Title A NATURAL HISTORY OF DEFAULT CONCEPTS
Year 2007
Material Bamboo, handles, plastic cups, photography
Size Variable
Location Bonner Kunstverein
The installation explores the fascination and tension of systematics and their misdirection. The work was originally conceived in 2007 for an exhibition with younger positions of conceptual art at Kunstverein Bonn. Surrounded by a seemingly archaic, seemingly ever-growing bamboo forest, the viewer encounters the photograph of a closed door and a collection of shiny, polished door handles. The story of a special building unfolds, the house that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna in 1925. The building appears as a design version of Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language. Here he developed the idea of an exact ideal language, as it is mainly used in science. The door handles in the house were also precisely planned custom-made products, which were later taken by the company FSB Franz Schneider Brakel and adapted to their own standards. These minimal changes seem very pragmatic, much like the way animal species adapt to their natural habitat over time.