Clouds...owe Obłoki ranne, jak te ptaki

by Pawel Althamer and Lou CantorText by Pablo Larios

The following text is intended to accompany Clouds, a collaborative piece by Paweł Althamer and Lou Cantor. The piece is a large inflatable sculpture that will be enterable by viewers.

The work of Warsaw-based artist Paweł Althamer frequently focuses on problems of participation and group relations; he has recently shown at Ludwig Museum in Köln, at MUSEION in Bolzano, the Guggenheim Berlin, and at Wiener Secession in Vienna. In 2010 he won the Kunstpreis Aachen. Lou Cantor is a Berlin-based collective, working in diverse media, whose projects frequently take intersubjectivity as their theme. Previous exhibitions include the 7th Berlin Biennale, NewNational Art at the Warsaw MoMA, and the Villa Tokyo. The work of both Cantor and Althamer are both united by an interest in intersubjectivity and their discrete practices grounded in problems and modes of partici pation.

Figures enter, dance, and jump within an immense sculptural Cloud. The premise is simple. One might find origins in Imma-nuel Kant. It’s probably not coincidental that Kant, whose restructuring of philosophy into epistemology launched, for some, a Kant-Krise of skepticism in the 18th century, spent a considerable amount of energy writing

about weather and meteorology – and yes, clouds. After all, certainty – in both mete-orology and epistemology – is theoretically achievable yet, on an individual basis, quite difficult to reach. It is easier to predict a latitudinal trajectory based on a pattern than

the individual instance of a coin toss. The weather, like the conditions for knowledge, are systematic yet erratic at the same time. Counted among Kant’s writings on natural history are works on earthquakes and physi-ography, on volcanoes on the moon, and the relationship between the weather and the celestial bodies. Our interest for us, when

looking at Althamer and Cantor’s sculpture, is Kant’s thesis that the origin of universe lies in clouds.

In 1755, Kant wrote (but did not yet publish) his first book, which bore the elevated title “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens: An essay on the Constitution and Mechani-cal Origin of the Whole Universe According to Newton’s Principles.” For Kant, morality, aesthesics, and law are systematic in principle; the weather, too, despite being elu-sively eruptive and erratic, must be subject to decipherable systematic principles that are teleological in nature. The Nebular Hypothesis, or Nebularhypothese, which has simi-larities to ideas Laplace and Swe-denborg, posits that the universe was once a massive cosmic cloud; gravitational forces – which Kant read about in Newton – shrunk and flattened this cloud until eventually galaxies were formed; the process

was repeated until smaller ‘clouds’ led to planetary bodies like the earth. It’s a funny thought to think of the great Sage of Königs-burg as a cloudbuster or a navel-gazer, head in the clouds. But many of the dualities and ambivalences that mark Kant’s thought – the

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systematicity, the conditionality of certainty, the delicate relationship between individual choice and moral necessity – have paral-lels to the current aesthetic environment that led to Althamer and Cantor’s sculpture, “Clouds.” Intersubjectivity, as Kant, Al-thamer, and Cantor might affirm, is neither easy nor transparent, despite how incontro-vertibly we are immersed in it. The think-ing of “Clouds” – with its overtones of both connection and obfuscation – might be that relationality is ambivalent, that what con-nects individuals is the paradoxical distance enacted by our very need for connection.

“Clouds” is a sculptural installation of a large inflatable object, reminiscent of a head or a skull, which viewers can enter, wander through, jump around and get lost in. One enters from a window that might be an eye or eye socket; but like childrens’ toys in fairs, the adult viewer to today’s art fair places himself in a ludic condition. Animat-ing the object by his or her motion, making the sculpture itself wobble or move, might make the headlike sculpture ‘come alive.’ The sculpture is white, like the nebular bod-ies of its title . But there are other resonanc-es: one, the link between play and action in the piece – that one can only experience it by engaging within it, making it bounce as it were – could remind us of the children’s game where kids try to make out shapes in an abstract sky. One might also think of the ubiquitous cloud of ‘cloud computing,’ and still yet, the symbols of fleetingness alluded to by the strange character in Baudelaire’s prose-poem L’Étranger (The Stranger): “I love the clouds ... the passing clouds ... over there ... over there ... the marvelous clouds!”

