Tiefgaragen (In Focus)

Sebastian Stumpf’s interventions violate conventional codes of behavior in public spaces – climbing small trees along a promenade or jumping from a bridge – and are essentially simple. The body tests its own physical processes as well as the laws of physics themselves by means of a direct experience, the same way a child might jump from the same step over and over again.

Thoughts

Thoughts

If the human body was once considered ‘the measure of all things’, in the modern age it has come to be perceived as the last place for authentic experience. After the image and the art of representation were plunged into crisis in the 1960s and 1970s artists like Valie Export, Bas Jan Ader and Bruce Nauman discovered the experience of their own bodies as one of the few remaining truths.

The body became a living image as well as a medium to be exploited, while a second medium was required to record the traces of this experience – the camera (photography or video).

If we look at the works of Sebastian Stumpf we find this same interplay between performance and the recording of performance, between the execution of a physical act and the documentation of it by means of a camera.

The artist operates in two distinct realms: in the empty spaces of contemporary art institutions and in urban settings with their preexisting orders. Stumpf’s appearance before the camera strikes the viewer as both artistic and subversive.

Learn more about Sebastian Stumpf from the gallery Thomas Fischer or Annex 14.

Text by Florian Ebner. Read full text: English / Deutsch

Information

Information

This piece is presented as part of In Focus, a monthly series showcasing new video art that caught our eyes, made us think, or that we simply couldn’t forget.

Tiefgaragen, 2008
Sebastian Stumpf
Video, 12:00 min