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Arnim Bautz's CLIP, a supercollider of culture and craft, intends to collectively maneuver us from multi- to unimedia while John Cage spins in his grave.
By Eugene Robinson
There's a delicate balance struck and in the bluing expanse of light, cloth, and shadow, Arnim Bautz's dancer has become emblematic of his conceptually muscular sense of time, place, and space. You see, Bautz, head of production house CLIP (and self-described Universalist, integrated art worker, director, and video jockey), is pulling the most perfect post-modern hat trick of them all by collapsing multiple media into something dense and elementary. Something he's calling Gesamtkunstwerk or Universal Art.
"Well Wagner was on the same path," Bautz explains. "Or at least when people thought of his operas, they understood that they were combining poetry, music, pictorial art, dramatic art, and dance. We've added mechanics, software, video and the Internet and call it über-art." Talking to Bautz at his office in Berlin on tangerine-inspired inflatable chairs amidst the lava lamps and the accretion of much less fey bric-a-brac, it feels like nothing if not a salon. And Bautz, moving over to his bank of hardware - Apple PowerMac G4s, scanners, ProVTRs, mixing boards, Octopos DV Studio 1394s - has embraced his role with two hands and a sense of endless possibility, completely undaunted by the freedom that that limitless range implies.
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Indeed his mixmatching of Wagner and Madonna, Pat Boone and Diamanda Galas, or Janet Jackson and Bach occurs on a tableau that is designed, despite appearances, to be anything other than niche. With CLIP's development of a virtual Internet star and scheduled appearances at Expo2000 and Europe's biggest art fare called, fittingly enough, ART, Bautz's master plan moves multi- to unimedia and makes accessible what had previously been the purview of aesthetes and pointy-headed intellectuals. But with Bautz's installations also bowing at live events - part Rave, part exhibit - it seems quite clear that the strange animal of mass appeal is a much-desired pet project of his. |
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