BURGHARD

23 same idea. At first, the objects appear to be unrelated, contradictory when contextual- ized and put into correlations they produce an alignment. JR: ‘Es gibt Ordnungen.’. The title of your current exhibit to be shown at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden’s exhibition space ‘45cbm’ is posit-like. While it may sound uncompromising, a certain amazement at the very existence of orders resonates here, too. How do you approach this term? B: There are these as well as those. That is it. JR: Which thinking and discursive fields are opened up based on your work ranging from the emphatic magic of the corporeal to detached analysis or criticality? B: (We pursued logic, developed a background of criticality and recognized that this doesn‘t suffice.) Today our work is floating and our aim is to be essentially engaged in thinking. For us, criticality is just a transitory state on the path toward a more com- plex experience. For the observer, physical experience constitutes the first and most important level of perception. The underlying and more remote levels, our way of engaging our work, must not necessarily be made legible to the recipient. Sometimes resistance is already conveyed via the materials used in the work or its means of production. Presence is important. Awareness. Not cognition but experience. JR: Encountering things in the immediacy of their presence? B: Initially, things just stand in our way. We approach and pursue them. Very pragmati- cally. We leave things in their concrete presence; they mean nothing beyond them- selves. The work comes into existence by configuration (i.e. juxtapositioning, inter- twining, forcibly fitting into one another). We then stand as the first viewers of our operation. – Such acts of the absurd always denote the human measure. Occasionally, this remarkable contingency is dizzying. JR: What can be discerned in your works from their production and the processing of the materials? What line does your work take vis-à-vis such terms as processuality, transmutation and modulation on the one hand and completion, thetic positing and opacity on the other? B: We never really put into place an ‘oeuvre’ concept in our artistic practice. Instead, our approach is more ephemeral, fragile and vulnerable with no claim towards timeless- ness. We create with the intention to relinquish, as in 90 Tage. We have always been about embracing the possibility of a radically different perspective – both for us and for the recipient. This moment that makes anything possible.

BURGHARD

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