A liberating punch in the guts

[1997 2000] You have to start somewhere. So for the purpose of this study of Tim Berresheims art, irrespective of any changing trends in art history or art critique, and without venturing into his psychology or private life, it seems appropriate to start with the artists existence from his ominous beginnings at the art academy, where an education which despite all the apparent obstacles and cultural and historical erosions experienced over the last decades and centuries has outlived these times as some kind of biographical measure of all things, and is still magically pulled from the hat as a wildcard (...was a student of...) by almost the whole art business world, from state-sponsored group exhibitions via the privately financed Youngsterschau (show for young artists) to sales meetings held in art galleries and presentations given in self-promoting showrooms. This conjectural turning point and the art business world with its desire for clearly structured biographies and hierarchies is very grateful for that is now considered to be weakening the position of the (young) artist as a being who is part of society, as well as undermining the technical, stylistic and iconographic direction of artistic development at a time when the artists (sub)cultural socialization also with reference to what is later described as the work of art, or work has already developed to some degree and must continue to do so. Now and then, however, this whole idea becomes almost irrelevant, as is the case with Tim Berresheim, born in 1975, for whom during this phase meaning during the 90s it was less (if at all) the fine arts, and instead music that made his life worth living. During the 00s, this soft spot of his experienced a shift and intensified, and after dropping out of the academy very early on, Tim emerged not only as a fine artist but also as a musician and producer of experimental and electronic music. But, back to academy life: as the previous century was coming to an end, Berresheim began his education at the Kunstakademie Braunschweig, where he had successfully applied at the beginning of the year with a small number of photographs taken during the previous six months. That he finally made this step was the result of a one-year-internship (began during summer 1997) with the director, actor and scriptwriter Burkhard Driest. Apart from the aesthetic and philosophical foundations in Driests work, reflected in particular in his scripts and drama theory, it was the directors obsession with coupling his own creative output with a pertinent dose of misanthropy, and experiencing this simultaneously as an essential pro-

tective shield, a possible escape route and a permanent possible retreat, that made a deep impact on Berresheim. Driests lasting influence motivated his decision to apply for a course in film studies. Until then Berresheim had made, in every sense, a wide berth around anything to do with fine arts. He had shunned the double standards and hypocrisy of the art business, and had failed to create even a single artefact at least until he found focus in his art for the entry exams. That it would never come to the intended training with the filmmaker Brigitte Hein is due, among other factors, to Hartmut Neumann, his professor during the one-year foundation course, who managed to awaken in him a seemingly dormant interest in fine arts and an especially unexpected enthusiasm for more recent art history, all of which inspired Tim Berresheim to not only pour over exhibition catalogues but also produce his first paintings. He created around fifty acrylic and oil paintings in this relatively short space of time, all of which have been destroyed or are lost, and in any case are considered irrelevant. Due to this and respect where its due these are of no further relevance to this study.

II

[20002002] During these first two terms, Tim Berresheim discovered completely new creative possibilities during his weekend trips to the Rhineland away from the academy not only in the physical sense which radically broke away from what he had learned at Braunschweig and promoted the development of a fundamentally altered visual language which would eventually lead to his distinctive own style. We are talking about computer-created work a medium in which the selfeducated Berresheim has now produced all his visual and musical work for over five years. After creating his first computer images in the summer of 2000 he nevertheless began a new term at Braunschweig with the acclaimed sculptor and photographer Johannes Bruns, but it soon became obvious that his days at the academy had to come to an end. Only a few weeks into the term he realised that the homogenized speech and behavioural patterns of the student community promised neither creative friction nor inspiring intellectual confrontation especially with respect to the almost pitiful discussions about creative forms of expression beyond traditionally respected techniques and that it was inevitable that his path would lead him in a very different direction thereafter.

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In these circumstances the news that Albert Oehlen had taken up a teaching post that year at the arts academy in Dsseldorf was significant. He was one of the few artists who considered the computer an acceptable medium for creating images that were not merely computer-generated graphics, collages or montages. Exactly 10 years previously, in 1990, Albert Oehlen had produced his first computer-generated image. Since then he has managed to transpose key questions that had already figured heavily in his paintings- for example the aspects of trivialization and artificiality onto the new medium, at the same time sharpening the outlines of the respective media with this transition from the real to artificial, and balancing out the combination possibilities.1 With this background it was only a matter of course that at the beginning of 2001, Berresheim went to Dsseldorf to exchange ideas with Albert Oehlen, independent of the academys formalities. This resulted in an intense collaboration lasting about one and a half years and in the joint involvement in the group exhibition Offene Haare, offene Pferde Amerikanische Kunst 193345, a collaboration that greyed the area of prospective student-teacher, artist-assistant and work colleague relationships. That Berresheim in conclusion to the topic of artistic education wasnt actually a formal student in Dsseldorf, but until the beginning of 2002 still a student of the academy in Braunschweig should be mentioned here at least as a footnote for the chroniclers. The first exhibition Tim Berresheim participated in was as part of the group exhibition Superschloss, put together by artists and on display as the concluding part of a four-part exhibition series at the Stdtischen Galerie Wolfsburg in March 2002. Among the eleven Superschloss artists were Michael Bauer, Stefanie Popp and Andre Linpinsel, artists with whom Tim Berresheim would work during the following two years both as an artist and a curator. Most significant was here without a doubt the exchange with Michael Bauer, a fellow student from Braunschweig, who had started his education earlier and (there it is again) was a student of Walter Dahn. Bauer was the first and, until the later collaborations with Jonathan Meese and Thomas Arnolds, only artist which whom Berresheim created joint work. In the lead up to the Wolfsburg exhibition the artists also made the far-reaching decision to found and open the exhibition room Brotherslasher in the same year. In the Stdtischen Galerie the impression gained was that the room they created seemed to

