Organizing, arranging, structuring – the amazing thing about artistic practice is that its possibilities may be limited, but all the participants are constantly working to expand these boundaries.
This results in a constant process of enabling new forms and their arrangements. A glance at two screwdrivers in different places explains what is so great about it. A red screwdriver is located on earth, in the hand of an elderly person. The number of its possible uses is very large: turning screws, opening cans, mixing colors, carving characters and infinitely more. On the other hand, a green screwdriver floats light years away from the next object in space. Although its possible uses are just as indefinite, they are obviously much smaller in their current number, since the number of possible uses increases with each interaction object.
Unimaginable as the future possible uses of the red screwdriver are, so unimaginable are the developments in visual art, for every process of form and order in artistic practice creates a new starting point. Those who now still doubt what produces the pleasure for all participants, i.e. artists and observers of artistic practice should also think briefly of the image of a gambler who has joyfully handed herself over to random chance. This moment of hoping for the emergence of an arrangement – without its causal connections being verifiable – and the feeling of happiness when a functioning arrangement of forms actually takes place, is known to generate quite a lot of enthusiasm.
Artistic practice, as conducted by Benjamin Dittrich, Stefan Guggisberg, Martin Reich and Simon Rübesamen, is therefore always the joy that people have been able to explore the possibilities that a screwdriver offers – or to create artistic works from various materials and sources. In doing so, this corresponds to the joy of random chance, of the occurrence of the (still) inexplicable, of the renunciation of causal correlations in aesthetic production. And: these processes could always go on like this, building on each other and increasing in potency, that they are perhaps just as finite as the universe, that is somehow stunning, isn‘t it?
Johannes Listewnik, 2019
