Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Anne Imhof
German; 21st-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
76%
Transparency III. 2022. Glass
Though I've never seen one, I have it on pretty good authority that Imhof's famous post-Relational Aesthetics spectacular non-performance things are kind of shitty. This found object was originally part of one of those charades, I think, and that fact probably makes it aesthetically worse than it appears to be when it's simply leaning against the wall in the Stedelijk's permanent collection galleries. But under such conditions, it's actually pretty awesome. It flits between being a surface and a sculpture and an image and an obdurate thing in space, but instead of seeming evasive w/r/t medium, it manages instead to inflect each of these aspects with all of the others. You'll be reveling in its patinated pattern and suddenly catch a glimpse of yourself reflected, which (as reflections have done since the heyday of Minimalism) will at once send you into the object (as image) and push you outside of it (as object yourself), but then just before the resulting phenomenological conundra have piled up high enough to immure you for good, you notice the irregular edges of the mirror's surface and the ridged width of the rectangle, and the thing becomes an enclosed volume for you to walk around speculatively... and so on. (Bonus points for achieving this complexity as a readymade!) If these various modes of noticing in sequence struggle, in the final estimation, to move towards the sort of experiential synthesis that's necessary for great art, there's much pleasure to be gotten from riding out their waves. (TFS, 2026)