Unfamiliar forms. David Fesl and Esther Kläs
Marc Navarro
In his essay on speech acts, John L. Austin established two categories: on the one hand, assertive or constative speech acts are those that serve to describe reality or give an opinion about a fact without refuting it, and on the other hand, performative or realizative speech acts are those that establish an action with their statements, as is the case with expressing a desire or will. If we stick to Austin’s classification, we will agree that I will watch with you, the title chosen for Esther Kläs and David Fesl’s exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Prague, is the enunciation of an action: the invitation to watch an event that is about to take place.
To elucidate the nature of this event, I will first consider the exhibition format chosen by Zuzana Blochová, the show’s curator, in relation to those speech acts John L. Austin classified as “performative”. I will watch with you is a two-person exhibition, and for that very reason, sustains an internal dialogue between the works of Kläs and Fesl.
From a curatorial perspective, two-person shows and group shows represent an opportunity to explore models of cohabitation. As such, this exhibition may serve as a sort of “area of exception” where certain rules do not apply and where one can even try to establish a new order among artists, chronologies and genealogies. But we cannot simply take for granted that these models of cohabitation are an exemplary civic action. The exhibition’s format also serves to orchestrate the contrary feeling: a profound state of estrangement in which artists and their works avoid contact with each other and, ultimately, refrain from being read as a unitary body.
In I will watch with you, Kläs and Fesl’s practices are presented compellingly. The artists do not renounce the particularities of their work in order to clarify their dialogue and naturalize it. Thus, by maintaining their corresponding positions, their works transit comfortably between the will to correspond to each other and a clear disagreement. In my opinion, this is one of the exhibition’s accomplishments and the reason why this dialogue – waiting for an event – is especially stimulating. In its determination to address two artistic positions without imposing an encounter, the exhibition questions the tendency to establish uniform interpretations and challenges the assumption that disagreement is an indicator that a conversation has been unsuccessful.
Here the exhibition adopts a dialogic structure without the intention of addressing a particular topic or informing an opinion on a given subject. Rather, the dialogue serves, firstly, as a dramaturgy of space, a strategy to consider distances and assign them a purpose; and secondly, as a departure point to explore the contradictory natures of artistic preferences, desire, and, in short, elective affinities.
Kläs and Fesl’s work certainly contributes to the success of this operation. Despite the discrepancies between their practices, both artists are concerned with the materiality of the sculptural object and the stories that materials contain and reject. Their works are equally ambiguous and elusive: we seem to recognize what we observe, but we rarely get confirmation. Some of the questions that the artists pose to us through their dialogue are: To what extent are we open to giving up our patterns of reading and seeing? To what extent are we willing to offer our perception without receiving a clear image in exchange?
Another similarity between the two artists is their concern for economy of gesture. By acknowledging the inner workings of their practices and what is essential to them, Kläs and Fesl give their works a presence. They both acknowledge that to a certain extent, their works must claim their own place, time, and way of being in the world. Barbara Hepworth once claimed that vision is not sight, but the perception of the mind, “a piercing of the superficial surfaces of material existence, that gives a work of art its own life and purpose”. I think of that perforated surface that Hepworth mentions as a split vision, two superimposed layers, which perhaps show through their holes not so much a final purpose but the vivifying coexistence of opposing ideas: what is built and what has been found, the unit and the replica, the organic and the mechanized. These opposing ideas are at work here and they inform our vision, our “perception of the mind”.
The works in the exhibition encompass ten years, starting with Kläs’s work titled Come closer from 2014 and ending with Fesl’s pieces, produced almost entirely in 2024, which respond most directly to the occasion given by the exhibition. The temporal arc drawn by those works poses questions and sheds light on the artists’ work methods.
As for Kläs’s, her works included in the exhibition invite us to wander around and map the space. On this occasion, she is only showing sculptures, but it is worth mentioning that her practice is not limited to a single discipline. Rather, it is an open investigation, attentive to the efficiency of the means used on each occasion and, most importantly, to the models of attention proposed by one or another artistic medium. In her works, Kläs puts into practice the ability to produce a state of confusion, to give one sculpture pictorial qualities and to make another define its volume as if it were the sum of strokes in a drawing. This lack of adherence to disciplinary boundaries pairs with the determination to suspend routinized notions of space. Her works are concerned with defining zones of confinement and exclusion, with ideas such as interiority and exteriority, firmness and instability – notions closely related to the transience of bodies in a broader sense. This includes both dance movements and non-choreographed gestures such as strolling or just taking a seat.
If we consider David Fesl’s practice in analogous terms, we will find a similar resistance to categories. If anything, his objects made from found fragments could be included in the prolific tradition of the poem-object, which Fesl has been methodically cultivating for years. The artistic use of object collection procedures such as those employed by Fesl can be traced back to the beginnings of the avant-garde. For example, Enduring Ornament (1913), Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s improvised wedding ring, is considered to be one of the first, if not the first, ready-made. Here we must also mention André Breton as the initiator of the poem-object, a term he coined. The surrealist writer composed his poems with organic materials, cut-outs, and small found objects, and claimed that such tangible words and sentences were inspired by dreams. Today, it is difficult to see Fesl’s objects from this perspective. Globalized markets and capitalist economies have entirely transformed our idea of the object and its suggestive capacity. The fragments from which Fesl patiently builds his works are therefore closer to a sudden awakening than to reverie. Although they possess a textual quality, their relevance lies not in giving them a new meaning, but rather in observing their dysfunctional nature and, in response, proposing ways of recomposing and repairing them. As precious and delicate as they are, no glass or case shields them, and precisely because of that, when they are shown they manage to transcend the Wunderkammer analogy – not only because by displaying them unprotected they become integrated into the sphere of the mundane, but because in doing so we realize that every single tiny piece that composes Fesl’s objects could exist in many other arrangements.
In a recent conversation, Esther Kläs mentioned that she tends to think about her sculptures as generic forms: each of them serves as the model for new ones. Each iteration is incorporated into its respective form family, which, in turn, defines larger groups of works. For her, form is the synthesis of a mental projection that follows pre-established patterns of form and function. One possible working example of such a method is Horizon (rot), a video piece from 2017. The artist documents herself describing a horizontal volume only with the movement of her arms and the translation of her body, almost as though molding the space around her.
We can identify in Fesl’s work a similar interest in presenting his objects as outputs of ongoing research, but in his case, the methodologies employed in the making of the object impose some particular constraints, in part because they are based on a combinatory system and because the form is barely planned before its execution. Objects only reveal their material constitution as they are being assembled and their different parts are combined.
As mentioned above, in my opinion, this method implies a different time frame for the formation of the artistic object. I am not referring here to production time, but to how the notions of “anticipation” and “deferral” contribute to the generation of form in Kläs and Fesl’s work.
But, going back to the exhibition’s title, I would like to propose that the strategies employed by the two artists to produce form – synthesis for Kläs, recombination for Fesl – are essential features of their practice. My impression is that both strategies propose their own dramaturgy of space and, in consequence, have different approaches to the body and performativity. To make my case, I will use a standard reference parameter in the study of sculpture and sculptural objects: scale.
Scale is, indeed, a significant factor in the exhibition, not just because the works are radically distinct in their dimensions, but also because in doing so they demand a direct experience. The scenic quality of such scale shifts is hardly reproducible, and one can only wonder as to the reason for combining such diverse scales. Knowing beforehand that their function is not to establish a hierarchy, I would rather lean towards the opposite task: to generate a labyrinthine effect. Such disorientation only results in the impossibility of obtaining a general view of the exhibition; a single picture would not serve to describe it.
While Esther Kläs’s sculptures – larger in scale – attract our bodies, Fesl’s objects concentrate our gaze. In Kläs’s sculptures, we must move around to understand the relation between their different elements and how they are constructed; by contrast, Fesl’s objects dissolve our presence. Kläs’s work has a certain responsive quality, recognizing and integrating the rest of the elements that comprise a given exhibition setting, whether they are considered artistic or not. But if we try to assign to the audience the role of improvised performers, then how Fesl conducts our bodies to observe his works is striking: we stand alone only a few centimeters away from the wall. It’s an intimate experience, a concentrated attention that annihilates other stimuli around us.
At the beginning of this text, I mentioned that group shows can be a way of convening a sense of strangeness. Although both Esther Kläs’s and David Fesl’s work is precisely aimed at restoring presences – the presence of a sculpture in transit from the artist’s studio to the exhibition space, the presence of a collection of discarded fragments and objects, or even our presence – it is comforting to confirm here that on certain occasions this restoration can’t be achieved without a certain degree of defamiliarization.
In my opinion, the title of the exhibition does not reflect a central event; rather, the event builds itself in the performativity of awaiting, observance, and attentiveness, and ultimately, in the appearance and disappearance of our corporeality.
Esther Kläs and David Fesl are invested in studying form at a time when this is regarded as a suspicious endeavor. It may seem that forms are in no way connected to our present, forms manifest no urgency, prove nothing; they exist beyond assertion.
Perhaps such disdain for form comes from the fact that trusting in shapes and forms has become a difficult and compromising task in our violently changing and shape-shifting times.
I can’t help but think of a short essay on shape in which painter Amy Sillman uses the notion of “shape impulse” to argue that the act of drawing, the urge to give shape, exists by default in a continuous present. At some point Sillman quotes Gertrude Stein: “A continuous present is a continuous present”.
As with Sillman’s shapes, the forms embodied in the work of Kläs and Fesl can only manifest themselves within our entire present, and this includes all its complexity and all its urgencies.
Reclaiming a space to add form, to reveal forms and invite them to coexist, certainly does not serve to establish a fact, nor does it contribute to establishing a forensic narrative about a given event. Even so, in our present time there is still a need to make space for form. With all its humbleness and indeterminacy, the addition of form in fact helps oppose the contrary tendency: to undo, to dismantle, to extract.
It’s important to acknowledge that form and shape are significant in their own way. Yes, they may be humble and indeterminate. They are not talkative, but there are so many things they can actually do: they conceal, reveal, touch, reject. And we can relate to every single thing they do just by looking around and watching: what we love, what bothers us, our joy and fears.
– Navarro, Marc. Prague: Center for Contemporary Arts, 2024 (I will watch with you accompanying essay).