【台北·敦仁】Beyond Light 光径- Hans Kotter 汉斯·卡特 亚洲首个展 3.20 -5.16

Peter Lodermeyer

知名策展人、艺术史博士、艺术评论家，任教於伍珀塔尔大学，教授艺术史课程。现任德国伯格特海姆城堡馆长。策展经歷遍布欧洲各大城市，曾在许多艺术杂誌、专业期刊及书籍中发表论述著作。2008 年起成为国际艺术评论家协会 AICA 的成员。

艺术般的人造光
近观 Hans Kotter 的作品

Peter Lodermeyer

在邻近莱茵河边的一家酒店，我询问是否能够看看听闻座落於该酒店中的 Hans Kotter 作品。 柜檯人员对於我所说的内容一无所知，只能模糊地示意我上楼。我在大厅裡上下走了很久，徒劳无功，直到我在一块宽敞的壁龕中发现木板墙上三个比例匀称的大型物体。在昏暗的灯光下， 我无法清楚看见物件表面有什麼东西。然后，我注意到有个开关并打开了它，当时我并不怀疑这个开关与物件的关係。三个直立的矩形盒短暂的闪烁了一下，接著便產生了名副其实的光亮奇蹟。在九平方米的平面上，一整片色彩形式的灯以明亮的鈷蓝色、黄色、以及瓶绿色组成，色彩在彼此之间以倾斜的波浪状起伏著。右侧以壮丽的干邑白兰地光辉达到高潮。如此的光彩氾滥形式让人难以形容，就像抽象画那般，却同时呈现了奇妙的真实性、物化感、与相片精准度。这些形式像是自然无比的动画—但是色彩却又十分酷炫，所呈现的外观亦极度平顺，以至於这些作品散发出令人困惑的奇异感与难以靠近的氛围。

突如其来的面对 Hans Kotter 的摄影作品，感受抽象与真实、自然与人工、技术完善与绘画感外观的摆盪，人们难免会质疑这些现象是否经过数位產出或变动。事实是，艺术家以相机聚焦在自己创建的油滴或稜镜上，以观察光线折射、绕射、与反射那令人困惑的复杂过程。透过多种光线来源的嫻熟手法，这些透明介质的内部显现出奇异的美丽形式与极佳的色彩品质。在这个过程中，虽然已经透过大量的光物质、色彩繽纷的背景、与反射表面来呈现，这其中的转变仍然难以辨识，所產生的现象唤起有形的实质印象，却无法形成可理解的形态。因此，这样的偽自然形式看起来像是植物逆袭或由液体构成的景观，却又同时在最深处保留著既无关紧要又精力充沛且难以确切描述的形态。这些被 Kotter 以雷射镀铬相片或灯箱幻灯片呈现的形式，之后并未再以数位方式进行修正；反之，它们是以在相机中呈现的方式显示。

Kotter 的主题是光。他的作品总是著眼於光线，追寻光最出乎意料的效果。如此一来，光现象的多样性使艺术家能够开辟新天地，在探寻表达的多种变化可能与不断创新的表现技术、材料与方法中，超越展示形态的常规界限。Hans Kotter 不只建造灯箱，他也製作物件，将他所发现的东西倒入透明树脂中，用光箔製成的光路标记整个空间、再用他的相机处理最微妙的光现象。在谈话之中，他将自己的摄影作品称之为「光画」，强调他仅是在大量实验过程发现摄影这种辅助手段，而且这样的发现大多是偶然的。Kotter 的主要工作并非摄影师，而是光艺术家。因此，他也必须是位空间艺术家，因为空间在视觉上展示给我们的，便是含有光的空间。不只是他的空间装置，就连他用霓虹灯管照亮的灯箱都显示出对展示空间带来重大影响的存在，并且实质地改变了空间。也因为如此，对於他不断获得在公共空间和办公大楼设立大型装置的委託，是一件再正常不过的事了。

