My Night Is Your Day
On the large wall map of the world at Karriere Bar, the earth is defined by vertical light tubes which, by getting brighter as the sun’s position changes relative to the earth, track its diurnal rotation. This means that in the early hours you will be able to see dawn approaching and on afternoons when time seems to stand still, you will see that it is indeed progressing. Johannes Wohnseifer’s works are hard to pin down since they often take their cue from the context in which they are set. This is also the case with My Night Is Your Day whose key elements, in response to the fact that Jeppe Hein often uses light and movement in his works, are light and movement. Adopting other artistic idioms enables Wohnseifer to study them, criticize them, express his admiration for them, reinvigorate them and make them his own. As was the case in the performance Backworlds/Forworlds, staged at a museum in Germany in 1998 with the skater pioneer Mark Gonzales. Here Wohnseifer had Gonzales skating in the middle of a composed display of minimalist objects, Lawrence Weiner’s textual sculptures and Andy Warhol’s silk prints of criminal mugshots. Pieces that all involve movement and are informed by ideas about protest and critique. In another context Wohnseifer has made a museum style exhibition of older institution-critical works juxtaposed with the trainers he developed in collaboration with Adidas. In both instances, Wohnseifer adds a completely new dimension to debates about critical interaction, innovation, freedom and – again – movement. Involving light and movement, Jeppe Hein’s work harks back to the 1960s kinetic art and Pop Art delvings into the dynamics between viewer and artwork. Delvings that were driven by ideas of freedom and ironic-critical play using commercial type images. My Night Is Your Day continues to conjure with these ideas by reflecting on geographical freedom of movement and globalization. Thus does My Night Is Your Day broaden out the discussion about how 1960s ideas of protest, freedom and the dissolution of all restrictions actually ended. (NH)
Johannes Wohnseifer, born 1967, Germany