exhibit as wide a spectrum of creative forms of expressions as possible. Apart from joint installations, sculptures, videos and text, and the poster Brotherslasher in Blde (Brotherslasher coming soon), Berresheim also exhibited a few oil paintings and his first computer prints. Only a month after Superschloss the aforementioned group exhibition in the Klnischer Kunstverein opened, where next to Albert Oehlen and Tim Berresheim among others, the two artists Andr Butzer and Markus Selg from Berlin also exhibited and who would soon accept invitations by Brotherslasher. Offene Haare, offene Pferde Amerikanische Kunst 1933-45 was a sprawling homage by the seven artists in total to the Russian artist John Graham who emigrated to New York in 1920 and has been largely overlooked until now. For this purpose, the large bright room was divided with a number of extra walls so that the meandering exhibition architecture with its added display areas, which would very soon be knocked down and replaced by the infamous Klner Loch (Colognes hole), imparted the sense of a furious finale. At the same time this documented a self-assured return to painting in contemporary art that was becoming conspicuous everywhere. 2 In one of these newly created rooms were five large computer prints and images by Berresheim, which differed from Albert Oehlens work especially in that they refused to follow their manifold openness be it the possibilities of contextual connections, safeguarded by semantic and iconographic references, or the transparency of the material aesthetics. Visible traces of the production and design processes, like pixel structures, are retained to create a new kind of painting based on the lack of precision specific to computer-generated design. The artificiality that Oehlen aims for can be followed through in (and because of) the combination of computer art and painting, that is to say in the disparate degrees of perfection in processing and editing of the subject in at least two different sizes in front of the screen and in front of the canvas. Here improvisation and chance rather than well thought-out ideas define the final design of Phantasielandschaften und Gitterfiguren oder vektorgenerierte Krper.3 Additionally integrated photographs and images found on the internet as well as the most absurd or amusing text passages ensure that the scenes are layered with different meanings as is the case especially with the so-called Plakate, computer collages from the late 90s and the early 00s [Image 1]. 76

Even at this exhibition in Cologne it is a different matter where the computer images of Tim Berresheim are concerned, whereby purpose of clarity and inner closeness of the subject are shown to resist the designs of openness criss-crossing the image even if it were to still take one and a half years until this Hermetik (hermetics), on which these efforts are based, would become one of the defining characteristics of Berresheims art theory for the present time. Two of the exhibited works shown for the first time featured his by now typical grid figures [Image 2]. They took over as anthropomorphic image elements from the skeleton and the mannequin, which still featured on one of the exhibited prints in Wolfsburg (Visual Energy, 2002) entangled in a meaningful fight from which no winner would emerge. The role of those two main actors, unevenly aligned in iconography and art history, was now taken over by these life-size protagonists with which the viewer could identify but which were highly disconcerting nevertheless. Here they are still designed with careful concessions to the conventions of the outside world (for example hair style and clothes) but at the same time are also disturbing and remote.

III

[20022003] In October 2002, three months after the end of the exhibition in the Kunstverein, Tim Berresheim and Michael Bauer opened the exhibition room Brotherslasher, also in Cologne, not far from the almost completed Mediapark. This happened at a time when only a few minutes walk away, other exhibitions such as April in Parking Meters, kontor and Schnittraum, were still exhibiting in the North of the city (Nordstadt) and which had been relatively significant since the beginning of the 00s. Their finest days, however, were already coming to an end, and all three of them abandoned this area during the following year due to either closing down or moving to the Belgian Quarter, favouring its considerably higher density of galleries. Its not only in this context that the opening of Brotherslasher seemed almost an anti-cyclical endeavour: the location in the basement of a house on the busy Erftstrae and the direct neighbourhood of the largest publicly sponsored complex of the culture industry apart from the Klnarena and Coloneum wouldnt exactly guarantee relevant passers-by. That it should take a few weeks until even the part of Colognes population actually interested in art would find out

about this new place was surely also the result of logistical negligence; on the first invitation to the opening, for example, the date was omitted, and then some time passed before the first press release was sent to the local press. However, all this can serve only partly as an excuse for the lack of interest at least in parts of the advanced Cologne art scene: we know from experience that these details are of little consequence to resident art seekers and the urban in-crowd. The actual obstacles which hindered the access to Brotherslasher were obviously grounded in the inventive self-image of the enterprise. Starting with the unusually offensive yet meaningless name, it continues with the programmatic focus, which surfaced in presentations by unknown artists of the Wolfsburg exhibition, and in particular in regular invitations to artists from the busy neighbourhood of the former Maschenmode (Berlin) and the Akademie Isotrop (Hamburg). Especially this decision allowed them to communicate that the enthusiasm for certain forms of expression or the delight in a presumed mutual attitude there were even traces of the doubtful term Gesinnung (conviction) in the air as well as the desire to show artists with only rudimentary representation in Cologne (for example at Hammelehle and Ahrens) were more important than to distinguish themselves in the slipstream of new positions. At the same time it was claimed, not for the first time, that some things are more difficult to communicate or establish in Cologne than they are in Berlin or Hamburg. But this is a different subject altogether. You cant really address this issue with the awkward aesthetic appearance or advertising of the exhibition room that Brotherslasher opted for, considering for example the unique choice of motives sometimes very entertaining or occasionally wholly tasteless for the countless invitations, posters, CDs and catalogue covers, which were often not all that relevant to the advertised exhibition. Having mastered these potential obstacles, however, the visitor would find presentations and publications which did not really differ much in terms of respectability from the commercial galleries. And they often came across a little bit more civil (and more welcoming, too) than is the case with some of the other self-managed rooms. But with this effectively all-encompassing aesthetic strategy, the unshakeable vicinity of fine arts to artistic questions in general would be the focus on from day one, and furthermore the diverse role of design in its widest sense as a principal element in the image production of such a 77