For the past couple years, no other word has been thrown around more as an emblem of connectivity than the ethereal

‘Cloud,’ or computing done (and data stored) wirelessly over a network. The name Cloud was suggested to encapsulate a complex network of connectivity concepts – infra-structure, storage, finance, database, feed-back – into a simple and unique rubric: the Cloud. The promise, of course, is that, as if in a gaseous chamber, we can access our data (our selves) anywhere, no longer tied down to physical data. Ironic about the Cloud is the fact that the term has gained such presence, and so quickly, but most of us (least of all the businesses pushing it) are unaware of precisely what it entails – this is ironic above all because, in colloquial usage, for something to be ‘cloudy’ is for it to be impenetrable, unaccessible, broadly defined, improbable, or simply vague. The medium of our ostensible connection, our connectiv-ity itself, is already marked by the specter of uncertainty and vagueness. This comes at a comment where it’s becoming clear that the Internet, above all, is changing the mean-ing of collectivity, while exposing aspects of the collective that were previously exposed. As the the impetus to “go local” or “glocal”, the Internet becomes more and more sited, and, like Kant’s cloud universe, the clouds collapse and become even smaller units of feedback loops and tagging. The Internet has stopped being a mere analogy to the ‘real’ world and is beginning to adapt to its ma-terials, to ground them in a way, the virtual becomes geotagged and endemic, while the particular takes on the tinge of placeless-ness and virtuality – a place is just one place out of many possible places. As a sculpture, “Clouds” bears out these problems formally, but also on the nature of objecthood and of site that the Internet continues to probe and frustrate.

In choosing to engage the viewers, al-

lowing them to roam and play freely within the sculpture, Althamer and Cantor give to viewers the illusion of choice. But since a participatory work’s criterion for engagement is that one must collude with the project, the agency implied in such a collusion is some-what overstated – in many ways, the object is forming us, not vice versa. But much partici-patory art, like today’s technological cloud, contains the very real relevant paradoxes of our culture: that the changing nature of col-lectivity and subjectivity simultaneously robs and provides individual agency; that, like a massive Ouiji board, it thrives off individual participation yet seems to preclude any one

actual decipherable point of agency. “Cloud,” the buoyant sculpture, as well as the concept, operates along more of a gravitational field (or a cluster of particles) than as a binary switch. Without our consent, it cannot func-tion; but with our consent, we are erased off the map as nameless agents, a fact which gets at the deliberate generality of the piece.

“Clouds” is a collaborative piece, but it highlights unites Althamer’s practice as both a collaborative/participatory artist, making peculiar demands on groups and collectives, and his practice as a sculptor. The work of Lou Cantor, an artist collective living in Ber-lin, covers similar ground by engaging above all with the theme of intersubjectivity – a theme dear to both children, who thrive off the collective, and to Kant, who established the notion as philosophical groundwork.

It is fitting, then, that this work on intersubjectivity takes the form of a col-laboration between the two artists. Rather than an exposition of current practices of

labor – with the logic of the outsource, and the implicit exertion to ‘collaborate’ present in contemporary art – this piece reduces these aspects to a quieter, more elementary position of dialogue, atmosphere, and perception.The piece’s white color references both the cloud; but, like that children’s guessing game, the real source of this tone will remain nebulous. The central irony is that, as this piece foregrounds the persistence of a networked environment – where the audience is made physical by the inclusion of multiple

individuals within one bounded space – the boundaries of this environment are provi-sional, hazy, cloudlike: our current techno-logical status is paired with the guesswork of children spelling out shapes in the sky, or the astrologer reading highly specific symbols into an abstract pane of relations.

He knew it hardly made sense, but still kept beating his fists against the wall. Someone would eventually let him in. For hours, he had been standing outside a curious-shaped building he had never noticed before in the outskirts of the city. It was almost morning, and he could see the first commuters on their way to work, emerging from the cracks of the houses like ants with suitcases. Why was he here? He didn’t know why – he was merely there, knocking.

Finally, he remembered a note he had stashed in his pocket. Reading it, he went around the side of the building, came upon a tiny open hole, and began to climb through into what must have been an immense white cavern. Touching it with his hands, it felt at once like plastic and like clay. It grinned outward like a face, a skull even.

How had he gotten here? The previous evening, his bedroom

had been swamped by an alarming din, by the sound of an airplane taking off below him or a zoo that had been stampeded. He turned on his lamp. Louise, laying there beside him moments earlier, was gone. The neighbors’ doors, he noticed, run-ning out through the hallway of his build-ing, were all open. Nobody had bothered to close them, and rags and clothing, the remnants of dozens of quick exits, spilled out into the patterned hallway carpet. On the street, he tried to remain calm, walk-ing normally. The bakery girl around the corner walked past him; he greeted her, but she only looked past confusedly.

Hours later, he was falling, Alice-style, into a cavernous face. He landed upon a surface that felt as soft as soil, but was also hollow, like a trapdoor in a theater

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set. It was rubbery, and the floor seemed to be moving, so that the moment he himself stopped moving, he would have to catch himself from falling. It was pitch dark – strangely, the window he had crawled in through let in no light. His senses seem-ingly amplified as a result, he began to hear the motion of bodies, of shuffling feet and a low hum of sustained motion.

