JIMMY ROBERT:
SUSPENDED CLOSURE, SUSPENDED

Published by
Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden
12" record


Price: 72 lei


Suspended closure, suspended (2009) with the recording and setting of a text spoken by himself, structured along similar principles as his visual works. Poetically, as a no further specified narrator, Robert approaches ideas on the question of gender, starting from his own position to a wider spectrum. Five verses of very different length outline the topics. The connecting style element is the references with which he works in each individual verse: Quotations, titles and references to important works from the arts, politics and psychology, open a firework of aspects on intellectual history, offering a guideline for his questions around self-positioning.

Robert’s emotionless narration, is accompanied by the countertenor Gert Hohmann who, with the possibilities offered by baroque singing ornaments, lends each of the paragraphs its own tone in a way, borrowing single words from the text as a starting point for his improvisation: Desire, Gender, Garland, Image, Position. As a kind of echo of the spoken word, the same artistic principle of quotation is used in so far as characteristic sound elements from baroque composers such as Bach and Purcell are arranged and transformed into a new musical collage.

In his collages, installations and performances Jimmy Robert explores the relation of the image to the human body. Each of his pictures unfolds (often literally) an object, transforms it into a spatial sculpture. The idea and the process of touching and to be touched move along the small ridge between intimacy and strangeness. In Robert’s playful yet profound transgression and progression of genres, the way he overlaps two- and three dimensional structures that permeate the most diverse forms of media, he transforms the principle of collage and decollage with wit, precision, elegance into contemporary visual idiom.