THE BORDERLINE DIFFERENCE
Works by Darko Fritz

Inka Schube


Darko Fritz's objects, installations and pictures are generated in a time-space laboratory. The chemicals in his experiments are codes and media. But the philosophers' stone, the perfect form that replaces reality, is a dream of the distant past. This alchemist has no illusions. Purification processes are always incomplete. The alternative is self-description: presenting delusion as delusion, the archaic ritual of confirming failure as the safest of all possibilities.

Fritz's works are shaped from the difference between the slowness of the body and the technological acceleration of time. They are mimetic investigations of semiotic systems and communication structures which influence culture. The underlying visual artefacts are rooted in art history, heraldic images of war, and binary codes. It is from these that Fritz formes networks to investigate the evolution of communication structures. He transports one element into another, combines, assembles and changes media. His works negotiate the relationship between surface and depth. His interest lies, not in deciphering the code, but in its permanent self-programming when changing from one medium to another. In his earlier works Fritz used sculptural methods: the same code appeared in stone, in metal plate, in flower bed, on paper and photographic surfaces. The information changes as a result of the codes they carry. The form is characterized by its external limit, its surface, which defines the difference between internal and external qualities. The haptic sensuality of the material breaks against the technoidheraldic structure which penetrates its surface as an ornament, a relief.

In Fritz's recent works this process is more abstract. History is conceived as a corpus where the various depths are interconnected in time and space. The construction of a communicative interaction between the different semiotic systems (the artistic and the technoid) integrates the observer (reflected in the ceiling mirror or the video). He thus exposes himself to self-description and becomes part of the system. Observation is presented as self-observation. The observer consciously lives the difference between his own body and its media image. This is not delusion, it is not simulation, it is mimesis: the ritual description of the denoted and denotation. In essence this is a theory of the evolution of communication which demonstrates differentiation and infers questions about the origin of structural complexity: "Once continuous... communication has been secured, how does such great structural complexity develop whether in many historical societies, or in modern global society?"[1]

Repeatedly working over one and the same question is a well-known psychoanalytic technique. It is time economy which helps create connections between the past and the future. The acceleration of history is subjected to the natural slowness of the body: within the context of universal tempo, self-organized spaces assert themselves by tolerating differences without forming hierarchies.


[1] Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main 1995, p.342

published at End of the Message - works 1995 - 1996, editor Darko Fritz, ex pose verlag Hansgert Lambers, Berlin, 1996



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