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Lamps are flickering, sculptural processes are interrupted at seemingly critical junctions, mirrors have been scratched or broken, or else they are dysfunctional, reflecting only a blur. Traces of mechanical noises, fragmented echoes hang in the air, somehow frozen in an idle state. Even the objects in the space seem like estranged reflections of the architecture. Are these “autonomous“ sculptures or functional objects; a fence or a building component?
The Austrian artist Gerold Tagwerker creates simple objects and forms that are incrementally perceived as “seeing machines” in the sense of a dispositif of the gaze that subtly foreground the status of the viewer, engaging with the individual’s routine operations of seeing, classifying, and comprehending. Phenomenological presence, powerful semiotic reference, and commentary on art alternate seamlessly. Tagwerker’s mirrored works contain a socioaesthetic and art-sociological component, as they make the viewer part of the work and also serve the function of mirroring the imposition of present-day subjectivity, thus making it negotiable as an ideological structure.