Opening: February 3, 2000, 7.00 p.m.
February 4 – March 18, 2000
Daniel Pflumm (born in 1968) first showed his work in public within the context of the Berlin club resp. techno scene. In the beginning, he founded and ran the (far beyond the borders of Berlin) legendary Club Elektro with the DJs Mo and Klaus Kotai, and later the no less prominent Club Panasonic.
The fact that Pflumm more frequently appears within an art context is not only to be explained by a, for Berlin typical, interest in crossovers between various cultural scenes, but also because Pflumm deals with subjects which are becoming increasingly topical in the contemporary art discourse and, on a theoretical level, can be located within the range of visual culture.
With his work, Pflumm responds to the fact that perception has fundamentally changed in the 20th century. Due to the media comprising all social fields, our view has become two-dimensional. Visual codes in various different fields – advertising, fashion, but also art – can be deciphered without great efforts nowadays, as our visual memory has attained enormous dimensions.
Pflumm examines the visual conditions which match the pictorial stragegies of advertising campaigns. With his work, he interferes with advertising aesthetics of global corporations: In computer animations and video loops, the logos are dissected into their structural and formal components, rotating 3D-models of the logos turn into abstract symbols, they are veiled, pixeled, and included in a sequence of, partly his own, type faces and video clips of illuminated signs from the urban surroundings. These images are accompanied with his collegues´ brittle, electronic minimal music. Also the lightbox pieces cored and dissected logos, consequently creating a new quality of appearance. Reducing them to their sheer form and colour, however, does not affect their striking appeal. On the contrary: Pflumm´s minimalistic pieces of nonrepresentational coloured signs and visionary spaces demonstrate cool abstraction and great elegance.
Although it cannot be denied that advertising strategies are an integral part of Pflumm’s visual work, it would be a prejudice to regard him as one of those representatives in contemporary art who, with their work, act affirmatively with regards to the logics and functionality of the market. It is quite the opposite: Pflumm responds to that perceptible tendency of an increasing fixation on labels – in order to drain them of their content. This finally shows the absurdity of advertising slogans, the interchangeability of wishes and one’s own desires. However, Pflumm’s images themselves remain sexy – and this is very likely the irritating moment of his work.
