Theodor Barth D'abord, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent… I met Dag Erik Elgin for the first time in a coffe-shop, at the West-end of Oslo. We basically were commissioned by the Institute of Social Hypocrisy to meet and see what happened (at the Institute's expense). We decided we'd co-write a short piece to be later included in a larger essay on the twilight-zone between art and design, while waiting for signals from Paris. The background for this piece It turned out that we had a number of shared references, and an interest for how intention reveals itself in time as the imprint of time (and therefore quite unpredictably). The imprint of time in monotype, the impressions of time as intention. A process of recording and replaying: the body is the world's antenna, Sloterdijk wrote many years back. It was on the background of discussions such as these that Dag Erik Elgin's work on provenance – and the trail of reminiscences secured and salvaged during a recent exhibit in Berlin – which one may understand as ballistic, rather than archival. Since I see myself rather as a profiler, Dag Erik Elgin managed to reach me as a colleague specialised in the same field. The focus of our dialogue therefore became his work on the provenance of Kandinsky's Improvisation no. 10. The trail of reminiscences from Berlin constituted a trail of contamination initiated by contact: his enterprise of trailing provenance, using a technique of ballistic typography, caught the attention of his still living subject, and started to track him down with a silencer. This episode, that unfolded behind the scenes of a Berlin newspaper, served in retrospective to reveal an aspect of Dag Erik Elgins technique: the use of the ballistic method to trail the provenance of Improvisation no. 10 – featuring Bauhaus (1927, the Weimar Republic), Antiqua (1937, the Reich) and Bodoni (1944, Switzerland) – eventually teased out that Beyeler's dealings with Nazi art-brokers, would likely be burried with him. |
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