Introduction

Despite the broad spectrum of jumping off points chosen by the artists in this issue of Parkett, they all share a recalcitrance that draws its energy from an involvement with uncertainty. There are some who describe Trisha Donnelly’s art as “hermetic” and Rudolf Stingel’s gestures in the space of art as “systematically confounding.” In contrast, Carsten Höller’s “Laboratory of Doubt” goes out into the world to spread doubt out of loudspeakers mounted on the roof of a car. But uncertainty need not be uncanny. A look at the cover—into and out of a room throbbing with contradictory connotations—suggests the exact opposite: liberation and festiveness.

The artists explore potentials. In a flipbook tucked away in the pages of this issue, Trisha Donnelly offers readers the possibility to expand their perception. Carsten Höller’s Edition for Parkett is a distorted image in the form of a sterling silver pendant that proves, on closer inspection, to be the anamorphosis of a car key. It is, in fact, the key to Höller’s laboratory on wheels. The artist rewards all those who recognize the decoded picture of the key in the cylinder with exclusively immaterial access to his laboratory.

Cay Sophie Rabinowitz describes Rudolf Stingel’s new self-portraits as “a body of work quite literally about being uncertain, an attempt to explore artistic self-doubt psychologically and graphically”. Seen in this light, the heightened feeling of self-worth inherent in Stingel’s Edition for Parkett, a golden ring with his monogram, might be interpreted as a foil to self-doubt. Wearers of this piece of jewelry become party to the intoxicating ambivalence of accentuating or obliterating identity.

Speaking about the gaps that inevitably appear in normality, Bruce Hainley writes, “Perhaps artists make something only to confront what cannot be understood”, while Beatrix Ruf describes the parallel realities that fill these in-betweens as “tempting the spirit”. Above all, the artists in this issue of Parkett show us that we cannot rely on anything, except perhaps on the ability of art to burgeon in the most hidden places and to emerge as the product of complete normality.

This volume also features an Insert project by Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand.