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Dr. Beate Klompmaker

One and two and three and four, a hat, a stick, an umbrella.
The enigmatic experimental arrangements by Susanne Britz

In her photographs, pigment prints and installations, Susanne Britz presents everyday objects clearly and humorously, enigmatically and playfully, so that the viewer sometimes feels dizzy in the face of their presence. Susanne Britz, who studied fine art, philosophy and chemistry, is well versed in artistic and philosophical attitudes.
Like the artist Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985), she combines everyday objects with a sensual-surrealistic component in her visual works and art installations. Britz seems to create works playfully and effortlessly, taking a wilder approach than Oppenheim.
In her multi-part installations, Britz combines everyday objects in bright, vibrant colors from the household (laundry racks, cleaning utensils), tools from the studio (spirit level, folding rule, hammer) with objects from the world of play and sport (plastic figures, shuttlecocks, skis).
The process of her artistic creation passes through various stages: photographs, digitally overdrawn, become pigment prints. Fixed to magnetic strips and projection screens, spatial installations are created, which in turn become the starting point for new photographs. This transformation from one medium into the next, for example when drawing and photography interpenetrate, results in a transparent character that is translated when the motifs are plotted onto translucent films such as backlit or silkscreen film.
Britz has great faith in intuition, in the unconscious on the one hand, and a deep awareness of art history and conceptual issues on the other. While the Dadaists and Surrealists still focused on the question of the levels between image and text and what it means to use language, Britz’s “modules” bring together artifacts from various media on an equal footing to create an overall discursive picture. In her installation Meta’s Labor, for example, Britz calls the projection screen, the wallpaper table, the lamp and the bouncy ball a “basic module”.
One strategy in her artistic work is that she creates her own reference system: absurd formulas that contradict all logic, with which she digitally overdraws photos: Arrows, numbers and freely drawn scales give her “pictorial experimental arrangements”, photos and pigment prints their own system of reference. This seems to express a spirit of resistance against any kind of experimental arrangement and against any kind of traditional, believed science.

Meta’s laboratory
While in the original sense the studio is a production site for art, the installation Meta’s Labor appears more like a modern alchemist’s kitchen with consumer articles that carry their promises within them. The artist deliberately uses the term meta ambiguously: on the one hand with an obvious connection to metaphysics, on the other with a biographical reference, as it is the name of her grandmother.
Britz says that she refers to “subjective basic artistic research” and develops her own concepts for all her exhibition venues, which also incorporate the inventory of the exhibition space, such as coat racks and hangers. Her objects and installations, which are reminiscent of a Gesamtkunstwerk in character, can be experienced by the viewer as open works of art.
Analogous to the myth of the “artist’s studio”, her laboratory situations are linked to the creative process. The artist does not stand in front of her easel, but puts on protective goggles in her laboratory and uses a machine to produce pink and light blue cotton candy for the visitors, which she describes as clouds. This transformation makes clear the act of constant transformation in which Britz refuses to adopt unambiguous male, female or emancipatory attitudes.
Susanne Britz, who was awarded the “Junger Westen” art prize (2009) and the “Losito Art Prize” (2016) for her photographs on the subject of “Integration”, turns things upside down without further ado.

Laundry rack versus bottle dryer
Susanne Britz’s three-dimensional work also appears to be a sabotage of our sign system and understanding of how things are usually used.
Their use of tumble dryers refers to the Bottle Dryer (1914) by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). This work was the first readymade in which an industrially mass-produced object was declared to be art. Britz, however, does not present the object as a solitaire, but presents a complex arrangement in which the clothes horse is hung upside down and combined with other objects. By balancing objects on a rope, the artist creates unstable states of suspension. Detached from their original purpose, they become ambiguously charged through the arrangement, combination and type of attachment.
In her “urban biotic project” (2006), Britz uses rotary clothes dryers for the first time. Eight different spiders stand in a Neukölln courtyard, each in a paddling pool filled with water. In order to hang up laundry to dry, visitors have to step into these basins to feel the moisture on their feet. These inversions are a reference to the tradition of the absurd. The scenario is irritating and raises questions. Here the proximity to philosophy becomes clear. Her artistic process is reminiscent of “thinking without railings” as Hannah Arendt describes it – as thinking that is not secure and is a risk. This is the only way to explain her playful installations and ambiguous experimental arrangements, which are based on her own aesthetics and perception. With Britz’s inner-pictorial logic, which is characterized by both wild thinking and an intuitive, childlike creative urge, every detail in her artistic work takes on a special charge.

Text from catalog „SUSANNE BRITZ, EIN HUT, EIN STOCK, EIN REGENSCHIRM“, edition timpani, 2019

BETWEEN OBJECTS AND MEDIA

The work of last year’s winner of the art prize „Junger Westen“, Susanne Britz, functions at the intersection of photography, drawing, installation and sculptural elements.

