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Homage to the Hohner Family … and to the Accordion
Installation, 2003
Oil shale on paper, stacked, at the electrical switch box /
former boiler house
Geist Kohle Arbeit – Spirit/Mind Coal Work
Text by Andreas Mayer-Brennenstuhl, Honorary Professor, Fachhochschule für
Gestaltung (College of Design), Schwäbisch Hall
‘Geist Kohle Arbeit’ is the title of an exhibition in the former boiler
house of the Hohner mouth organ and accordion factory in Trossingen, which
includes Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb’s installation with local reference, ‘Homage
to the Hohner Family … and to the Accordion’.
The exhibition venue has a life of its own and conveys a sense of history.
The best way to respond to it as an artist is to live into it and to treat
it with respect. The current exhibition achieves this to a large extent.
Responding to a dominant environment is best done with small-scale, at
times almost unnoticeable details. Visitors are therefore called to search
for and track down hidden, unprepossessing aspects.
Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb’s ‘Hohner’ installation refers to technical remains
in the factory’s transformer station, i.e. the electrical switch boxes. In
preparation for her design, the artist studied systems of transformation,
albeit in her very own specific way, questioning the problem of time, of
transience. Up till now, Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb has mostly worked with
schist and oil shale, geological materials which contain a particularly
large number of fossils – information from the dawn of creation, so to
speak. Here, the artist created her own fossils, first exploring the
history of the place and then ‘fossilizing’ the historic documents she
found, using a paste of shale she made herself. The things she found during
her ventures into the factory interior also represent interesting documents
of transience and of the transitory meaning of the term ‘work’. The items
shown here document the work ethos applied in a family enterprise at the
beginning of the industrial revolution. Perhaps some visitors to this
exhibition knew the Hohner factory in earlier times, maybe even from their
own experience, and would certainly confirm that working then was a
different experience – positively or negatively – from what it is today.
Today’s notion of work describes a form of alienation from a meaningful,
productive activity not only on the assembly line, but also at management
level – in an automatic obedience to anonymous ‘inherent necessities’ in
the wake of the magic word ‘shareholder value’. This is a central cause of
today’s cultural crisis. The fact that our awareness of and thinking about
the subject of labour is the key to a humane organization of the world of
employment is expressed in the exhibition title ‘Spirit/Mind Coal Work’.
The shift lever for the transformation of present set-ups is not made of
metal, but consists of a ‘revolution in mindset’. It is in our minds that
we can change the meaning of work to bring about changes towards more
humanity in our working environments and people’s social circumstances.
With the necessary artistic openness Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb has searched for
and registered traces of past working environments and offers us a space
for thought and experience, which reveals our definition of work as
historically established and therefore relative, criticisable and needing
change.
Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb’s strategy is to point out developments from the
past, their results and remains, opening our eyes to possibilities,
potentials and the certainty that things could be different. Art cannot and
is not obliged to do more than that. Everything else should follow quite
naturally, even – possibly – the suggested transformation.