Philipp Messner, Jorge Peris

8.09 – 12.10.21

I feel like Ramses, 2021, installation view

I feel like Ramses, 2021, installation view

I feel like Ramses, 2021, installation view

I feel like Ramses, 2021, installation view

I feel like Ramses, 2021, installation view

Jorge Peris, untitled, 2021, octopus skin, 80 x 70 cm

Jorge Peris, untitled, 2021, octopus skin, 80 x 70 cm

Jorge Peris, untitled, 2021, octopus skin, 80 x 70 cm (detail)

Philipp Messner, to be added, 2021, 3d animated tongues, tablets, smartphones, chalkgrid, 240x240cm

Philipp Messner, to be added, 2021, 3d animated tongues, tablets, smartphones, chalkgrid, 240x240cm

Philipp Messner, to be added, 2021, 3d animated tongues, tablets, smartphones, chalkgrid, 240x240cm

Photo credits: Laura Egger (photos 7, 8, 11: Magdalena Wisniowska)

The film ‘Pharaoh’ (Kawalerowicz, 1966) begins, not as one might expect, with an image of the pyramids in the vast Egyptian desert, but with a close-up shot of two scarab beetles battling to push their dung ball across a dry, hard plane. In the film, Ramses does eventually confront the Great Pyramid of Cheops, but even then, we only see what he does, a wall of massive stone stretching upwards and across the screen. As Ramses laments to the High Priest, a thousand years ago Cheops still had the power and resources to build something so enormous, so spectacular. He, Ramses, no longer can. When he sees the pyramid he does not see a grave, but the might of Cheops’s will. 

When Philipp Messner and Jorge Peris say, ‘They feel like Ramses’, they too talk about a position of power and its subsequent loss. For me, the figure of Ramses represents what Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call, ‘scientific thinking’, a kind of approach to the world that ‘looks from above’.  In his essay, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1960) Merleau-Ponty describes science as something that we impose on the world; as he writes, ‘Science manipulates things and  gives up living in them.’ However bright and dazzling its results may be, to science the ‘there is’ of things is lost. This would be the sensible world, its soil, such as it is lived by us and for our body. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between the body of science, which for him, is a mere information machine, and the actual body, a haunting presence that is always there. ‘I haunt a single, present, and actual Being’.’

Merleau-Ponty’s is a critique of science, his worry, scientific thought’s continual success. When the world is seen only as an object to be operated upon, then science becomes absolute, and if this was further extended to humanity and history, Merleau-Ponty argues we would then enter ‘a nightmare from which there is no awakening’. Yet like Ramses before us, we now stand at science’s ruins. The corona pandemic made sure that no one can claim science’s position as absolute. And with the loss of this absolute position we also lose something else, which is what the work of Messner and Peris show so well. What we lose, is the soil underneath, the hauntings of our and the other’s bodies. 

The octopus slowly drying out on the wall has the look of a scientific specimen, pinned up for classification and analysis. Equally, it has the feel of witchcraft, about to be thrown into a bubbling cauldron. We can look at its obscenely exposed body but we cannot get away from its fishy smell. Its exposed body haunts the room it is in. When we look down on the floor below, we see a tongue licking the screen from behind. We see only the pink muscle, as it emerges from the darkness, before coming closer and lapping away at the glass. It too is like a ghost that only appears to us when we stand above, in our assumed position of power.