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2007 Fall

Kris Martin: From One Endpoint to Another

Christopher Y. Lew

Kris Martin smashes the sculpture Vase, 2005, Chinese porcelain, glue, h 225cm. Collection Wilhelm and Gabi Schürmann, Herzogenrath. Photograph Ulrike Baumgart, courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.

Kris Martin smashes the sculpture Vase, 2005, Chinese porcelain, glue, h 225cm. Collection Wilhelm and Gabi Schürmann, Herzogenrath. Photograph Ulrike Baumgart, courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.

Kris Martin smashes the sculpture Vase, 2005, Chinese porcelain, glue, h 225cm. Collection Wilhelm and Gabi Schürmann, Herzogenrath. Photograph Ulrike Baumgart, courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.

P.S.1 Curatorial Assistant Christopher Y. Lew connects the dots in Kris Martin’s artistic practice.

There are beginnings and endings, and for Kris Martin the end is a seed to a new beginning. For his End-point series, the Bel­gian artist collages the final period from major works of literature and other books onto a blank page. It is only accompanied by the title and author written along the lower margin. A simple act that produces an even simpler im­age, the result is nevertheless profound—the distillation of entire narrative worlds into a dot, a daring suggestion that literature culminates into a single, equivalent point. Focusing on Martin’s selection of books that investigate death, the collages gain added meaning and resonances, bearing the weight of not just the conclusion of a story, but of other finali­ties, those of life and culture.

Included in the series is The Diary of a Young Girl (A. Frank), the collage from Anne Frank’s famous record of her adolescent life during World War II. Frank and her family hid with other Jews in the attic of an Amsterdam office for over two years before being found and ultimately murdered by the Germans. While much of her diary chronicles the daily dramas of the cramp quarters, the pressure of war and fear of discovery was suffocating. On January 13, 1943, Frank wrote, “All we can do is wait, as calmly as possible, for it to end. Jews and Christians alike are wait­ing, the whole world is waiting, and many are waiting for death.”

With just a point at the center of a page, Martin’s notion of death is not a ferryman pol­ing across the river or a demon rising from the darkness, but a colder, abstract depiction. One reaches a point and it is over—turn the page and there is simply nothing.

Martin employs a similar page-turning device in ET TU, his 2006 work that revolves around a six-ton printing press. While not in­cluded in his P.S.1 exhibition, the idea of final­ity pervades it as well as featured works like Vase and Still Alive. Used by the Belgian pub­lisher Imschoot for 40 years, Martin ran a final job through the press to create a single page with the work’s title, which is better known as Caesar’s final words before his death on the Ides of March. Presenting both page and printer, Martin gives a theatrical voice to the demise of a monumental machine.

In both End-points and ET TU, Martin finds the major chords for his art where oth­ers hear the closing coda. In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway’s passionate book on bullfighting that is included in Mar­tin’s series, the American writer describes the tradition as “an art that deals with death and death wipes it out.” Either the bull is brought down by the matador or the matador is gored by the bull. Much of Martin’s work hinges on the idea of art from death and the death of art. His Vase will slowly disintegrate with each subsequent smashing and recon­struction, 100 years will deteriorate in due time, the sound and motion of the Mandi III signboard will never announce more than its own futility. All things come to an end not with a bang or a whimper, and much less an ellipse, but with a period simply put.