Texts
Michael Riedel is known as the system analyst of art, among other things. He has made the art system his system of art. At the core of his work is repetition, the basic principle of any functioning system. However, his primary interest is not duplication, that is, the result of repetition, but translation from one to the next, and the changes and differences that are created by translation.
Riedels Arbeit besteht zu weiten Teilen darin, Prozesse zu erdenken, welche die vorgefundenen Objekte, Bilder, Texte oder Laute einer ergebnisoffenen Transformation und formalen wie inhaltlichen Verselbständigung anheimgeben.
Aus Texten und Schriftbildern generiert er autonome Formen, Muster und Strukturen, die er auf Bildträger aller Art, auf Leinwände, Plakate, Ausstellungswände, ja ganze Räume oder Gebäudetrakte aufbringt.
It is no longer about critique, about theory or about justified verdicts made from a level of reflection holding itself at an observer’s distance to the art establishment. Nor is it about specific phenomena. Instead, it is about performative self-contradiction and deconstruction retroacting on itself.
Riedel begins his painting process by producing a palette: This palette corresponds to the system that produces possibilities. His palette of 34 posters which, arranged in different variations, represent his Poster Paintings are print-outs of websites that have communicated about his art online.
Quarter- and semi-circles on the posters serve as structuring aids when assembling the multiple posters on the canvas while simultaneously visualising the moment announced by a little turning wheel on a computer screen when its operating system is ‘busy’, when the computer temporarily enters a state of non-function or locks up.
Eine Weiterführung der Poster Paintings sind die PowerPoint Paintings. Sie bilden Übergänge – oder auch Lücken – zwischen jeweils zwei existierenden Poster Paintings ab.
Damit hat Riedel zwar die Übergänge zwischen zwei Poster Paintings abgedeckt, aber zugleich neue Lücken zwischen den PowerPoint Paintings geschaffen, wodurch letztlich das Gemachte und das Nicht-Gemachte im Werk zusammenfällt.
Im Gegensatz zu den Poster Paintings, auf denen Kunstkritik zum Ausgangspunkt von Kunst wird, versteht Riedel die Wabenplatten eher als Infotafeln, bei denen er allerdings durch Layout und serielle Anordnung ebenso wie bei den Poster Paintings das Lesbare zugunsten des Bildhaften verschwinden lässt und die Informationen in den Zustand reiner Grafik versetzt, ja die Grafik als Event zelebriert.
The liberation of that which serves a purpose defines the elevation of graphic material to art material. For Michael Riedel, it is crucial that his designed advertising, informational, and communicative means, such as posters, invitations, publications, and PowerPoint presentations—as applied graphic arts—do not constitute art at first. Only when they are transformed into art material do they become a component of works of free art.
For his three-tiered exhibition series at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2013–15), he used multiple hours of sound recordings of the dismantling process of large museum shows. The resulting text produced by the software took the place of an exhibition and was presented in the form of a room-filling installation.
After a good thirteen years of collaboration, Michael Riedel draws a line under his work with his New York gallery and publishes their email correspondence spanning the period from 2004 to 2017 (preserved as EMLX files) in the form of banknotes.
In the face of technological and social perspectives such as driverless cars and block-chain formations, Michael Riedel’s oeuvre asks, not least, the question of artistic production in the circle of artificial intelligences.
The strategies Michael Riedel has developed to expand the creative subject by means of systemic self-development produce new perspectives on the relationship of art, creativity, and life.