Mic Enneper 'The Studio'    Oct 19 - Dec 1, 2001

This artist's projects are generally conceived for a limited time and a specific exhibition site. Dismantling at the close of an exhibition is here tantamount to destroying the work. The uncompromising procedure reveals its focus. Enneper's in-situ pieces are precisely constructed architecture that works within a defined spatial situation and from it draws its identity. From the point of view of museum practice and the museum brief of conservation, this artistic concept must seem at first glance like a position of refusal, informed by a will to absolute perfection. But a closer look reveals an archival trait. All Enneper's projects are preceded by models, and fragments from works already destroyed enter new work cycles (Eismeer is a case in point).

The five present objects, made to a scale of 1:20, differ from earlier models in that they are not intended for later translation into real terms. These are variations of the architectural basics of Enneper's studio - the ground plan, window openings, the volume of individual rooms. From these parameters, architectural objects are generated that refer to the studio as their point of departure but also transcend it. The layout of a system of corridors is based on the real window and door openings of the studio, but there is no real corridor counterpart. Concrete pipes projecting over the "studio", transforming it into part of an imaginary industrial plant; or machine parts connected to the architecture with cables - Enneper plays wittingly with the boundaries between a building existing in reality and the materialisation of a utopian architecture existing only in the mind.

If his projects realised to date - whether to be entered by the gallery visitor or only viewed from outside - were made as autonomous statements with no basis in found structures, the works we show now deviate from his previous practice. Yet, typical aspects of his oeuvre overall are unmistakably present. There is the fundamental need to construct and build, there is perfect craftmanship in the execution and a clarity in the aesthetics, and the eliciting of sensations of the incalculable, the uncanny and sometimes the ominous.

The chosen explicit subject of "the studio" is highly significant. For centuries, the artist's studio has represented a classic subject, the centre of his/her inspiration and creativity. The sense of energy created in the technical elements with their suggestion of movement, it would seem, finds its way through channels into the studio. The reverse path is just as conceivable. When Enneper lays the systems of "studio", "factory" and "machine" one over the other, the viewer discovers the artist's activity as a field of social production; at the same time it conveys an intimation of the intensity and the complex forces in the maker's own working process.