Grosser
SPOONS
unglazed porcelain feels like sandpaper on the skin. when you polish it, you can make it feel almost like … (think of anything). you will be able to grasp how it feels like to touch the rough underside of a plate with your tongue when it is standing on the table, unglazed. can you imagine what it would be like to eat from such spoons?
the red dust fell to the ground. when someone opens the door too quickly it might be raised and dispersed into the space. perhaps it will settle on your dish or in your glass of wine. we should move around carefully.
Commensurate: a corresponding degree or amount of something.
Commensality: the act of eating together.
Commensurate Commensality evolved through an almost unspoken process of making. We started with five hand-carved wooden spoons, then translated them into porcelain by molding them. An individual form thus gradually became part of a shared system – a variation tied to a limited set of origins.
For the exhibition, the spoons were stuck into holes that we had drilled in the walls. Dust from the drilling was left on the floor, waiting for traces to be left behind by the audience and documenting their performative movements across the room.
The spoons were no longer merely objects to be looked at. They were not merely the result of a transformative process either. They were now agents, offering small amounts of food to those attending. They activated the space, introducing a common rhythm of taking a spoon, holding it, and consuming the food it offered.
Eating in public is an awkward thing. Eating food from a spoon attached to a wall is even more irritating. To lick it clean and return it to its place in the wall: where does this action stop being part of an artwork and starts to become something else? There is also a problem of scale: the total amount of food placed on all the spoons in the installation equalled just a regular helping for a single person. How many spoons would one need to eat from before it would be considered excessive? How many is too many?
The traces on the floor suggest excessive movement, with people strolling around the space, chatting and eating – being part of an artwork that is both a situation and its activation. A situation that gained visibility by being shared. It invited people to gather, to question common patterns of consumption and to test new forms of collectiveness and exchange.
To be spoon-fed means having someone else decide what you consume. What you eat, how much you eat and even how you behave in a group is shaped by the setting and the scenario it creates. We, as artists, also experience a form of being “spoon-fed”, working with limited resources and an unstable income within systems that both support and constrain production. Autonomy and dependence are just two sides of one coin.
Commensurate Commensality is a collaborative work consisting of 100 individually carved spoons and an edition of 16 sets of 5 porcelain spoons each. It is a work with its own temporality, shifting from exhibition to gathering to edition.
Text Vanessa Joan Muller, Jennifer Posny, Alma Moos Nunez, Elham Hadian, Cosma Grosser
Project Jennifer Posny, Alma Moos Nunez, Elham Hadian, Cosma Grosser
as soon
as I start thinking about itAufnahmen von Wasser in Bewegung werden auf Standbilder projiziert. Bewegung und Stillstand.
Pair
Attempts of captivating a moving image
Attemps of entering a moving image
Cosma Grosser Film, Videoinstallation
Performance by Maio Fangping
photo: esel Lorenz Seidler
Concrete Film
The frames of the built body show an artificial landscape isolated from its surroundings. The view of the architecture is focused on individual components, details come to the fore. A facade is cut and altered. After a certain time, perspectives of the filmed object reveal the surroundings through their reflection and framing; in this sense, a connection between the extiroir and the facade is created, focusing on the merging of the non-artifical and the built structures.
Matter in Place
Composing Material and place, artificial landscapes and the nature of their structure. Every tool leaves it's traces, every stone has its composition. Each copy/removal/ impression/recording has its own surface, which is revealed through its particular textures. Time and place are recomposed through the manipulation of certain fragments. The surface detaches itself from it's surrounding and is determined by the overlapping of the textures as well as the materiality.
Anna Theresa Pöll, objects
Cosma Grosser videoinstallations
Composing Material and place, artificial landscapes and the nature of their structure. Every tool leaves it's traces, every stone has its composition. Each copy/removal/ impression/recording has its own surface, which is revealed through its particular textures. Time and place are recomposed through the manipulation of certain fragments. The surface detaches itself from it's surrounding and is determined by the overlapping of the textures as well as the materiality.Composing Material and place, artificial landscapes and the nature of their structure. Every tool leaves it's traces, every stone has its composition. Each copy/removal/ impression/recording has its own surface, which is revealed through its particular textures. Time and place are recomposed through the manipulation of certain fragments. The surface detaches itself from it's surrounding and is determined by the overlapping of the textures as well as the materiality.