Born in 1975 in Nqutu, South Africa

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Mandla Reuter

Fourth Wall, 2008

electric cable, connection box, other materials, photograph

Fourth Wall consists of a heavy current connection taken from the electricity system of the city of Santa Fe, leading throughout the building and terminating with a connection box in an otherwise empty room. It carries voltage high enough to power e.g. a large theater, a dark ride, the Eiffel Tower or to provide a medium-sized city with electricity

On the one hand the work can be seen as a concrete elevation of the technical possibilities of the exhibition space, making any kind of theatrical apparatus feasible. On the other hand, seen as a sculptural work, which is meandering throughout the exhibition space and revealing its purpose at the end, it plays with the same mechanisms that are employed by entertainment industries.

In the early thirties only Hollywood is producing the kind of scenarios that equal Roxy’s fantastic landscape in anti-authenticity. Hollywood has developed a new dramatic formula  isolated human particles floating weightlessly through a magnetic stream of fabricated pleasure, occasionally colliding  that can match the artificiality of Radio City Music Hall and fill it with abstracted, formalized emotions of sufficient density. The production of the Dream Factory is nowhere more at home than in Roxy’s brainchild.  (Delirious New York, pp. 211)

Our reception of fictional work is by all means a conscious reception  the question of viewing a copy or a simulation  but we first do this in a process of a “willing suspension of disbelief” that was already observed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the end of the 19th century, and later illustrated by Umberto Eco with his picture/outline of “fictional conventions.” The rules of these conventions are simply elementary. One sits in a viewing room, the artificial sun of Radio City Music Hall dims, the stage lights beam, stories and images play back and forth that on the one hand one recognizes as staged  nobody jumps out of the audience to rescue the princess, nobody jumps on the stage to dance with the Rockettes  and so we accept this staging as “quasi real.” We respond emotionally to what happens and then subsequently discuss what happened, or, through a so-called para-social interaction, we fall in love with the main actor of the film or the show.

The work Fourth Wall deals with certain aspects of the technical production of scenes that could allow for suspension of disbelief.

Confounding viewers’ expectations of space and place are integral to the installations and architectural interventions that are part-and parcel of conceptual artist Mandla Reuter’s artistic practice. An alumnus of the Stdelschule, Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt/Main, Reuter creates site-specific, ephemeral works often through simple means that challenge the illusionism and spectacle produced by today’s globalized culture industry. Reuter simultaneously reduces and expands the concept of the work by making space itself, as well as media (such as exhibition catalogues and invitation cards) the subjects of his artistic practice. He is especially interested in space with respect to its institutional and architectural framing. Be it a gallery or a private space, Reuter exploits their various determinations (open/closed, functional/representative, public/private) only to shift these categories. His minimalist spatial interventions, which have involved manipulating a gallery’s interior lighting system so that all the lights turn on and off at irregular intervals, or playing a movie soundtrack through an open closet door that is not typically part of the exhibition area, disrupt the elementary functions of the space and our perceptions of it.

Yet, sometimes it is simply the access to a place that Reuter provides, obstructs, or withholds. For Invitation (2005), a work he produced with Alexander Wolff, the artists distributed 500 copies of the keys to a private apartment in Warsaw, along with an invitation noting the address to friends and other interested parties, that effectively provided formerly private access to the apartment to a heterogeneous and in the end uncontrollable group. In contrast, Untitled (2006), denied access to the exhibition space with a huge rock, a gesture that rendered the show itself accessible only through a back door entrance.

Another recurring element in Reuter’s work is his interest in the parameters of Hollywood’s movie industry. The diverse foci of the artist’s interests were made visible in his latest solo exhibition Isolated Human Particles Floating Weightlessly Through a Magnetic Field of Fabricated Pleasure, Occasionally Colliding (2005) where he subtly attacked the slippery illusionism produced by Hollywood through deconstructing mechanisms of cultural staging. Reuter not only expresses his highly conceptual approach to art in his installations, but he also curated exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Pigment Piano Marble (2006), and Studio Reuter (2004), and published a novel, Tokyo Panda (2004).

Chus Martinez