metallic thalos, a palette whose pleasures are associated with art school naïveté, femininity or a combination of both.

The big and contradictory idea of Beauty runs like a thread through all the artist’s work. Just as it is a theorized value with historical ties to ethics, it is also a guiltinducing industry of desire and vanity. Black implies that ideas of beauty and practices of self-beautification are not as far removed from each other as we’d like them to be. This is further reflected in the individual titles of her works, whose vague poetry could make for inventive eyeshadow names. Black’s pieces sport titles like Persuade to Return or Withhold Favour, while the cosmetic line MAC’s vocabulary, as sourced from their website, includes “deep truth,” “suspiciously sweet” and, oddly, “interrupted.” By mixing these two worlds, the artist delves into the uncomfortable complex of both art and femininity; both can objectify and render decorative, all the while staking a claim for autonomy.

Looking, as Black shows, is a complicated thing, and discovering that complication is possibly the most satisfying aspect of her Capitain Petzel show. With a few exceptions, it is concisely crafted to bring to consciousness our own processes of observing—processes that may change from person to person but also share a common space. This is a welcome reprieve from the directed and limited attention span we must foster to navigate the contemporary world’s visual surplus, which, ironically, can render us even more unaware, despite constant critical analysis. ❚

“Karla Black” was exhibited at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, from February 17 to April 14, 2018.

Dagmara Genda is an artist and writer living in Berlin.