under construction
By Vikenti Komitski written for the exhibition Haunted Horizons in 2024
Тhe exhibition Haunted Horizons by the Berlin-based artist Clemens Behr takes place simultaneously in the spaces of Punta and Posta galleries and the courtyard of Goethe Institute in Sofia, and engages with the idea of ruins. On his first visit to Sofia, the artist got intrigued by the story of the Arena di Serdica Hotel (opposite the Goethe Institute), a six-story, modern building raised on top of the remains of an ancient Roman amphitheater from the 3rd century, discovered during the construction work. Despite protests from the local community of archaeologists and historians, insisting that the municipality should preserve the ruins, the hotel was still built with the condition that some of the remains will be kept visible as part of the architecture.
Beginning with this story, Behr build a six-meter high sculpture near Goethe-Institute out of wood and various construction materials, whose proximity and visual language directly refers, almost duplicates, the aesthetics of the hotel that stands on top of ruins. The structure, raised on columns not of stone but out of ribbed PVC material, often used for roofs on temporary buildings, appears as a quote, a retelling of the story of the ancient Serdica arena and the hotel, at once pseudo-antique in the essence of its elements and postmodern in the feeling of deconstruction it gives. When speaking of his artistic choice, Clemens Behr refers to a famous practice from the 18th century, when fake ruins resembling the remains of ancient buildings were built in the landscape parks of Western Europe. The fashion was sparked by the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii, after which many excavations and studies of ancient sites began in Europe. Such locations awakened interest in antiquity and with it a fetishization of everything from that era as part of a romanticized idea of the past. A famous example is the Ruinenberg near San Soussi in Potsdam, built in 1748 by Frederick the Great as a water reservoir, decorated with artificial ruins reminiscent of a Roman theater. Ironically, some of the ruins were damaged during bombing raids in World War II.
Ironically, the hotel, built on the ruins of the Serdica Arena, has been now closed for several years. Through the vitrines facing Budapesta Street, one could see the Roman remains in the interior of an abandoned and haunted lobby. Ber's installation near by looks like part of the amphitheater and the hotel at once, a strange element in which antiquity and the context of contemporary Sofia are intertwined after a head-on collision.
The theme of destruction and reconstruction continues in the works displayed at Punta and Posta. The series of objects - boxes made of glass and acrylic - imitate the language of an urban environment: broken windows covered with different materials, repaired shop vitrines, temporary solutions. Cracks in the glass, sealed with silicone, create beautiful abstract drawings that also hold the separate pieces together. In Situ work in this technique occupies the vitrine of Posta. The large glass, an invisible divider of outside and inside, private and public, becomes visible and interesting when broken and repaired. A large-scale sculpture in Punta structurally duplicates the architectural elements of the space. The environment appears twice: once as itself and once as a reconstruction - door, corner, frame, windows – almost similar but different, like a doppelganger from another dimension.
The use of restoration as an artistic technique is the key feature of these works. Like the fake ruins of Ruinenberg, these objects were originally made in an aesthetic of decay. What protects them from falling apart is also what forms them. They speak of a moment when coping becomes equal to creating. What defines our age seems to be a constant attempt to prevent a total catastrophe or living in a mode of damage controlling the consequences of such. What we choose to preserve is what we choose to remember, but lost in interpretations, the narrative of history, like a copy of a copy with a lost original, became equal to fiction. The future appears in a horizon haunted by an endless repetition of the past.
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By Rafael Schacter published 2018 in "Street to Studio"
Enamoured with the unfinished, the incomplete, the unresolved, not with process but potential, not with action but possibilities, Clemens Behr seeks to tease out the beauty of that which has yet to be revealed, the beauty of the what may come and the what may be. Using cheap, everyday materials (such as cardboard, tape, and plastic waste-bags, off-cut wood, lighting fixtures, and gaffer tape), and much influenced by the “junk-aesthetic” of Dada and Merz, Behr’s practice can be seen to materialize in two broad directions; the first, a set of sprawling, site-specific, often ephemeral installations, the second, a series of more permanent, yet similarly fragmentary sculptures and collages. Seamlessly integrating both design and fine art principles in each of these approaches however, merging two and three dimensional space, geometrical and architectural formulae, painterly and sculptural techniques, Behr has formed a body of work set continually in motion, one that he attempts to constantly disfigure and refigure, deconstruct and reconstruct, deform and reform.
The first movement towards Behr’s current aesthetic was his progression from the two to the three dimensional, and his embracement, in this process, of one of the most commonplace of mediums, recycled cardboard. First using this substance in order to produces a set of frames for his two dimensional works (in a characteristically makeshift, impromptu manner), Behr felt that the medium enabled a feeling of endlessly modular possibility, its geometric simplicity perfectly adaptable to any space. Folding and slicing the card sheets in order to construct volume out of flatness, the ephemeral, origami-like assemblages that Behr first created were primarily influenced by his previous training in graphic design – his search for certain shapes and rhythms, certain forms of balance and repose – yet were concurrently guided by the tacit understanding of space he developed through his background in both skateboarding and graffiti. The sculptures Behr produced were thus intrinsically site specific, using the geometrical grammar the medium afforded in order to both mimic and play with the surrounding architecture and simultaneously play with the viewer’s perspective. Yet what soon became increasingly important to Behr was the elements of surprise and chance that this medium seemed to enable, accident and serendipity becoming vital to his output in itself; with few preconceptions prior to practice, always starting his works with no set plan and never sketching prior to commencing, Behr would let the materials compel the work forward, telling him what to place where, instructing him through the chance collision of form and colour.