这些灯箱与哥德式大教堂窗户之间所建立的联结十分有趣。其中这薄如蝉翼的感觉，例如从透明物质中穿透出的光或者是有大量光线进入的空间，通常被艺术史学家认为是中世纪裡光形上学的表现手法。这种轻透的魔力也存在於 Hans Kotter 的摄影实验之中，当然，其中也不应忽视的是，艺术家也感知到当今我们与光的关係是十分世俗的。在他首次尝试进入光的微观世界时，他并没有因此屈服於所观察到的光抽象之美。他对此太过挑剔，因为他敏锐地意识到那扎根於西方思想之中的光概念作为神圣、真理、和理性的象徵，早已遭受广泛的世俗化而最终猛烈地变得琐碎。毫无疑问地，西方关於光形上学的先决条件之一是，在大多数的情况下，太阳日復一日、自然且无法被利用的特性。后来有了电，光成为持续可用、可造、且可管控的物质。 对我们所有人而言，人造光线已成为现代日常生活中不证自明的先决条件。到了晚上，我们得益於霓虹灯广告光芒、车灯、与路灯的照明，即使是最丑陋的城市也能受惠於褻瀆神灵的人造光。最终，在 Dan Flavin 於 1960 年代的萤光灯管装置艺术中，人造光立即成为主题，也成为光艺术这种新形式的材料。

Kotter 的装置与灯箱之中，充满光的形式与镜面平滑的物件，看起来总是「闪闪发光地乾净与纯粹」，正如 1999 年那自嘲式的展览名称所暗示的那样。这听起来像是广告词的座右铭，提醒著我们意识到，西方的光形上学今日已落入產品设计、广告商、以及他们口中令人质疑的幸福承诺之中。我们对於广告之中那种阳光总是耀眼地照著，使每块砖、每片金属、与每个漆面都闪烁光芒，像无暇的牙齿呈现洁净纯白的完美状态、而金属镀漆的豪华骄车在图片中像其他星球来的生物那样，以安静且极为纯粹完美的方式呈现。Hans Kotter 的作品有意识地自己置於诱人的，或几乎可以说是挑逗般的视线之中，以接近消费性產品那般地呈现著完美且无菌的美学。Kotter 使用灯箱的方式，是在艺术范畴之外的我们所熟知的，尤其是我们在百货公司或精品店中常见的广告方式。在「The Very Best…」装置作品中，他製造了桌球檯与球会奖盃这种体育界常见的用品，以冷淡的闪烁光芒强调其材质。透过他对光线的使用，以夸张的平滑设计带出一种抽离感，借此强调物件的讽刺感，使物件转变为「酷」的标记而不带有实用价值。 从乒乓球桌中可以感觉到美学已转变成一种恋物感，呈现著从下方照亮且透明的形式，却无法实际用来打球。虽然尺寸的设计与正规竞赛所使用的大小精准对应，但是檯面上含有油水混合物，会使球一上桌便被黏住。然而，无用是否为美的代价？Kotter 在他的作品中测试了艺术与设计、以及美感与功能性之间的狭窄界限。同样的，他那悬吊或者倾靠墙上的灯箱，也同样交替於极简雕塑与时尚设计之间。然而，一旦有人打开隐藏於内部的萤光灯管，这些装置便转化为魔术灯笼，从光之仙境之中显现縈绕人心的图像。Kotter 的作品是对光產生无尽迷恋的练习曲。

Artificial Light as Art.

Approaching the Works of Hans Kotter

by Peter Lodermeyer

A hotel in Germany, not far from the River Rhine. I inquire at the desk if it might be possible to look at the work by Hans Kotter that I had read about being here. The receptionist, obviously clueless to what I am talking about, gives me vague directions to one of the upper floors. I go up and down the halls for a long time, searching to no avail, until I discover in a roomy niche three large, elegantly-proportioned objects on the wood-paneled wall. In the dim light I am unable to recognize much of what is on the front surfaces. I notice a light switch and turn it on, not suspecting it has anything to do with this object. There is a short flickering within the three upright rectangular boxes – and suddenly a veritable miracle of light takes place. Across nine square meters of surface a cascade of colour forms lights up

in bright cobalt blue, yellow, and bottle green, undulating in slanted waves across one other. To the right the colour culminates in a magnificent cognac-coloured glow. The light-flooded forms remain inexplicable, like in an abstract painting, and at the same time oddly real, material, photographically precise. They seem organically animated – and yet their colours are so cool, their appearance so smooth, that they maintain an air of something confusingly foreign and inapproachable.

Confronted out of the blue with Hans Kotter’s photographic works, oscillating between abstraction and materiality, naturalness and artificiality, technical perfection and painterly appearance, a person will inevitably question whether or not these are phenomena that have been digitally produced or altered. The truth of the matter is that the artist takes his camera, zooming in on drops of oil or glass prisms he has built himself in order to observe there the confusingly complicated play of the refraction, diffraction, and reflection of light. Through skillful lighting from various sources, forms of strange beauty and splendid colour quality emerge in the interior of these transparent media. During this process, transitions that are difficult to identify even though they result from light-flooded matter, colourful

backgrounds and reflecting surfaces, create phenomena which evoke corporeal impressions, but do not materialize to any comprehensible shape. Thus, pseudo-organic formations come about that seem like paradox plants or landscapes made of fluids, and yet remain at the same time, immaterial, energetic, and indefinable in their innermost. These forms, which Kotter then exhibits as laser-chrome prints or slides in light boxes, are not subsequently altered digitally; on the contrary, they are presented in the way they revealed themselves to his camera.

