Mitzev´s "Inversion Spaces" and the Bearable Lightness of Being
Recent studies have shown that a new body-type is spreading in the obese affluent society: Increasingly waistless bodies grow into cones and cylinders. The pre-prosperity body with discernible waist is latently vase-shaped. Concerning the orientation in space, which is our point here, the body functions as a more or less flat box. Top and bottom, left and right, back and front, inside and outside: the basic spatial orientation is always related to the body. The main directions our body is able to distinguish correspond with the co-ordinates of a box. The body-box is the referential model which determines our perception of and our orientation in space. If we were equipped, for example, with a spherical body floating in space whose perceptional horizon spanned the whole sphere like a panoramic eye, the co-ordinates, abstractly reflected in the idea of the Euclidic space, would be fundamentally irritated and suspended.
Vincent Mitzev pursues a cheerful irritation of orientation. In his "inversion spaces" he constructs utopian places which are – in the sense of the word "utopian" – at the same time non-places and imaginary ideals. In this, Mitzev´s strategies of irritation are not aimed at the human body as a model of orientation potentially to be changed: he is neither a dietician nor an enthusiastic progressionist and body-developer. The body rather provides the standard of orientation and by this Mitzev evokes disoriented places and imaginary states which joyfully and ironically relieve the body of its weight.
Already his work "Hasenbergl", created in 2000, deals with orientation. In different places, from the Munich Marienplatz and the Hamburg shore of the Elbe to the beaches of Hawaii, signposts had been installed showing the way to the Hasenbergl, the "Munich Bronx". On a global scale, the urban and social periphery is thus recommended as subject of world-wide recognition. Orientation to an unknown point leads to disorientation: Why is this signpost standing here? Its direction is correct, its local consequence next to zero.
Another form of disorientation is shown in "Nearly Weightless", "a leaning telephone-box where you can make calls for free". The tilt of the telephone-box puzzles our perception and the common order of things – embodied by the Deutsche Telekom and its efforts to set up straight phone-boxes. With its diagonal obliquity, also Tatlin´s "3rd International Tower" referred to dynamism, progress and utopia. In Mitzev´s case, the big diagonal promise of the utopians is reduced to free phone-calls and looks like an industrial accident of the assemblers´ squad. Still, the tilted box functions as a relational figure: Whoever watches it for a while and still believes in German order could be inclined to regard it as straight and the surrounding as skewed.
The common order and, as we have said before, the body, provide the standards for the basic orientation in space. The relation of the body to space and gravity also gives information about the human frame of mind; a number of metaphors and sayings suggest so. The expression "frame of mind" itself seems to imply a connection between mood and spatial orientation. Phrases like "disburden one´s mind", "light-hearted", or "high-flying" suggest feelings of happiness as soon as the body escapes gravity.
Mitzev´s inversion spaces evoke this happiness by disorientation and by imaginary spaces which bring the body closer to the sky. His "Lightning-Conductor" in the upper floor of the Academy of Art seems to bring the outside to the inside and the roof into the room: In a corner of the atelier he displays a gravel-covered area and a lightning-rod – the installation looks like a common flat roof. The aspect suggests: This is a roof. Reason (a lighting-conductor inside is useless) collides with the evidence conveyed by the appearance of the walls, the ceiling and the window: This is a room. Because the "Conductor" was installed in an academy, an allegorical interpretation referring to art seems near at hand: Art is no longer a flash of lightning setting the world on fire but at best – a lightning-rod.
"Lightning-Conductor" shows that the fundamental orientation not only depends on the body, but also on signs. The sculpture "Roof Landscape" can be seen in this light. The tile-covered support is a material object, but also a sign which defines its location as a roof. The project "Roof Landscape 1", developed as a contribution to an art competition, functions, even if the scale is much larger, still in a similar fashion: Mitzev recommends to build roofs you can walk and sit on as a sojourn in public spaces. Only a few meters high, the flat roof still deludes the visitor into thinking he is high up, over the roofs, overlooking the buildings and close to the sky.
By the way: "Roof Landscape" compares to a work by Vito Acconci, also created for Regensburg, which Mitzev, as he assures us, did not know. This comparison shows the specific in Mitzev´s procedure. While Acconci makes houses sink into the earth, virtually grounding them, Mitzev lifts the roof-squatter and puts him in an imaginary elated place over the city.
Most radically, Mitzev irritates with his installation "Weightless". He puts the wooden floor-covering of an atelier on the ceiling, paints the floor white and turns everything upside down: Lamps grow upward from the floor, a bucket hangs topsyturvy on the ceiling, the heating is over the window and the sink far up on the wall, upside down. The human eye reads such displaced elements as orientational codes and is convinced to know where the bottom is and where the top. But as soon as someone enters the room, the signs collide – the more so as they are video-casted. The onlooker starts to wonder if he can trust his eyes. The delusion of inversion is so strong that it seems as if people in the room defy gravity and walk on the ceiling. Up to now, such an experience was reserved for astronauts in space. But Mitzev creates imaginary weightlessness by the collision of contradictory signs. The disappointment which is always present in the imaginary, is compensated by irony and by the freedom of the imagining mind. Utopia will be utopia forever. Smiling consolation: Also reality is nothing but a sign. We get an idea of the bearable lightness of being.
Heinz Schütz (Translation: Christine Wunnicke)
