'A lick and a promise' by Jakob Forster at Allmendstraße 91-95, Zurich

Reasonable Objects

Group

It is a street near the school and we are at the restaurant, I believe it is Chinese. My memories get blurry with street names but I remember clearly the waiter doesn’t write down our order, and forgets to bring the right things. We are four art students, studio sharers, Disciples of the Illusions, and three of us are wearing that same cheap, rosa jacket which pleased everyone so intensively that we all bought it. It binds us for just now - our recognizable, attached fluffy pink uniform. It is a specificity to this moment under the yellow neon light of the restaurant: I won’t wear that jacket anymore afterwards. We are close- and I’m having a good time.

Single Use Coffee Cup (Attitude)

Cardboard, found paper, fine paper, Japanese paper (the thin, the thick, the found, the bought) - repetitions of peripheral views (objects appearing in the corner of the retina) turn into semiological resonances and form an argument. They are bound through the tactile relations of their support. Studio situation: spending time- trying to think involves small content overflows. The frail layer of the beige coffee cup becomes wet rapidly, the liquid leaves a mark.

Early

For quite some time in January I was roaming through Donald Judd’s online archive. From that picture you sent me, displaying three cardboard squares painted with singular white circles and placed on an industrial brick wall, I recall one photograph of Judd’s early work: Untitled,1962 is a corner made of two wooden planks painted in his red cadmium, in which a hole has been centrally cut, and a black asphalt pipe goes through it (“as black as space”).

Your photograph brings me to a similar place: driven by the credible possibility of a plain work, the gesture is naturally expanding into its dedicated space (background of the photo). The painted cardboard sheets on which the FSC logo still appears - as the roughly treated red planks - act as signifiers of a certain new-ness of the work. I am looking at the soon-to-be cardboard button circles, slightly curved, weakened by the weight of the paint. I am looking at the New and the Early as terms able to charge the space of the work with an evolutive potential. * 1& 2

Chess Board

We decide to invade the studio (the cave, the hideout). It is a sort of abandoned sub-level, draped in moisture, with wet walls falling apart and reforming into fallen patterns (Patterns of the Fallen). If you are to forget, we are six meters below sea level - so you can sense the deepness of this writing. Painted vertical objects that were once doormats are now hanging on this soon to be demolished structure (muddy holes, lukewarm humidity). Their familiar format and grainy surface evoke through their patterns both the harmonious forces of geometric power (the circle, the square) and remnants of domesticity through their function. Dark Entry Fences to the subterranean, both uncanny and reassuring in this place, lightened with the hard light of a construction lamp. You are posing for a photo with a long violet cape.*3

— Matheline Marmy

1. https://juddfoundation.org/
2. Through and thanks the abundant (and often fierceful) Judd’s written art criticism, I discovered the work of Anne Truitt: visit her catalogue raisonné also http://www.annetruitt.org/)
3. Here it is to mention I am writing under the influence of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (The Night: A Philoso- phy of the After-Dark, Zero Books, 2019)