space as well as its implicit methods of exclusion and the resulting socio-cultural connections and all this independent of what was actually exhibited in the room. The opening of Brotherslasher was celebrated with a joint exhibition of Berresheim and Bauer with Jonathan Meese and centred on three dressed, life-sized dolls. In contrast to the possibly most famous of all historic exhibitions with dolls, the Exposition International du Surrealisme 1938 in the Parisian Galerie des Beaux-Arts, in which a total of sixteen female shop mannequins were hired and each dressed by a different artist, the three participants in this case were responsible for designing the doll as well as the outfit. During the following two years you would only see singular, smaller works by Berresheim as part of three further group exhibitions at Keiner ist besser oder eventuell besser, the first comprehensive show with a total of fourteen artists in the summer of 2003, in spring 2004 as part of Ganz oben, the first presentation after the move into ground floor premises of the same house, as well as at Screamers, a homage to the legendary but sadly mostly forgotten punk band from Los Angeles. At this point in time it had long been clear that Berresheims interest in music wasnt satisfied with his work as curator, because concurrent with the opening of Brotherslasher the first vinyl record by and with Tim Berresheim was released, under the project name Die Ahabs (The Ahab Family), which he had recorded with Jonathan Meese, until then exclusively associated with fine arts (and occasional acting). Berresheim had met Meese at the beginning of that year, and Meese soon expressed a desire to make music together, a move which would fall, in short, onto extremely fertile ground. After the debut work of the Ahabs the pair would record under the most diverse pseudonyms during the three following years Haircar, Trepanation and Wir sind die Musiker (We are the Musicians), among others already numbering eight records and five singles (as of September 2005) which were all released on Tim Berresheims label New Amerika. 4 Further records which followed the first LP the album Swing Your Thing of the Bergkapelle Mount Everest as well as four 7s paved the way for the first fine art collaboration of the two artists. On the occasion the release party was held in December 2003 at the Berlin gallery Contemporary Fine Arts, that evening twelve images were for sale, black and white computer prints by Berresheim, almost all of which featured singular elements of the record

covers and labels mainly portraits of the musicians painted over by Meese in bold red [Image 3].

IV

[2003] Only a few weeks earlier, in Mid November, Tim Berresheims first solo exhibition took place in the project space of the gallery Hammelehle und Ahrens. The previous year, its two owners had moved to Cologne from Stuttgart where they had founded their gallery in 1994 and had come across Bauers oil paintings and Berresheims computer images during their regular visits to Brotherslasher. They offered the two artists the opportunity to exhibit their work in their private project space in the gallery house ads1a, a former substation in Cologne Rhiel, converted to high acclaim by the Cologne architect Bernd Kniess and which now accommodates four galleries in total. Berresheim exhibited half a dozen works under the theme Let me help, which were all created in 2003. Despite the fact that it was his first solo appearance these works marked a turning point in several ways in his still young oeuvre. On show were amongst others the two, at present last joint works with Michael Bauer, the so-called Sexperimente (as oil on canvas and as computer print). While Bauer continued to remain faithful to oil painting, as in the project space exhibition Die Tne meiner Flte which immediately followed Let me help, Tim Berresheim departed after this one short relapse categorically from the habits of traditional image creation and its literal traces of personal handwriting in order to design his figures, objects and scenes now entirely with a computer a few months later he would enlist the help of a digital camera. At the same time the project exhibition contained the last of his works in which digits or words are used as non-visual regulated bearers of meaning teamed with these design elements, or works in which absurd rhymes or spoonerisms and frivolous humour played a role. This might be filed as the last remainders of a beer-fuelled student life; in any case it is further proof that it will still be some time before young male artists in Germany will distance themselves from the need to do a Kippenberger for a while, at least at the beginning of their career. Luckily Berresheim knew how to let go right away. Apart from all that, however, the core piece of Let me help was without a doubt The Muse [Image 4], which for one overshadowed the rest of the works because of its sheer size (250 x 400 cm) but also indicated a new direction of and theres