How many were there? He couldn’t tell how far away anyone was. Actually, he had no idea whether they were human – the space could have been filled with dogs, or snakes. And how large or how small was this room he was in - is it possible to be simultaneously afraid of the smallness of a space and its vastness?

“Who told you about this place?” He wasn’t startled by the voice, knowing al-ready that he was sharing this space with other people. But he couldn’t see who had addressed him; in fact, he wasn’t sure he had been addressed at all. He had seem-ingly intuited the question the way certain insects communicate, by electrical signals, by the osmosis of information. A kind of listening without hearing. He recalled that scientific breakthroughs often occur simul-taneously in different parts of the world, and the only reason for this is that informa-tion, rather than happening in traceable net-works, spreads out like a gas, not a stream.

“That is correct,” he heard, once again with the same bizarre intuition.

He was getting agitated, beginning to feel that his thoughts and movements were being observed. “Who are you?” he asked. Then, he could barely trace what occurred next: a sequence of concordant voices, speaking, and people taking him by the hand and leading him to other corners of a labyrinthine space.

He began to panic; he asked for the exit. He was told there was no exit because there was nowhere to escape to. There is no outside. Further, time and space had col-lapsed, so that, just as Einstein’s model of space-time posits a grid, expanding down at certain gravitational points, he could light a match and look at his watch, and see that the hands had disappeared. “You asked to come in,” someone asserted, correctly.

He inquired his co-habitants how long they had been there. No answer. His eyes accustomed – or rather, his hearing became so good that, like a bat, he could intuit the shape and color of objects, as if he were seeing them, always in relation to where he stood. The people around him were indeed human – or seemed to have been. They had clearly been there, happy and carefree, for some years. But this utopian surrounding had effected the members in varying ways.

Some lay there, motionless; others had turned into kinds of savages, picking their beards as if they had lice, twitching sporad-ically. there was a sock, a cactus, some ro-dents, and several dogs, whom other mem-bers still addressed by their human names. A woman sat constructing a likeness of a sunken cruise liner, calling it her husband, and speaking with it. One man wouldn’t stop eating cupcakes, though it was unclear from where they were appearing. He had

been reading about cults, and I knew that these effects were both permanent and not without ills. Freedom is not always good in all settings, or for all people. Eventually one of the figures stepped out and exclaimed that he was a work of art; to listen to him; to pay him the kinds of reverence one has for a Vermeer in a museum.

He took to imagining things – curi-ous arrangements of objects, sequences of events, unimaginable colors – and found

that his cohabitants would respond. Some time later, he found a note etched on the surface of a wall, which appeared to be an ancient myth that accounted for the bizarre space he was being held within.

“First there was water everywhere. There was a God-creature named Flat Pipe. There was only water, and Flat Pipe floated with his belly down. Flap pipe could do anything, but still he just floated there. At some point Great Spirit leaned over from the clouds and said to him, Hey, Flat Pipe, how about building a world around you? Fetch some animals, they will help you and hunt for you. A woman. Do you know what that is?

“So Flat Pipe thought of ducks, and ducks appeared. They sat on the water like an uneven row of corks. They did not speak, and Flat Pipe got restless. He wanted to know, say, where does the land start? O tell me, ducks, how deep is the water? Bring me back land. But the ducks ignored him, being but stupid fowl.

“So Flat Pipe thought of water-birds, and water-birds appeared. They, feeling creatures, quivered for the water was cold. Hey water-birds: swim down and find me some land. Tell me where the world begins. So the water-birds swam down, but after about ten feet their frail wings just broke. They came back holding their wings up by their beaks, looking like paper boats that had been ravaged by wind.

“Flat Pipe needed a new animal. A terrible animal, as if both camel and whale, a creature that knows the water and knows the land. As he was pondering there emerged a great blue turtle. The turtle’s shell was metallic, with a blue sheen. It bore no pattern. The turtle sat expressionless, then departed.

“Years went by, and there was no word

from the turtle. Flat Pipe gave up hope and continued to float alone on the water, and age began to sear its eyelets through

“When Flat Pipe was an old man and wishing he could give up and die (alas, he is eternal), he saw a fleck approaching from the horizonless distance. It was the blue tur-tle. It came up to him and brought his leath-

ery head closer until they were face to face. Then the blue turtle gagged and burped out a piece of dross, some ugly-looking stick, maybe an old coin or a seashell. It hovered there between them.

“ ‘There you have it, Flat Pipe,’ said the turtle, looking down. ‘Here’s your land.’”

“Flat Pipe then rolled it up into a ball and cared for and tended and grew it and from this came all of the earth an beasts that are here. All except for men; nobody knows where they came from.