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WORD UP The methodology of misunderstanding in the work of

Michael Riedel, language-mangler and current art-world rave

Text: Sameer Reddy

The moDeRN momeNT is char-acterised by a cacophony of diverse languages and expres-sions, but michael Riedel’s prac-tice suggests that he’s mastered the art of translation. Since grad-uating from the Städelschule in 2000, the 39-year-old, Frankfurt-based artist has been articulat-ing a deadpan investigation into the ways different phenomenal systems work – reinterpreting music, film, art exhibitions, and internet content to create paral-lel worlds with unique potentials. his aesthetic dialect seems dry, but look more closely, and its sur-real dimension is revealed, along with a playful approach. “There’s always a shift when you’re doing a translation,” he says. “The more misunderstandings the better.” It would be a stretch to equate his efforts with the fantastical tone of lewis Carroll, but the end re-sult is as transportive as Alice’s adventures, travelling through a perceptual looking glass to ar-rive in a wonderland which un-dermines basic assumptions about reality.

In June this year, the Schirn kunsthalle will open the first mu-seum survey of Riedel’s work. his initial output established his conceptual interests in a strange terrain which manages to simul-taneously problematise “the real” and “the virtual”. Two notable works include “Gert & Georg (Gil-bert & George)”, in which Riedel hired two artists to shadow Gil-

bert and George at their Frankfurt opening in 2002, mimicking their every movement, and “NoSNho” at Galerie michael Neff in 2004, which consisted of a recreated local nightclub, Robert-Johnson, literally turned upside down. Visitors acted out lionel Richie’s 1986 pop hit by dancing on the ceiling to a soundtrack recorded during a night spent in the original club. It doesn’t get more Alice In Wonderland than that.

Describing some of his early motivations for embracing trans-lation, Riedel says, “When you start as an artist there are all these judgements. People are telling you, ‘this has already been done, this isn’t new’ and at some point you’re thinking, ‘Why am I doing it, I’m not here to be the idiot who is judged all the time for what he’s doing.’ People can’t really judge what you’re doing if you’re repro-ducing things. In a way it’s not judgeable by critics. It provides a protection.”

Riedel has attracted attention for his 2D work as well. For a 2011 exhibition at David Zwirner, Rie-del culled information about him-self from the internet, extracting information and text from web-sites that mention his work, and then incorporating the informa-tion into 22 large canvases, over-laid with large coloured dots. The canvases, which resembled a kind of mechanical diagram, were hung on floor-to-ceiling wall-paper composed of text from the

gallery’s website. The resulting effect transmuted the self-ref-erential source material into an architectural form, containing the viewer within a recombinant matrix of visual language.

Discussing Riedel’s body of work, museum curator matthias Ulrich says, “michael’s idea of creating forms is of a machine or system that produces the art, and as the artist, he just makes decisions about whether the out-put is the right one or not. There is a chain of positions that create the work as such, but after that comes another object or work, so the process in his work is also to be seen as a variation of a start-ing point. he shows everything, how the work is produced. It’s to-tally transparent. It’s all obvious, all there.”

That might sound extremely Warholian, but on the surface Riedel has little in common with Warhol or the generation of post-Warholian art stars who have come to dominate the pop cultural conversation. Warhol’s degraded silkscreens, along with much of the morbidly sexy work that was celebrated in the Noughties, ex-ude a decadent, manufactured glamour, in stark contrast to Rie-del’s fragmented, aloof visual lan-guage. But Riedel’s process, if not his results, echoes Warhol’s in the obsession with translation. Not as a means of reconstituting some-one else’s expression, but as an end in itself containing a proprie-tary set of meanings. Although his methodology and materials aren’t flashy, it could be argued that Rie-del is translating “pop art” into a new format, one that engages with common pop issues like context, reproduction and sampling, with-out gratifying our appetite for con-ventional visual pleasures.

knowing from where Riedel derives his source material adds to the experience of his work, but his rigorous, graphical cre-ations, often created with cheap

materials, stand on their own, just as Warhol’s cheap, smudgy silkscreens of Studio 54 habitués live out a distinct existence from their human referents. Both de-construct the aura of the artist, while expressing an ambivalence about the value placed on mate-rial artefacts.

The similarity between the art-ists is perhaps best articulated through Riedel’s own words. he says, “I like when things are getting produced automatically… invent-ing a system, which is then do-ing the art for me, so I can be the spectator of the art going on in the system. I still believe in authorship but there’s a shift. I’m inventing an artist who is doing art and I can look at him and evaluate it.”

Andy couldn’t have said it bet-ter himself.

mIChAel RIeDel, Kunste Zur Texte,

June 15 – September 9 2012. www.schirn.de

left page: michael Riedel during the installation of his 2011 solo show “The quick brown fox

jumps over the lazy dog” at David Zwirner, New York. Photo by Jason Schmidt.

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

Clockwise from top: installation view of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”

at David Zwirner, New York, 2011. Vier Vorschläge zur Veränderung von Modern, 2008.

Installation view of “Stutter”, Tate modern, london, 2009 (left: No. 14, right: No. 3). Untitled

(Michael S. Riedel), 1997. Photography. Installation view of “Neo” at David Zwirner, New York,

2005. All images courtesy michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © michael Riedel.