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no other way of saying it a completely unique visual language which would be continued and modulated meticulously in the following two years. The memory of the first vehement and almost disturbing encounter with this over-sized picture during the opening on this rainy and dark late Sunday afternoon is still very present: the cold, wet trip to the gallery far removed from the busy centres of art business in town, and the subsequent walk through the staircase up to the second floor whereupon entering the exhibition room any trace of pleasant autumnal feelings would be smashed to pieces by the force of this composition, which hung isolated on the wall opposite the entrance. At that moment it wouldnt make up for the unpleasant journey, on the contrary. The shatteringly clear and at the same time unsettlingly designed combination of human bodies with almost entirely abstract shapes, the eerie and quite literally untenable composition and the more than simply unfathomable iconography of the depicted situation went hand in hand with the certainty that any comforting aesthetic sense of safety had been pulled away from underneath ones feet even if it is just the last trusted sheet anchors like holding on to the gesture of the known brush stroke or the calculated triggering of art historic and/or pop cultural references, as has often been used in the more recent past and in more ways than one you were left standing in the cold with your nightmarish but still amazed confusion. This might sound ridiculous, but for the first time in years of running aimlessly around art fairs, group exhibitions and academy tours, this had the impact one would only dare to consider a possibility: that I had seen something incomparable if not unprecedented, and as a result this visual language would take me in again and again, just as it did the first time, during the following days. In this sensory mixture of nightmare and fascination it just doesnt make the decision for you, whether you should avoid this idiosyncratic vehemence or give in to it and look for the confrontation. During these moments and with this in mind, it seemed quite an obvious question to ask whether the exhibition title Let me help was actually to be understood as sheer mockery. Or maybe it was exactly this hermetic unity of the setting and the resulting questions about the interaction of visual elements and bearers of meaning that offered an epistemological assistance, reaching further than the own modes of depiction, and which focussed on a far wider complex the perception of works of fine art and the balances of power inherent to their production and reception.

Painting plays a role in this first over-sized computer image only as a subject and so brush and palette are the only identifiable objects in this computer-designed composition, which had been like all the works that followed transferred to the canvas as a unique copy in solvent-based paint. At the time of this overly technical and allegorical declaration of resignation to painting, this very art form was actually making a come-back, for some unexpectedly, at full throttle to pole position of the art world. Already at the beginning of the 00s painting managed to re-establish itself as the hottest thing in the art business, after multidisciplinarity, institutional criticism and connectivity of theories had gained the upper hand and as a matter of course, it was those which questioned those myths of modern art, which primarily painting as an art form brought with it. Especially in 2003 this development was ennobled in Germany by significant big exhibitions, for example in spring with Painting Pictures at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg or with Lieber Maler, Male Mir at Frankfurts Schirn. At the same time the national variant of the Junge Malerei discourse made an impact for the first time with the sprawling group exhibition Deutschemalereizweitausendunddrei in Frankfurts Kunstverein, and ever since it has been floating atop an intimidating wave of success. At the end of this year The Muse then seemed like an ultimatum to the myths that we believed forgotten but were swept ashore with this wave: the myth of the tormented (male) artist, enveloped by the mysterious aura of his workshop, kissed by the (female) muse in a moment of genial enlightenment, who as a matter of course uses the brush as the connecting link between his physicality and the canvas, and where finally ones famous own handwriting is immortalised. The Muse acts as a hinge, not only in this dialectic game between theoretic presence and material absence of the art form painting, but also in its significant role in Tim Berresheims artistic development over the last five years. It is his first major work in which the singular visual elements the spatial design, the inimitable presence of the protagonists, the elaboration of the abstract shapes or the constellation of the objects confidently assert themselves after their until that point more timid efforts. Here they manage to acquire the significance of aesthetic axioms, reaching further than The Muse, which Tim Berresheim will be able to fall back on in his future works. Until then, however, this had been the only individual work designed independently of a series, a group or at least a pendant, and which features 79

its own title, independent of an exhibition title or a nominal subordination to its respective series. This was all to change a short time later. [2004] The anthropomorphic figures, usually undressed, hairless and partially deformed, would soon after Let me help become an unmistakable and fundamental element in Tim Berresheims art. In the past two years they have played a significant double role as nightmarish subjects and at the same time as the central constructive elements of the composition this is the case at least in all the large-sized works, generally 180 x 200 cm. This also applies to the two pictures of the Obey series featuring one figure each, both created at the beginning of 2004, whose isolationism might even surpass the suffocating intensity of The Muse. The once again male protagonists remain in an artificial, even embarrassing pose in the foreground of the picture, but despite their dominant position, the eye is nevertheless led into a diffusely obscure but elaborately illuminated room, in which only distinctive shadows and reflections of a handful of bizarre objects offer help with orientation [Image 5]. These focus points are readily accepted by the viewers gaze while navigating over the canvas, however at the same time they intensify the slightly irritated sensation of perplexity that had already accompanied first impressions of the enigmatic The Muse. This tightens the screws of the inner symbolic unity just a little bit further, so that even the deciphering of possible internal meanings or relationships is lost on the way. It is exactly this cultivation of perplexity that shuts out what Berresheim summarises with the term Welt der Vereinbarungen (World of Agreements) which is a challenge to the exclusions of the science of images and on an even more basic level, the world of communication itself. Combined with the principle of Hermetik (hermetics) as a second central theme in his art theory, this forms a renunciation of the mechanisms of interpretation. In this radical critique of interpretation and communication and especially with the resulting disregard of the principles of referentiality and/or authenticity, there lies furthermore the question of the afore-mentioned reaction of the image objects between their roles as bearers of meaning on the one hand, and as pure visual elements on the other. Despite the technological well thought-through execution of both works, which momentarily

