"A drunken boat" Exhibition from 14 September to 31 October 2002

The title of the exhibition is taken from the "ships of fools" in which, down the ages, "mad people" in Holland and Germany were shipped off into exile, without knowing where they were bound. In a way, "A drunken boat" is a metaphor of this; even if the works in this show are based on real documents and documents taken from fictional works, what they represent is already part and parcel of another world, another reality, and the collective memory. Each one of these works goes beyond the subject or event from which it has been inspired: a painting or drawing, no longer a real moment or situation.

Johannes Kahrs' visual research is expressed as much by the techniques of painting and drawing as by a medium like video. Johannes Kahrs' video works have been shown in France first at the Almine Rech gallery in 1998, then as "A-h scratch" (1998) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyons, in 1999, "Fuck you OT-Depression" (1999) (then in November 1999 at PS1 in New York), as "A-h scratch" again (1999) at the Contemporary Art Centre in Sete in 1999, and at the FRAC Pays de la Loire in 2001, again as "A-h scratch" (1998). His latest audiovisual work, "Tonight" (2001) was exhibited at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, in the summer of 2001.

The show at the Almine Rech gallery is the outcome of a year of work devoted to painting and drawing. Johannes Kahrs born in 1965 in Breme, lives and works in Berlin.

Exhibition from 10 November to 23 December 2000

In November 1998, during Johannes Kahrs one-man show at the Almine Rech Gallery, a sizeable video installation ("A-h") was shown, along with a series of 50 charcoal drawings.

The upcoming exhibition will, for the most part, consist of a diptych: two large oil paintings. Johannes Kahrs paints and draws, he also works with video and photography. The challenges of painting today are a vital field of exploration for this artist: how to make a painting with such and such a topic? A 1997 painting: a woman seated, revealing her bared genitalia, another, a painting from 1993, depicts a man, with one leg amputated--such are the still difficult, not to say taboo, images and subjects which Karhs has elected to address. Another facet of the subjects he's interested in concerns the images we have in common, due to a shared film and contemporary music--faces and situations or events which sometimes become symbolic.

The diptych for this Johannes Kahrs exhibition, on view from 10 November to 23 December 2000, is a continuation of this line of exploration in his work. Johannes Kahrs'work will be exhibited at the Munich Kunstverein in January, 2001.

"Time Heals All Wounds" Jimmie Durham

My On the television in Berlin there is a most atrocious commercial from Time/Life, which has now become part of the Warner Corporation which in turn part of some larger conglomerate. The commercial advertizes the sale of a video about Mengele, the Nazi torture doctor, and it is a tease for the thousands of pathologically sadistic, criminal-minded bastards that are excited by Mengele. I mean, the folks at Time/Life know perfectly well whi their audience is, and feel no shame at catering to the sickos for all the world to see. They sell pornigraphic death shows on, prime time 'television in a way that no one without Time/Life media authority could get away with. And it is a very dirty business, because it not only celebrates, free capitalism, but also takes advantages of Germany's shame about covering up the past. We cannot protest this commercial because to do so would seem complicit in some way, or to be censorship. I protest it here in this art catalogue, but dozens of letters to the television stations and to newspapers would make no impression. This commercial is one piece of flotsam in a giant and continious tidal wave of images and inducements that drown our sensibilities. We don't know where to turn. We don't know how to look, or not look. Johannes Kahrs approaches this situation; I imagine, with great caution, almost timidity. Because he is committed to making art - to working on, the specific job and the discipline - and because he wants the art to be intellectual; to function intellectually. (This tidal wave spoke of is really and epidemic - of stupidity; highly infectious.) Can art, compete 'with this monstrous barrage? Not, I think, if its intention is simply to be visible in the storm. That intention leads to 'art strategies', in which the artist figures out some gimmick to capture attention for the allotted fifteen-minutes. In that case it becomes part of the barrage. I think art cannot exacly compete at all. One cannot write good literature that gets even a tenth of the attention given to bad magazines or detective novels. But often people seem to forget that art should engage us on exacly that deep intellectual level wherein we engage with literature. The situation of art is different, though - because we cannot look away from all of the images that advance upon us, the way we can try to separate 'printed matter'. Maybe that is one reason why the world (and to me as an outsider, maybe more especially Germany.) is now so strange and so naive about signs. We live in a world where one need only wear the appropriate hat to be recognized as that which one aspires to be. It is Kahrs's weird sensitivity to this phenomenon that makes his work vibrate so weirdly. Once I was contemplating a new hair style, and I explained this to him that I imagined to look like the old man in the village in the film "The Magnificent Seven". Kahrs knew exactly who I meant and what his hair looked like. He described to me the scene I had been thinkinf of. But he himself makes nothing of his talent for visual and cultural details. In Kahrs's video works the sign 'video work' is subverted (but not by the usual means of replacing that sign with the marketable sign 'subversion of video work'.) at the same time that the sign 'painting' is; for his videos are often like paintings that move, exept that their movements are odd - arythmical. His audio works are even more odd (so that listening to them you quickly come to realize your own expectations about listening and that of course those expectations have been implanted.) Bart de Baere said that with music and sounds Kahrs makes a new time; against "street time". De Baere also said, speaking as we were of Kahrs's 'inter-discipline' or 'mixed-media' approach (I intended to write it as his approach to art, but it is really, I think, as I remeber other conversations, his approach to drawing.) Bart said that Johannes is always on the move, always travelling. He goes everywhere (painting, drawing, sculpture made from exising objects the same way you might a poem from 'existing words', video, and whatever.) But then he makes his own village. He makes a village for his work; it is made of his work; and, remarkably (Bart remarked upon it but I had already remarked upon it.), with little egotism. Kahrs has a humility that is connected to making the work. Maybe that is partly because of his acute sense of history... (:) another mutual friend has complained that in Germany we cannot escape recent history because so many people have petty careers to maintain by shopping and selling that history. Others are masochistic as a way of avoiding intellectual thought about current situations. Kahrs's sense of history is practically infinite in its specificities and its humanity. He was not alive when Germany was at war. Once as a boy he fell off his bicycle and cut his arm badly. The doctor was as rough as he could get away with being while dressing the wound. When the boy complained the doctor said, "You are German, you can bear the pain." (and don't many of us have such horrible experiences with doctors?) Last summer Johannes Kahrs regaled us night after night with the most awful German children's stories. He had heard or read them all as a child, and kept every single word ans story as a secret treasure of indictments. A treasure of undeniable accusations. He need never bring these to light - they may more like Duracell battery, and only a small part of his 'main drive'. I first saw the strange method of drawing by erasing in Kahrs's work, even though for all I know it is quite common. He makes a piece of paper, usually a large piece, totally dark with charcoal or graphite. He then erases where light would be. It is a labor-intensive yet sensual way of copying photography - even of recapturing light and image. And it is so soft! If he has chosen an actual photo to 'blow up' by this method, and if the photo itself is of some hard situation, Kahrs can then bring us into his weird and completely contemporary village, and show us area of our own daily streets that were hidden before by their own noise.