FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / Niklas Maak / Feuilleton Seite 26 , Montag, 9. August 2010, Nr.182. Translation by Dr.

Lucinda Rennison, Berlin

The Eagles Flight Path in the Mind A New Perceptual Chart: Several exhibitions discovering the art of Jorinde Voigt Two kiss each other: the single sentence is written right at the centre of a confusion of numbers and agitated curves, almost lost in the maze of arrows and lines, and the first question one asks when seeing it is, what on earth does it mean? Does it have something to do with a memory, or are these stage instructions? And what is this sheet of paper with its arrows and columns of numbers and spirals: a protocol, a map of the world, an explanation, or a demand? A drawing can be retrospective i.e., like a landscape sketch, it can be a memory of something once seen or prospective: like a plan that still needs to be realised. This second type of drawing includes building designs and musical scores. Jorinde Voigts large-format drawings, often more than two metres high, are both. One can read them as a notation reminding one of something: here, the drawing hand appears to imitate the flight paths of an eagle, the lines are reminiscent of shoals of fish, whirlpools, erosions and other complex dynamic forms. Voigt uses statistical data for her drawings, employing them to develop graphic algorithms. Her organisational diagrams can be read as abstract images of the world: the wind that blows, cars that drive past, music that we listen to, films that we see everything that is visible and tangible, making noises and changing our perception of space and time is translated into lines, tangles of lines, structural models. From a distance, these graphic systems recall the world maps from the Lufthansa magazine, whereby a network of curved lines indicates possible flight routes. However, the drawings can also be read as scores: one bar of one hit should be played and then a different bar from another hit in this way, starting out from the drawings, it might be possible to create a sound that is composed from the hits of a particular season and would therefore sound quite different from one week to the next. Voigts pictures often adopt the format of history paintings, and in a certain sense that is also what they are they sum up in codes the phenomena and atmospheres that shape our contemporary world; they are graphic machines to apprehend the world. In formal terms, this manic way of defining systems of order, the repetition and addition of symbols, is reminiscent of Hanne Darbovens endless notations and cascading signs. One can also follow art historical links to the tradition of Action Painting and Performance Art. Jorinde Voigt often draws while lying on the paper and the perfect, manic velocity of the arrows documents the tempo and determination of her expressive gesture in drawing. And finally, there are echoes of John Cages Ryoanji Drawings and a Japanese pictorial tradition whereby letters and drawing, the legible and the visible, behave in a different way to their counterparts in European art. Nevertheless, perhaps Voigts images cannot be described fittingly as art and so the use of art-historical categories and references is correspondingly inadequate. Instead, one could rather view them as depictions of system-theoretical experiments, which one is better able to grasp through the eye of the chaos researcher. Voigt invents complex systems that are concerned with communication: besides numerous algorithms for wind and pulse and electric current, she develops in double notation signs for the smallest conceivable form of acoustic utterance, for the very first stage of music, the question of how communication begins. Some of her works give the impression of being psycho-alchemistic experimental set-ups. What happens when the everyday the rhythms of pop songs collides with the unusual (the movements of an eagle)? The eagle and its flight paths appear repeatedly as a motif and indicate various conceivable perceptions of reality

FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / Niklas Maak / Feuilleton Seite 26 , Montag, 9. August 2010, Nr.182. Translation by Dr. Lucinda Rennison, Berlin

including those of the aesthetically enraptured observer and of the natural scientist. To the romantically minded viewer, the flight of the eagle is poetic or sublime. But the eagle is interesting to the engineer primarily as a highly-concentrated, technically perfect flying machine. Voigts notation of the eagles flight path is once again both: as a romantic drawing it is evidence of enthusiasm for a movement and, as a technical drawing, of the attempt to grasp the secret of this movement. And perhaps Voigts Eagle is also a reference to the typewriter of the same name and so to the new bureaucratic ways of understanding the world which became possible as a result of this machine around 1900. In the visualisation of scientific theories there is always a critical point that is, when the diagram by means of which one is hoping to explain a phenomenon develops a suggestive, aesthetic life of its own: of course, there is no blinking red light in a brain during a neurological experiment; the differently coloured representation of cerebral areas is only an attempt to illustrate hypotheses. Nonetheless it is viewed by a public with faith in images in a similar way to an x-ray, which makes something real directly visible. Likewise, the mathematical model of the so-called Mandelbrot tree caused many people to believe that everything in nature was constructed like a fern. Jorinde Voigt plays with this compulsion towards objectifying when, in her work 2 kiss each other, she has several couples kiss each other so that the frequency and number of participants in the notation result in a Fibonacci sequence: here the least predictable, most individual gesture a kiss is pressed into the ordered system of the Golden Ratio, which Renaissance theory believed was the mathematical measure at the heart of all forms in nature. Some of Voigts sheets also make one think of depictions of world conspiracy by artist Mark Lombardi, who set out the interlocking mechanisms of the financial system in rampant sociograms. They both share an interest in visualising structures that shape our consciousness in diagrams the system of the music industry, for example, the question of what sounds are used to manipulate us and in disclosing the mathematics on which emotions are constructed. In these attempts to visualise power structures, functional systems and the effect of symbolic objects, Jorinde Voigts approach is also close to a new leftist philosophy based on Luhmann, which is dedicated to examining how the reality that an observer constructs is prefigured by systems of power. The deviations and explosive moments in Voigts works indicate that such systems and their pre-figuration are not a God-given order, but can be altered. By contrast to other artists who seem miraculously magnetised by the neuroscientists theories of predetermination, Jorinde Voigt allows the unexpected, the individual or even mutation to play an important part in her drawings of the world. Her major series State/Random I-IX can be seen currently in Den Haag and is soon to be shown in Siegen. Here, there is already a collision in the title between those things that can be registered bureaucratically, a reality that the mega organisational system state is able to describe and direct, and the individual and contingent. And just as the edges of the Mandelbrot set have some similarity to the main form but always display various minimal deformations, the repetitive columns of signs drawn by Jorinde Voigt are never quite the same sometimes her hand slips a little, sometimes a line may become a little longer. Drawings with identical content appear different each time in the same way as a piece of music with identical notes always sounds different when it is played by different performers. In her brilliant study on Measuring the Invisible, Lisa Sintermann pointed out the vital role played by Voigts deployment of the body in her art, as well as her individual signature. This lack of clarity, this penetration of the individual, non-repeatable, unique, chance aspect into a strict system and its consequences: this represents the heart of these works. They provide an open visual model that different viewers can connect with, however extensive their range of experiences and involvements. One can recognise

FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / Niklas Maak / Feuilleton Seite 26 , Montag, 9. August 2010, Nr.182. Translation by Dr. Lucinda Rennison, Berlin

objects, titles, songs, films and experiences in the maze of these systems. Voigts notations of contemporary life and this is what makes them so unusual and novel create images which are actually more like frames, like nets in which the images and experiences of everyone who attempts to decipher them can find a place. NIKLAS MAAK Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 182, 9th August 2010