seem to be far ahead of their time, the depicted objects manage in exactly that oscillating moment to take on the thread of a longgone era and spin it further. At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century the autonomy of the art form of painting was promoted for the first time, and in the following 50 years it would evolve into total abstraction. The germinating plea for artificiality and inconsistency also as an emancipating separation to the then new medium of photography served the purpose of leaving behind the centuries-old demand for a more descriptive art. When Edouard Manet presented his first major piece The Spanish Singer, also known as The Guitarist [Image 6] in 1861 at the Salon de Paris, which he like Berresheim at the time of The Muse had completed when he was 28 years old, he left behind a baffled audience, until then exclusively trained in the interpretation of biblical events, historical reproductions and the allegories of the realists. The critique of his very ordinary depiction of the playing and singing man in a diffuse space, accentuated by the intense colouring of a few objects and the distinctive play of light and shadow, set itself alight with exactly these details, which in favour of their function as visual elements left out the truthful content demanded by the traditionalists be it the randomly assembled clothes of the musician, the purportedly wrong use of hands on the guitar or the forced artificial posture. The majority of the critics were unable to accept these yearnings for autonomy and so it seemed understandable at the time to not want to acknowledge a Manet with his bold painting style, his daring themes, with these inexplicable physiognomies, which wouldnt open up to the viewer nor narrate or share anything.5 This characterisation of Manets combination of spatial depth, choice of themes and physicality reads like a preliminary description of the Obey series where especially the incommensurability of the figures happens on a different plateau away from the irritations which can emanate from an identifiable person, for example a lonely guitarist. Berresheims pictures refuse any possible complicity with the reality outside the image or the canonised repertoires of symbols and instead give away alleged securities available to the recipient for interpretation or empowerment. This means, to word it inadequately, that the question of power is posed ex negative; what is debated here is nothing less than the conditions of this knowledge configuration. At first surprising, this venture does reintegrate painting as an art form but it doesnt 80

rehabilitate it. Because it doesnt happen like a triumphant return of the softening icing on a cake that forms the mercilessly hard outlines of the computer image, but as a contrast to one of the last aesthetic refuges of the recipient, the widest possible associative space which is opened up by pure abstraction. The design of the individually painted details, i.e. their size, shape and colour, were already defined at the time of the composition of the image elements on the screen, since the shadows (of the head) and the reflections (of the object hanging from the left hand) were created before the relevant application of paint. Or is it perhaps the other way round? This confusing combination of varying techniques is in no way only a playful co-existence of divergent forms of expressions, but the more emphatic (at first perhaps subtle) comment with respect to the negations of allegedly cross-border Multimedia practices. No confrontation or intervention takes place here because each medium is used to show the limits of relevant clich-laden attributions cool computer art versus expressive painting in this case and to sharpen in this synchronicity the view onto their composition. The Obey pictures were on display for the first time as part of the group exhibition White Boy, which Berresheim carried out together with Michael Bauer and Stefanie Popp at the beginning of 2004 at the Berlin Autocenter exhibition space. He also showed seven small prints, Echte Gefhle (True Feelings), which form, largely independent of the large computer images, a trace to his countless other creative activities, the record covers as well as the flyers and catalogues for Brotherslasher. In the case of three of these photographs portraits showing human faces covered by skull masks this connection becomes all the more apparent since they had already appeared in the booklet New Amerika. Hitbeat for Music Lovers. No1, published end of 2003. In this first publication that Tim Berresheim designed and released apart from the Brotherslasher catalogues there is no mention anywhere of himself or his works, it only lists his musical projects and pseudonyms and confronts them with occasional extremely bizarre random images. Apart from that the booklet also served as the first advertisement for the label New Amerika, which Berresheim founded in an effort to officially catalog the records he (jointly) recorded and produced and which he professionally manages since his move to Cologne in February 2004, in cooperation with the resident distributor a-musik.6

[2004] In the summer of the same year Tim Berresheim bundled together the various areas of his activity for the purpose of the sweeping synaesthetic attack Dont call us piggy, call us cum, which he organised with Jonathan Meese, by now a regular collaborator. The project would bring with itself two records, the LP Dont call us piggy and the 7 Call us cum, the first and so far only concert of the pair, that would take place on the premises of a-musik at Kleiner Griechenmarkt, a comprehensive publication and the exhibition in the same name at the Hammelehle and Ahrens gallery. Also in this context we once again come across some of the by now seven band names (new additions are for example Haircar and Pignick), immortalised on disused old wooden doors in scribbled writing next to sparse figuration. Each one of these modified auratic ready-made objects, as possibly the greatest imaginable contrast and yet as an integral component, flanks the to the highest degree artificial and precise computer images, again with just one figure each. At least this applies to four of the five constellations, all of them entitled Tea and Coffee and numbered. The tryptich Tea and Coffee 5 [Image 7] is an exception in several ways. Two doors were used which show the artists first names instead of their pseudonyms. They frame an image twice as large (in comparison with the other works, 220x360cm), on which the standing figure throws a t-shirt to the other figure unnoticed, and who sits upright with a straight back, facing the viewer. On the front of the t-shirt the crumpled portraits of Berresheim and Meese can be seen. With the picture on this printed piece of clothing the outside reality gains access to the image, but only in a very self-referential manner: the figure itself becomes a fan of the music released by its creator. All of the similarly comprehensible references in the Tea and Coffee series are limited exclusively to the persons and products that are connected with this proliferating synthesis of the various art forms (Gesamtkunstwerk) that came out of the exhibition. The nesting of the visual and musical forms of expression is taken to the extreme in the computer image Tea and Coffee 4 that shows an image of the LP cover Dont call us piggy by Tim and Jonathan (or Tim and Jonathan) on which again Berresheim and Meese can be seen. By naming the individuals responsible for the various formations Tim and Jonathan in this work series as well as the individual projects, by turning their own products into visual 81