Kotter’s theme is light. His works always address light, tracing its most-unexpected effects. In doing so, the diversity of the light phenomena allows the artist to break fresh ground in finding highly varied possibilities of expression and ever-new techniques, materials, and manners of presentation, which extend beyond the customary boundaries of the genre. Hans Kotter not only constructs light boxes, he also builds objects, pours things he has found into transparent resins, marks entire rooms with paths of light made of luminescent foils, and, using his camera, approaches the most subtle phenomena of light. In conversation he refers to his photographic works as “painting with light”, pointing out that he only discovered photography as an aid after much experimentation and mostly by chance. Kotter is not primarily a photographer, but an artist of light. As such, he is also necessarily an artist of space, since space reveals itself to us visually as a void that contains light. Not only his room installations, but also his light boxes lit with neon tubes reveal a presence that has a considerable effect on the room, and in fact, changes it. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that he repeatedly receives commissions for large-format installations in public spaces and office buildings.

It is highly interesting that a connection has been made between these light boxes and the windows of gothic cathedrals. What is diaphanous, i.e. the penetration of light through transparent matter, as well as the flooding of light into a room were often considered by art historians as an expression of the medieval metaphysics of light. The magic of the diaphanous certainly also occupies Hans Kotter in his photographic experiments, but it should not be overlooked that the artist is also aware of the fact that today our relationship to light is deeply profane. In his forays into the microcosm of optics he does not succumb to the abstract beauty of the light effects he has observed. He is too much the critical contemporary for this, acutely aware that the notions of light anchored in western thought as symbols of the divine, of truth and of reason have long since been subjected to a far-reaching secularization and finally, a drastic trivialization. One of the preconditions of the western metaphysics of light was no doubt, for the most part, the unavailability of the sun as it sought its natural course through the day and year. With electricity light became a constantly available, producible, and manageable quantity. For all of us artificial light has become a self-evident prerequisite of our modern everyday life. At night, thanks to the glow of neon advertisements, the headlights of cars, and streetlights, even the ugliest city can share in the profane magic of artificial light. At the latest with Dan Flavin’s installations of fluorescent tubes in the 1960s, artificial lighting had become at once the theme and the “material” of a new artistic genre, the art of light.

In Kotter’s installations and light boxes, the forms and mirror-smooth objects flooded with light always seem “sparkling clean and pure”, as the self-ironic title of an exhibition of 1999 suggested. This motto that sounds like some kind of advertising can serve as a reminder that the western metaphysics of light has fallen today into the hands of product designers and advertising agents with their questionable promises of happiness. All of us are familiar with ads where the sun always shines and each tile, each chrome and paint surface gleams, where cavity-free teeth sparkle in their hygienically perfect condition, and metallically-painted limousines shoot across the pictures like beings from other spheres, silent and in utterly pure perfection. Hans Kotter’s works consciously place themselves optically in seductive, almost flirtatious, proximity to the aesthetics of the consumer products that are perfect and sterile alike. Light boxes, the way Kotter uses them, are known to us outside the context of art, above all as an advertising means used in department stores and fashion boutiques. And in his installation “The very Best …” he makes everyday objects from the sports world, a table-tennis table, and club trophies, gleam in a cold splendor that emphasizes the material. By exaggerating the sleek design, imbuing it with an alienating effect through his use of light, the objects are enhanced ironically, mutated to become “cool” signs of themselves with no utilitarian value. A turning of aesthetics into fetishes may be sensed in the table-tennis table, transparent and lit from below, but not usable for playing. Although its measurements correspond precisely to the measurements required in tournaments, the tabletop contains a water-and-oil-mixture that would make a real table-tennis ball stick upon contact. Is uselessness a price one pays for beauty? In his works Kotter tests the borders of the narrow line between art and design, between beauty and functionality. Likewise, his light boxes, hung on or leaned against the wall, alternate between the status of minimalist sculpture and chic design object. But as soon as one activates their fluorescent tubes hidden in their interiors they become magic lanterns that reveal haunting pictures from the wonderland of light. Kotter’s works are etudes of the inexhaustible fascination with light.