Malte Bartsch
Cloud Economy
15. Juli – 18. September 2022

Malte Bartsch shows current works in "Cloud Economy". Apparatuses, displays, aluminum casts: Ready Mades - elements twisted in form, function and meaning - of the measured, technologized and economically conditioned everyday life. The materials, forms and techniques of his sculptural, installative as well as participative and process-based works are as current and familiar from reality as their themes: Time and its experience; energy and its storage, transformation and waste; the deceptive feeling of being superior to the earth; incorrigible belief in progress.

Checking in at the Time Machine: Reminiscent of a digital time clock, it acknowledges the time spent at the machine with a receipt, but does not individually measure the time spent in paid work - or in the company? "the economy"? - invested - but not lost? - time. The decentralized project, which began in 2013 with over 60 Time Machines in six countries to date, collects all of the time spent here, which had no other purpose than perhaps just that: to feel time. And doesn't that also mean generating time? I was there when I scribbled it down, time has passed when its span is measured: I got 5 seconds here. "Thermal printer, button, person, time, 25 cm × 31 cm × 13 cm", according to the work details, over 21,000 small works of art on paper have already been printed on the Time Machine and become the property of the person involved.

Continuing through the exhibition: what resembles a honeycomb in its organic form is an aluminum cast of an electric car battery. Delicious honey of fast, quiet, flexible mobility, which can be squeezed out of this honeycomb for an average of eight years, repeatedly replenished with the nectar of ancient oil and gas resources and the pollen of radiant power plants (the greener the electricity, the longer the battery life until flowers and bees can no longer be recharged). Nature's structures and processes have always inspired technical progress, which this time is to be celebrated as part of its salvation.

A three-meter-high agave in bloom, a unique moment of transience in the life of the plant, for which it spends all its energy after decades without deriving any particular benefit from the beautiful blossom: fixed for eternity in aluminum.

Then the visitor is surrounded by clouds. They run along the walls in fragments through LED displays from advertising technology, whetting the appetite for more, for the real thing, a whole cloudy sky - a little piece of romance in the clocked world of work and consumption, and indeed: in the cloud, in the combination of many, in the totality of all their information, the formations and movements of the clouds can no longer be predicted mathematically and physically. Despite research, something as fundamental as the weather has eluded calculating access since time immemorial.

And how do people (re)act with their (un)predictable emotions? How transparent are the large, complex interrelationships of the economy beyond the farmer's rule "supply and demand regulate the price", especially for immaterial goods? How sensitively do systems - from micro to eco to stellar - interlock?

To summarize, a video of a performative, even ephemeral sculptural work illustrates the failure of humanity despite cutting-edge technology and research at the highest level: the pleasure of fireworks at the end. A rocket shoots into the black sky to spray its fantastic sparks at the highest point, but it does not succeed. The trajectory is manipulated and it crashes. At least it bangs and then lights up shortly before the impact. Again and again, the rocket hurtles away from the earth at full speed, again and again it crashes - but the party goes on anyway; and after all, the only option is to go into space!

Malte Bartsch creates time, space and occasion to reflect on our human situation. We look in vain for solutions or answers here: Malte Bartsch shares our reality, he does not want to and cannot lecture. But his works pointedly formulate the gap between a persistent belief in progress and permanent failure, hopeless optimism and hopelessness, technical and economic optimization and the deterioration of (super)living conditions for humanity, between our measuring and surveying elevation above the earth and desperate dependence on it.

Text: Juliane Rogge