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components and specific subjectivities and with the repetition of ample obscure iconographic details, for example the omnipresent exercise weights on the most diverse levels of representation as an element on the record covers, in the catalogue about the artists and in the computer images belonging to the figures the Gesamtkunstwerk, encompassing the music, sculpture, computer art, lyrics, painting, applied art and photography, delivers its own deconstruction as a part of itself. The highly sentimental, in its detail uneasy artificiality of the images is combined with the material simplicity of the intentionally constructed attribution of different artists. Both contribute to the fact that despite the dimensions of the whole sprawling venture, a soothing synaesthetic sense of comfort, which blurs the outlines of the separate species in favour of an atmospheric overall impression, is ruled out from the outset. In fact the opposite is the case, as in several places a distance is created and the perception is focussed on the individual elements of the whole: be it the already described collision of the most various of materials, the eccentric, at times questionable choice of names and titles or especially the documentation of the production conditions of music and art in the catalogue, which contains excerpts of Jonathan Meeses lyrics as well as photographs of the two in their own private spheres, which seem to have served occasionally as models for the design of the figures. Unlike quite a few other alliances between fine arts and music with their tautological all-over strategies just think of such diverse efforts as the installations of Carsten Nicolais or the video works of Rodney Graham it is not the cross-border compatibilities and common ground, but the fractures between the genres and between the spheres of production and representation that become the subject of discussion. This all-encompassing yet transparent principle of synaesthesis is reminiscent of Bertolt Brechts critique of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in whose counter concept, the age-old battle between words, music and image () can quite simply be settled by the radical separation of these elements. As long as Gesamtkunstwerk signifies that the whole is made up of everything mixed together, as long as the art forms melt into one another, the individual elements will all suffer similar degradation so that each is little more than an idea or a prompt leading to the other. This melting process captivates the observer, who himself is melted into the painting, consequently representing a passive (suffering) part of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This kind of magic obviously needs

to be fought. Anything that attempts to hypnotise or that tries to create inappropriate states of delirium must be blurred, must be surrendered. 7 Aside from the computer images, whose life-size protagonists are painted over by Meese later on though seemingly, as a baffling close-up inspection will reveal, not directly onto the canvas the aforementioned doors and a handful of the snap shots of the artists, declared as private art works that are not for sale, Berresheim showed two photographic works (School of Tim and School of Jonathan), in which he made use of the experiences he had gained when working with three-dimensional vector-generated bodies. (Before this exhibition his only effort to show photographic works had been as part of the Brotherslasher group exhibition Ganz oben.) The deserted situations in a forest and park respectively [Image 8] were taken by Berresheim himself with a digital camera, so that later on the figures and individual objects could be integrated onto this scene with the computer, and in this way could evolve into a credible part of the image, unlike in a collage or any other mixed media constellation. It is again a challenge for the paradigm of multimedia overlays, but this happens here from an entirely different perspective which strikes this ambitious demand with its own weapons. By compositing a technique that has become quite popular thanks to the increasingly widespread combining of animation and real film during the last 25 years (an early example of which would be Don Chaffreys Petes Monster of 1977) an irritatingly homogeneous visual language in which a separation into the various elements seems impossible even with the best of efforts. Only a few months after the completion of Dont call us piggy, call us cum, Tim Berresheim took part for the first time in an art fair, the Art Cologne straight away in his double function as artist and exhibition room manager. At the end of the aisle where Hammelehle and Ahrens presented one of his Obey pictures was the Brotherslasher booth as part of the section Young Contemporaries, new to this fair. Together with Brotherslasher collaborator Heike Freudenthal, Berresheim and Bauer exhibited a selection of lesser known, primarily by Brotherslasher represented artists(Popp, Linpinsel), next to already established artists who had remained close to Brotherslasher (Butzer, Selg), along with all the Brotherslasher catalogues, editions and in connection with a-musik a large selection of artists records. The stall 82

left a lasting impression with this entertaining mix, so that the programme and the combination of the displayed objects were praised frequently, the address book and e-mail subscription list filled quickly and last but not least, the sales topped even the most hopeful expectations. Nevertheless would they leave it at that, for the Art Cologne venture had confirmed exactly what had been a regular theme with Brotherslasher during the two preceding years: that it is ostensibly the advertising strategies and the image of the exhibitor, rather than the unconditional interest in artistic forms of expressions actually aspired to that matter. Only now, during their ennoblement thanks to their integration into the exhibition halls of the trade fair, many no longer could, wanted to or had to overlook this exhibition space; now all those people interested in art even and especially those from Cologne were incredibly keen to receive the next invitation, journalists were willing to report on Brotherslasher, collectors could no longer say no. Though this could have been considered a happy occasion to start afresh, at that point and at the end of an eventful year, it was really just a logical step to end it all dramatically, go out with the loud bang, and concentrate instead, after this befitting comment about the art business world, on their own work. [2005] In the first works complex which was created that year, photography played a more important role than they had with Dont call us piggy, call us cum. Danish Blue, the title of the complex, contains, alongside seven computer prints each with a single figure, the same number of smaller photographic works (30 x 40cm). The assignment of possible counterparts in this constellation is not obligatory and is instead left entirely to the beholder. The most obvious difference to the works of the previous year is that now objects have been integrated into a situation already present. It is a new decision that works to the disadvantage of the figures with their dialectic relationship in this game of presence and absence of physicality. The two Danish Blue series undermine the thesis that Berresheims previous works until that point generally reflected permanently on the possibilities and conditions of image production, the bearing of meaning and the mechanisms of reception. With the outsized computer images mainly two architectural and figurative elements stand out: some of the wide visual spaces are divided by additional vertical walls that reach

