A few weeks ago, my tutor took our whole group to the Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht (ABKM). I should be more precise, and say, to the there-located Bachelor studies of Autonomous Art. Looking nothing like the main buildings of the Academy, the old monastery building is filled with wood, paper, pictures, cigarette stubs, electrical gadgets of all sorts, there was music in pretty much every room, or humming ventilators, paintbrushes, hammers, soil, and fabric. So, everything, scattered, but with a kind of order that was invisible to us at first. We met the graduate students, who all have their own studios, and were showing us their final works, made up of wood, paper, pictures, cig…you get the point. It was fantastic, most of us consider ourselves something like art aficionados and I had seen the opposite extreme, the European Fine Art Fair, only a few hours prior to this. I immediately knew which side of the art world I’d prefer for myself, but that was not relevant at this point. All the studios were white, but they lived, they were occupied spaces of other young people who could do with these walls what they wanted, and even if the art works, as the artists pointed out repeatedly, are far from being completed, we enjoyed all of it a lot.
But I don’t want to lose track.
I was assigned to Steffen Kraska, a German artist who is, if I can at all plaster his work into one sentence, making art about pictures. Aiming at the very core of photography, film, light-on-material, he showed me his projects and his previous installations, and his photographs, and a little booklet, a layout-version of a book he made with his photographs. The booklet was created entirely out of printer paper held together by a myriad of paper clips. To be honest, in that moment I was more about excited about the photographs and the light that came into the studio through the dusty window than the paper clips. But my task was to write an artist file about Steffen Kraska, and I couldn’t fit the paper clip book in there anywhere, and I regretted that, and therefore, Steffen, that booklet, the whole thing, including the paper clips, is incredibly cool, too cool for that box you store it in :)
www.steffenkraska.de
But I don’t want to lose track.
I was assigned to Steffen Kraska, a German artist who is, if I can at all plaster his work into one sentence, making art about pictures. Aiming at the very core of photography, film, light-on-material, he showed me his projects and his previous installations, and his photographs, and a little booklet, a layout-version of a book he made with his photographs. The booklet was created entirely out of printer paper held together by a myriad of paper clips. To be honest, in that moment I was more about excited about the photographs and the light that came into the studio through the dusty window than the paper clips. But my task was to write an artist file about Steffen Kraska, and I couldn’t fit the paper clip book in there anywhere, and I regretted that, and therefore, Steffen, that booklet, the whole thing, including the paper clips, is incredibly cool, too cool for that box you store it in :)
www.steffenkraska.de
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