Your Time Is My Rolex

“The raven is smoking. The raven smokes all night. It smokes and smokes and smokes,” trumpets Andreas Fischer’s kinetic sculpture Rabenrohr (Raven’s Mouthpiece) while it knocks impatiently on the floor and moves on the spot. Rabenrohr, which consists of a mega-phone atop a pole, has formed part of the Museum Ludwig’s collection since 2007, and from the outset its insistently reiterated words have aroused visitors’ curiosity.

The Museum Ludwig surveys Andreas Fischer’s mechanical works in the exhibition Your Time Is My Rolex. The artist, who was born in 1972, uses motors and microprocessors in combination with found materials and objects, including armchairs and workmen’s tools, to construct sculptures that move and speak. Depriving the components of their original purpose, he incor-porates them into new contexts that grant them a different, narrative significance.

In the form of humorous mechanical parodies of human beings, the apparatuses act, complain, and accuse, obsessively telling fruitless existential tales or engaging in futile dialogues repeated ad nauseam. The machines repeat their motions and routines in endless loops, never breaking through into something different, and constantly reiterate their words, whether in soliloquies or dialogues, without reaching a meaningful conclusion.

Wirds Bald (Get a Move-On) blares out the words “It’ll get better, it won’t get better,” as a shooting apparatus repeatedly takes aim at an unidentifiable target but always jams before firing. Embodied in a machine, the all-too-human nature of the scenario has an unsettling effect on the spectator, generated by an apparent determinism that, through repetition, arouses a desire to break out of the vicious cir-cle.

Jasmina Merz

Museum Ludwig, Cologne
December 01, 2012 – March 17, 2013
Opening: November 30, 2012, 7 p.m.