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all the way up. Apart from this, in all seven images, only female figures are displayed, mostly in a state of undress [Image 9]. Furthermore, in comparison with previous works, increases the intensity and diversification of both illumination and colours, so that the Danish Blue complex contains the most theatrical computer images so far. This impression is reinforced by the fact that in almost all pictures the classic art historic object of study, the throw of folds, which has challenged countless generations of sculptors and painters since the early middle ages, plays a prominent role. So in all these works, it is neither narrative anecdotal nor referential concerns that are of interest, but the sounding out of experiments with colour and shape, the composition of elements and their internal relationships in the image space as well as the search for perfect light, shadows and folds, all serving a self-contained unprecedented visual experience. It is these artificial representations of physicality that are preferred to the non-figurative coloured sections and outlines. It is exactly this identifying, even eerie element that obstructs the lapidary and pleasing opportunity to escape into abstract or associative areas, so that this quite considerable obstacle actually manages to defeat the recipient by blocking the access to the confrontation with internal image questions. At the same time, this physiological permeation, which in its literal and semantic nakedness forms an integral component of the hermetics of these pictures, demands an intense readiness to overcome and concentrate, which transfers almost as a matter of course onto the fundamental perception of the pictures, as a kind of reward. And this one can be grateful for. In contrast, The Danish Blue photographs totally omit any display of human bodies or their computer generated simulations, but in their absence they reinforce the impression, that these figures had been used not as a trigger of existential mind games but primarily and mercilessly as construction elements. With their all too concrete objects that take the figures place they articulate a new rejection to the wide field of personal associations and the freely floating game of art and cultural historic references. By using geometric shapes, set in what are assumed to be rural surroundings at night time, which are undoubtedly reminiscent of accurately cut pieces of cheese and baguette [Image 10], the frame of mind, which would normally be ensured by abstract shapes, is blocked from the outset, as these overly concrete selfreliant shapes enforce the reflection of internal image aspects such 83

as composition and light unless your preferences in all seriousness lie in discussing the combination of blue cheese and female figures. Not only on an aesthetic but also on a technical level are the recipients confronted with the strange unity of these new forms of expression, since even with regard to art critics and art historians, the competence of the media is limited when it comes to these computer prints and photographs. While learning the technical fundamentals of painting, sculpture and printed graphics is a common introductory component of history of art and hands-on curator courses, at this point in time not many art historians would be able to follow even superficially the technical procedures of these highly complex works or, with this kind of background, be able to adequately judge these works. That is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but it is at least grist to the mills of those who have been asking for several years now for an art historical approach to these visual studies, which still distance themselves from the traditional primarily technical assessment criteria and classifications because of the complexity and diversity of the media. It would in fact be difficult to classify the computer images under primarily material aesthetic premises. Why ban these works into the auxiliary section New Media just because a considerable part of them was created exclusively with the computer? To put this question differently: isnt it evident that the history of painting and photography in this context is far more interesting than the more recent history of computer-based art, as it has, since the mid 90s see under interactive art been exhibited at fun fairs such as for example the permanent collection of the ZKM in Karlsruhe? And doesnt Tim Berresheims art leave media-specific discourse in its wake because of it, in order to question the basic mechanisms and definitions of the art and image sciences at the same time? New media or not, these works are primarily one thing, after all: Pictures. The computer is here merely a tool to achieve the desired purpose of displaying visual spaces, figures, objects as well as their configurations and constellations as precisely as can be imagined, in order to finally represent them on an appropriate medium. The work exists only then, when in this form as an original there is only one certified print, with no limited editions it can leave behind its relative status, even if after its completion it remains on the hard disk.

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[2005] Berresheim challenges the separation between allegedly new and traditional media once again, this time with his most recent work series, in which together with the Cologne artist Thomas Arnolds, he combines computer generated figures with photography and painting. Together they created 20 works that were displayed under the slogan FYW in June in the exhibition space Uberbau in Dsseldorf, documented by the catalogue of the same name accompanied by an introductory story written by Jonathan Meese. The black and white photographs were taken exclusively by night and show deserted places in the inhospitable peripheries of urban built-up areas. Fences, gates, posts, banisters, stairs and brambles as well as the consistently snow-covered grounds dominate mood and composition. In contrast to Meese, who as part of Dont call us piggy, call us cum painted over only individual parts of the computer figures in red and black, Arnold helps himself to the whole colour palette and doesnt even shy away from covering the bodies completely with paint [Image 11]. The subjects of the FWY images remind of the handcoloured eerie photographs of the surrealist Hans Bellmer, who since the 1930s had staged dolls which hed built himself in forests or domestic environments. His second doll, developed in 1935 and which from then on served as a model for his eroto-maniacal photographs, allowed him to break away from the standard principles of the human anatomy thanks to his new constructions [Image 12]. Using the central ball element around which individual limbs are arranged in manifold variation, he managed to order the body parts in a new way or to multiply them, even to simulate organic changes through arithmetic forms of doubling and multiplication. But these syntagmatic metamorphoses are still bound by the corset of the mechanics whose rhythmic and repetitive sequences mark the manufacture of these abnormal figures as well as characterise the work and production conditions influenced by Ford, reminders of a time when the figures were created. Tim Berresheim is in contrast a paradigmatical artist of the post-Ford-era, as the smallest units of his three-dimensional figures are merely information according to their creation in a post-industrial computer-assisted information and service-oriented society. The vector-generated bodies in the FYW series are, even more significantly than their predecessors, subject to permutations, proliferations and extensions. The digital mutations however take place independently

