Anna K.E.On Dithering25.05. - 04.08.2013
Württembergischer Kunstverien, Stuttgart

In the arts, motifs of dithering are seemingly ubiquitous: be it Hamlet’s question of “to be, or not to be,” the Grimm Brothers’ “Birnli” (little pear) that simply does not want to fall off the tree, or Bartleby the Scrivener who incessantly “prefers not to.”

In art, and especially in contemporary art, dithering is found not only as a motif, but also as an aesthetic method and structure. This is the case, for example, in cinema as the so-called “dead time” (temps mort), the empty moment and state of limbo introduced by Michelangelo Antonioni, where the story does not continue; or in video art, this is the loop that perpetually shifts the beginning and the end of a narrative.

Further, artists work with broadly ramified systems of reference—ones that range “from the hundreds to the thousands”—and also with methods of repetition, deferral, and permutation. They produce multiple readings and repeatedly subject the beholder to situations of undecidability. They are dealing with the digressive in lieu of the purposeful, with the unexpected in lieu of the calculable, with the equivocal in lieu of the definite. From a certain slant, dithering may also be considered a queer method.

The exhibition On Dithering, which runs from May 25 to August 4 at the Württembergischer Kunstverein, seizes upon dithering mainly as a methodology of contemporary art and reflects it along motivs of suspension and suture, digression and derive.