Since moving to Berlin in 2011, however, where he gained a Masters in Fine Art at the Universität der Künste, Behr’s work has moved away from this earlier reliance on geometry and towards a focus on negative space. Still working almost exclusively with found objects, still working spontaneously and organically, what shifted was an increasingly antagonistic relationship with his materials themselves (an urge toward breaking, ripping, shattering) as well as a new emphasis on both the perpetual incompletion of his practice and the site of the body in relation towards it. These developments can be seen to have been inspired by two figures central to Behr’s evolution, Gordon Matta-Clark and Kurt Schwitters. Not only following Schwitters proclivity towards assemblage, ephemera, found fragments and junk (as was the Dadaistic proclivity), it was his extraordinary Merzbau – Schwitters frankly unparalleled attempt to form a living sculptural artwork within and from his Hanover home (a project later instituted in in Lysaker, near Oslo, and in Elterwater, Cumbria) – that can be seen as most immediately influential on Behr. Rather than it simply being the combined precarity and enormity of the Merzbau that Behr aimed to emulate however, it can in fact be seen to be its innate imperfectness, Schwitters refusal to ever finish his masterpiece, his refusal to ever conclude his search for new compositions that is key. For Behr, this is, today, perhaps the critical disposition: All his work is considered incomplete, all ready to be reassembled and reconstructed. All of it contains the rich, never-ending possibility of reformulation. The final composition of forms, shapes and colours thus merely acts as a resting point in a much larger process, the work always containing, for him at the very least, a sense of the rough draft, a notion that it is forever under construction. In a similar manner, Behr’s reverence for the work of Matta-Clark can be seen to emerge not simply through the importance of his deconstructivist aesthetic, his pioneering manner of dissecting and dismembering architectural space (which is of course hugely significant in Behr’s practice), but rather via the importance that Matta-Clark placed on the physical body within his work. Often alluding towards Matta-Clark’s final piece, Circus—The Caribbean Orange produced at the the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1978, this work, as with all of his so-called “anarchitecture”, was meant to be physically encountered, to be walked through and engaged with, to be corporeally experienced and felt. Whilst Matta-Clark’s films and photos are thus hugely significant (and tell us much about his own thought processes and influences), they fail to capture the radically disconcerting nature of his work, the way his actions attacked not just the norms of architecture but our very senses. For Behr, this attempt to distort perspectives, to transform both site and material, is crucial. He wants his work to provoke us, to initiate moments of discomfort and contentment, moments of agitation and composure. He wants us to be in his work, rather than to simply look at it. And what thus becomes pivotal is the way his installations constantly modify both through his own agency as artist, as much as through the ever changing position of the viewer themselves, the viewer who enters and reworks it through their presence. What becomes crucial is the works status as always incomplete, non finito, its status as always in the subjunctive mood.
Text by Angela Stief published 2016 for the exhibition "Erst die gute Nachricht bitte"
Clemens Behr, who was born in 1985 in Koblenz and studied graphic design in Dortmund before moving to the UDK in Berlin, doesn't need much. Shaped by an intensive engagement with public space, equipped with a penchant for everyday materials like wood and cardboard, and a great deal of improvisational talent, he has, in recent years, cultivated a preference for DIY (Do-It-Yourself) strategies and has realized works around the globe, from Oslo to San Francisco to São Paulo. Flexibility, modesty bordering on needlessness, intuition, and the courage to appropriate and repurpose are the character traits that shape his artist profile.
At the core of Behr’s often site-specific works, which are located both in interior and exterior spaces, is the principle of collage and its spatial unfolding in assemblage. Using found objects, remnants of societal usage, street trash, objets trouvés, and generally repurposed materials, Clemens Behr creates large-scale installations, wall sculptures, and image works in the manner of a bricoleur. Behr’s "working with whatever-is-at-hand," as Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the undetermined technique of bricolage, is due to improvisation and chance. The artist, who sees demolition sites as gold mines, has once compared himself to a free jazz musician, highlighting an approach to sampling that generates a new aesthetic syntax from existing modules and objects, which he breaks down into their individual components, and unfolds in the here and now: “take and link what’s there.”
Clemens Behr’s abstract geometric spatial structures, made from newly decoded materials, which are often ephemeral and short-lived and rely on intuitive decisions, are in the tradition of Dadaist and Cubist imagery and recall Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, the apartment transformed into a work of art. It is likely only an unfortunate historical circumstance that the Merzbau was destroyed during World War II by an air raid. However, it is no accident but a conscious decision that Clemens Behr prefers deconstruction as a principle of construction and the process-oriented approach of conservation and a focus on eternity.