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of centres or bases, and in addition to this is the design of their artificiality, incomprehensible to the observer in contrast to the accumulative arrangements around Bellmers ball bearings. Those would also regularly be connected with the linguistic forms of the anagram and the palindrome or the idea of semantic liberation. 8 Berresheims manipulations however can neither be reduced to smallest units of meaning nor are they newly coded triggers of fantasies of any kind. It is therefore only a matter of consequence that the figures do not function as areas for projections and are simply components of the images, which avoid the exclusions of linguistically communicated common denominators. Despite these incompatibilities, these and all other mentioned works by Tim Berresheim are not to be misunderstood as a plea for the return to the innocuousness of lart pour lart, for it is the inescapable intensity of the contemplation that can focus the view on other products of fine art as well as on visual languages and politics in general, as weve already seen. This transfer ability, inherent to these images, reminds us, in its sensitisation of at least one specific form of perception, of a piece of music with similar educational-analytical consequences. We are talking about a composition that is almost diametrically opposite to Berresheims dogma of the highest possible artificiality: John Cages Composition 433 , which acquired its title from the length of the legendary premiere performed by the pianist David Tudor in 1952 in Woodstock/New York. The three movements of the piece were marked by Tudor opening the lid of the piano at the beginning of the movement and closing it at the end, but he wouldnt do anything in the time between. Nonetheless, by denoting the beginning and the end and regardless of what happened in between, in this case all the random background noise, this was defined as music. For Cage the non-intentional is of highest importance, and he ignores the handed down idea of the artists subject and allows, in the greatest possible contrast to Berresheim, the highest degree of non-artistic and non-artificial reality. However, there are two points at which these two extremely contradictory aesthetic models meet: on one hand in the hermetic strictness here the highest degree of artificiality, there the highest degree of reality; on the other in the concentrated presentation here the concentration of the image elements, there the concentration of what is happening. In both cases both the symbolism as well as the referentiality get a clear refusal, because for both Berresheim and Cage the conditions

of human perception, i.e. the individual physicality, form an immediate connection with the presented work. All these elements sensitise the dealings with visual and acoustic presentations beyond the reception of the completed work. La Monte Young, fluxus artist and composer of minimalistic music, greatly influenced by Cage during the 50s and 60s, once stated that it is as useless to write about art as it is to dance about architecture. He certainly isnt entirely wrong here. Who knows, perhaps it would indeed be more appropriate to play music in appreciation of Tim Berresheims art instead of filling stacks of paper. In what would more likely than not be a hopeless effort for an adequate conversion to music, a low droning, very distorted but nonetheless pleasant bass would start the piece; soon afterwards a sharply mixed guitar with significantly more high frequencies than Steve Albini would ever dare to mix would cut up the subsonic waves, whose precisely separated segments would soon be confronted with quiet but piercing screams. The only thing missing is a drum kit. But at this moment the funky rolling sounds of the computer generated drum joins in, because obviously the hermetics need to be maintained. And the devil would have a hand in it if the space in front of the stage were not to empty as a result. And if you still feel obliged to dance, you would soon enough look like the deformed physiognomies of the computer prints. Perhaps you should just leave it at that, and just shut your mouth. That wouldnt do any harm. Im sorry, but it just has to end somewhere. Wolfgang Brauneis (Translation: Bettina Swynnerton und Annabel Bootiman)

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1 compare Leeb, Susanne, Metamalerei. Interview mit Albert Oehlen, in: Texte zur Kunst, December 1999, year 9, issue 36, pages 5357 2 Just think about the exhibition series Painting on the Move which was shown also in spring 2002 parallel to the Art Basel in three museums in Basel. This would give this new trend an art historic legitimation in the art business that left nothing to be desired in terms of emphatic impact. In the shadow of such blockbusters (irrespective of the different strategies, artistic aspirations or official attitude) the hype surrounding the young German painters of the so-called Neue Leipziger Schule or the gallery Guide W. Baudach in Berlin (at that time still called Maschenmode), would continue to increase. 3 see there, page 55 4 see Brauneis, Wolfgang, Sinners Devotion, in catalogue Tim Berresheim and Jonathan Meese, Dont Call Us Piggy Call Us Cum, Cologne, Gallery Hammelehle und Ahrens, Cologne 2004, pages 48 5 Keller, Horst, Edouard Manet, Munich 1989, page 34 6 For more information about New Amerika see www.na-o.com 7 Brecht, Bertolt, Anmerkungen zur Oper, in: Anmerkungen zur Oper, Versuche 112. Issue 14, Berlin 1963, pages 101107; here page 104. 8 compare Mller-Tamm, Pia and Sykora, Katharina, Puppen Krper Automaten. Phantasmen der Moderne, in: Puppen, Krper, Automaten. Phantasmen der Moderne, Dsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1999, pages 6593, here page 84

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