Susanne Britz creates proliferating associative networks with drawings, postcards, overpainted prints, everyday objects such as plastic water pistols, hair curlers and colorful clotheslines, which creep from the wall into the room. The starting point for her work is often the drawing, in which an idea is initially provided form, so that in the following steps it can be thoroughly developed and played out in a wide range of colors. During this process, sculptural forms occasionally emerge; they seem to become independent and proceed through a three-dimensional metamorphosis in the room. Reality becomes a freely accessible physical design parameter which is appropriated and imbued with individual interpretations. In some photos, text appears in the form of comments, like diary sketches, accompanied by colorful lines which create and show a new unfamiliar relationships between the objects. Cryptic systems of enumeration seem to reference secret formulas which allow reality to be categorized. In this context, the individual piece functions as a sort of platform, from which one can venture an associative leap to a further node of meaning and possible perceptions. Complexity and diversity, recognized foundations of all of life’s interconnections, are made visually perceivable certainties through the looping and connecting of various levels of form and meaning.

“For me, drawing means to formulate”, Susanne Britz says, “and thereby to connect the real with the virtual, the inner- with the outer-space.” This is also achieved by the viewer who engages with the dense interplay of interconnections and rather than seek concrete meaning, strives to explore the space between the elements.

Dr. Uwe Schramm, speech at Susanne Britz’s opening in the Kunsthaus Essen, 2010
Excerpt from catalog „punktlandung – Susanne Britz“, Blurb, 2015

FORMULADRAWING

Various complementary analog and digital strategies flow together in Susanne Britz’s work, helping to inform the development of her unique interpretation of the picture plane, integrating graphic, but also painterly imagery, as well as installations.
Susanne Britz adds graphical layers over digital photos in her digital works. In this way, new levels of meaning emerge through a sort of digital palimpsest-process.
The drawings are not created with a pencil or pen, but rather with a computer mouse; the medium is not paper, rather a digital photograph. By means of the drawing,
Britz analyses the digital photo, which often depicts a type of experimental set-up, thereby taking into account the physical laws inherent to the experiment.
These experimental set-ups are comprised of still lifes constructed by the artist as well as scenes observed from everyday life which she compresses and secures in the form of an image with a camera. These images are imbued with a sense of everyday artificiality, revealed both in the arrangement and the utilized objects which reflect our technologized leisure- and trash-culture.
The drawn lines analyze, categorize, ask questions, and paraphrase the photographically fixed experimental setup. The line appears irregular, agitated – as if drawn by an unpracticed child’s hand. This quality can be traced back to the fact that a computer mouse was used as the drawing implement rather than a graphics tablet. The mouse does not allow exact, clean lines. Yet this superficial shortcoming is part of the artistic strategy. The waiving of perfection is a part of the paraphrasing and emphasizes the impact of simple, elemental pictorial processes. This can be understood as an expression of freedom while engaging technical processes. The lines create parallels, circles and arrows, but also more complex three-dimensional forms. One gets the impression that Britz conceives the image as a room, in which she defines flow directions and makes these visible for the viewer. This also corresponds with the artist’s description, which compares the form of the drawing at the computer with a type of blind drawing, where the eye glides through the digital representation of the room while the mouse simultaneously follows along, nearly seismographically, as a reflex. Britz’s layered drawings create new pictorial dimensions in which the laws of physics seem to be rewritten. References are made, but remain cryptic and hence unclear. Thus the interpretation of the images is allowed a degree of freedom; the works that Britz creates are consequently invested with a structure enabling open-ended engagement. The drawings also possess a significant painterly quality due to the colorful content of the photographs and the often equally colorful layered drawings. Colors inherent to the photograph are picked up by the mouse and further developed. In this way it becomes clear that the photograph is now conceived as a drawing, and its development continues in this context.

Occasionally the strong colors of the lines also remind the viewer of spatial markings. The concept of categorization and marking is again asserted through the choice of pictorial elements such as numbers and letters. The language of scientific formulas is referenced in fragmentary form, thereby suggesting that the fundamental scenario is represented as an experimental setup with unknown exterior dimensions.

Elements hang, stand, lie or straddle the pictorial space. The drawing emerges as a unique, digitally inscribed set of instructions. This quality is also evident in Susanne Britz’s installations. These remind the viewer of drawings, creeping into the room and once having assumed spatial form, expressing the laborious processes which did not find enough space in the drawings. The formulistic drawings lead the view, carry one along, but then alter the path since no formula exists that can or tries to explain the drawing. It is within this void that a philosophical perspective of the objects placed in the drawing emerges within Britz’s work.

Dr. Florian Schaper
Excerpt from catalog „punktlandung – Susanne Britz“, Blurb, 2015

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