THE BLACK HOUSE

On the driveway in front of the Art Pavilion, an object is set up, a black house without doors and windows inside which audio with lulling sounds is installed. The black house is a kind of surrogate form/mass, a metaphor that comes from a ‘non-place’. It is a materialized capsule for the unconscious, a dwelling for existing, being, and the basic form of the primary human shelter, the home. The lulling sound that comes from the object functions as a warning signal that we are not awake. In relation to the Art Pavilion, the black house is an added object with a mysterious purpose.

‘At first glance, the black object on the white gravel of the approach to the main entrance of the Art Pavilion has the effect of a two-dimensional photographic montage in real, three-dimensional space. Or as if a bit of the space had been cut out in the form of a little house, and that beyond is seen: a space filled with a black void; we are in a balloon, around us is what we see is there, but the balloon is in that black, and the little house is a window into what is out of the balloon. And if for a moment we recall that our sphere is actually in such a space, in a space that cannot be said to be entirely empty and entirely black, even if there is no more intense blackness and bigger emptiness than that of space, and that too is a balloon. And if the little black house is a window into that outside, then space too has something outside, and the window is a black hole. Perhaps behind the black hole there is a bigger balloon still, which, in the logic of things, should be neither black nor empty, but coloured and completely filled with all sorts of stuff. It is impossible, that is, to break free of the feeling that there must always be something else behind something.

If we replace the telescope with a microscope and look inwards, there is always something else in anything. In both cases we have to admit that what we see both outwards and inwards is just a little part of what exists, in other words a detail registered in our senses of some kind of infinite abundance….’

Boris Greiner / from the exhibition catalogue