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Artistic duo Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have a specialty matched by few contemporary artists. They create worlds — historical yet relevant, real yet fantastical — and document those worlds through staged photography, installation, and found objects. This is intellectual art at its best.
Kahn and Selesnick’s most recent creation, Eisbergfreistadt, is on view at Irvine Contemporary until December 8, and tells the story of the post-World War I Baltic port town of Lubeck, which was struck by a monumental iceberg in 1923. Townspeople imagined the eventual flooding, thought it was a sign of the apocalypse, and created Eisbergfreistadt, an “Iceberg Free State.” The exhibit mixes true historical artifacts, such as the historical notgeld currency purchased by Kahn and Selesnick on eBay, with artistic renderings, masterfully staged photographs and installations.
Much of the work on display features the notgeld, which was given to German and Austrian citizens by local banks after World War I, and became practically useless due to rising inflation after the war. In Cardgame (pictured above, detail), three men play cards in the center of the 72 inch long photograph, surrounded by wooden crates, torn suitcases, boots and hats, all overflowing with countless bundles of notgeld. Dressed in long coats and fur, and wearing stone-carved masks depicting unknown animals, the men sit on crates amidst an ominous icy landscape.
As in Cardgame, several of the photographs in Geshichte Von Eisbergfreistadt (pictured right), depict townspeople burning the money for heat, wearing it as clothing (the clothing itself is also on display in the gallery), and, more often, simply having nothing useful to do with this worthless currency. While many of these black and white photographs appear quite lifelike, and leave the viewer wondering if any of them are actual historic documents, Kahn and Selesnick include a few obviously absurd photographs just for satire’s sake. One particularly ridiculous image shows a man wearing an overcoat and an animal mask, which according to Irvine’s Assistant Director is one of the artists, bending over and crapping countless notgeld bills into a pot, amidst a landscape of icicles and icebergs (pictured bottom left). Other photographs in Geshichte Von Eisbergfreistadt include images of piano-playing, waiting for the train, and pushing a barrel of notgeld.
Like their previous exhibition at Irvine last January, in which the artists documented a fictional moon landing with U.S. astronauts discovering a group of moon-inhabiting Edwardian-era astronauts, Eisbergfreistadt continues the duo’s theme of satirically recreating a historical situation. The artists’ realistic depiction of these historical, and not-so-historical, events questions the reliability of photography, documentation work, and history itself. Additionally, depicting this world threatened by a flood-induced apocalypse and the collapse of a stable economy, Kahn and Selesnick’s work speaks of relevant and contemporary issues, and, unlike much of the overtly political work of the 1970s to 1990s, refreshingly assumes a highly intellectual audience.
Images of Cardgame and Geshichte Von Eisbergfreistadt are courtesy of Irvine Contemporary.
Eisbergfreistadt will be at Irvine Contemporary through December 8. The gallery is located at 1412 14th Street, NW and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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