Kudielka/Wimberley, „Von A nach B“, Installative Performance
Photography: Martin Sigmund
From A to B was commissioned by TanzSzene BW e.V. and presented as part of the festival sechsunddreisigtausend (‘thirtysixthousand’) at the Württembergischer Kunstverein.
An audience is invited to sign a contract as a performer and negotiate a fee to make the journey from A to B, the shortest and most direct route through the exhibition space. The artist Marcus Bergmann prepared canapes. No other entertainment was provided.
The journey from A to B covered a distance of 13 meters, along a red carpet between two large doors (point A and point B). Participants were free to perform the act as they wished, but if they strayed from the carpet their contract would be considered void. Performers received their fees at a second desk, located just beyond point B. A total of 2000 Euros was paid to over 100 individuals for 50 journeys. Fees ranged from waivers to 150 Euros.
The impossible theater
Meanwhile, in the large adjacent gallery space, we exhibited an email conversation with the theater author Wolfram Lotz, detailing an attempt to commission a new work for the festival. This was displayed alongside the invoice we asked Wolfram to submit for the time he committed to the project and for what was eventually an ‘unfruitful’ process with no ‘end-product’, or rather a process that did not culminate in a form of entertainment for an audience.
Notions of product, productivity and value
From A to B was simultaneously a bureaucratic, physical and artistic journey. As a pragmatic solution, it explored the discrepancy and inter-dependency of bureaucratic and artistic processes and the act of evaluating and measuring perceptions of artistic productivity. From A to B played with the expectations of an audience, production infrastructures and cooperating institutions, towards an artist and their work.
Reflecting on a process in which ideas were repeatedly confronted by personal, bureaucratic and logistical realities, we asked what happens when our audience is left to entertain themselves? The result was a spontaneous evening of performance and discussion, juxtaposing conception, collaboration, self-organisation, self-valuation, comparison and justification.
