Bernhard Brunner: A dialog often has a history. The occasion, questions, answers and thoughts stem from a time of experience that (unnoticed) precedes the construction of meaning in what is said and then intervenes as the intention and goal of the conversation. The following text, which consciously follows the form of a written dialog, with speech and counter-speech, with thesis and doubling, with thoughts and their additions, also bears these traits. It is preceded by the author's re-experience of astonished curiosity when looking at Wolfgang Groh's works. The desire remained to write about this amazement, to stay with the material and at the same time to break the “detached, empty, selfish freedom” (E. Bloch). Thus the idea of doubling the perspective crept in. Together with answers and inserts by the artist himself, a construct was to be created that not only describes the works, but also establishes (thought) approaches. The author and the artist thus meet in the written word, which - both are convinced - captures the works more appropriately through their joint progress than would have been possible if they had gone it alone.

Wolfgang Groh's works force the viewer to make a hermeneutic effort through the divergence of the material. The mind's attempt to create units of meaning is made more difficult by the deliberate fragmentation of the aesthetic fragments, which, hidden within themselves, allow a synthesis, but at the same time deny it. The process of identity formation, which is inherent in every intellectual unit, indeed in the most fundamental sense, in every concept, is not abolished, but transformed and changed (similar to the Dostoyevsky novels, which depict interpersonal contacts with the utmost precision and restraint against the involuntary appropriation of the Other). This appeal to the spirit that emerges from the works is the enchanting thing. And that in two phases: firstly in the process of understanding itself and secondly in the result. Kant knew that every concept must be based on perception. The materials used in Groh's artworks are used inhomogeneously in order to keep the interplay of sensuality and the mind in suspense, to enable associations and freedom, in other words to liberate reason, which has been mutilated by utilitarianism in our time, from quick and expedient judgments. They are individual objects and at the same time - also because they refer to each other and to themselves - carry a broader meaning.

Wolfgang Groh: The works are as much about searching as they are about finding and the belief underlying these endeavors that in the tangled archives of the world they will come across treasures that are valuable enough to be made tangible. The material for this lies in the past and the lost. It consists of stories and reports of forgotten realities of life, the associated facts, the discarded objects and, above all, the images, photos and prints left behind, which want to testify to their objective motifs as factuality and truth. Individual aspects are focused on with curiosity and caution, undergo an intensive approach, are detached from their original contexts and give rise to further imagination and speculation, to condensations and variations. The pictorial ideas extracted and realized at the end of this process are therefore the result of a subjective, selective point of view, which should not be understood as historical reconstructions, as documentations of something that really happened, but rather as inventions of something that need not have existed. Accordingly, the works are spaces of possibility that are intended to invite us to take an alternative look at the past and at aspects of human activity in the world that are included in it - a look that simultaneously relates social and human themes of the past to the present in the sense of a transferring vision.

The invigorating aspect of the works probably lies in this opportunity to liberate one's own power of judgment through the addition of aesthetically designed negativity, even to slow it down in a certain sense, in order to present it with an open field of synthesis of feelings, memories and insights in a different way than it experiences in the “industries of everyday life”. This also prompts the eye to repeat and scan the works. One could associate an unsatisfactory state with the impossibility of finding a quick concept, of reducing the materiality used to a denominator, which the power of judgment of our logocentrism ultimately always strives for. But the situation is quite different: it is precisely through the slowed development of cognition that stubborn constructions can be formed, which sometimes find more and sometimes less support in the other fragments of the work. In this way, the power of judgment, stimulated by the forms and the sometimes clearly sensually perceptible elements, passes through a phase of unconstrained intellectual vision and dispenses with the constraints of the system. Of course, all this also changes the result.

In order to do justice to an idea, an intended narrative through the objectification of the sculptural form, the individual carriers of meaning, the materials, forms, colors, proportions and arrangements must be brought into an adequate interplay and at the same time an inner order. Even if some sculptural ensembles appear like experimental arrangements, they are not meant as something provisional and approximate. The effective qualities of the individual pictorial elements and their compositions correspond to the inner necessity of a self-contained whole that is not hermetic, however, but opens up imaginary spaces for the viewer as a complex network of relationships. Precisely because the individual parts not only influence each other, but also affect the viewer in their relationship to each other, who reacts spiritually, stimulated and driven by their qualities, the work of art can be understood hermeneutically as a meaningful structure without external explanation. The way in which we engage with the parts and the whole thus results from the peculiarities of the things themselves.

The fact that the principle of identity is broken by the fragility of the works leaves room for the “togetherness of the different” (Th. W. Adorno). The things and the ideas of our power of judgment refer to each other and yet are at the same time irreconcilably opposed to each other. The result is thus inscribed with failure: It becomes impossible to make a universally valid judgment. But this failure must be seen as a better part of thinking. Because the synthesis of the judgment does not come about, it is not annulled but changed - it reflects the surplus of object that is never fully absorbed in the individual concept, in the sentence, in the thought, in the message. If science is, as Max Weber puts it, the “disenchantment of the world”, then it is up to art to bring back the magic. Far from allowing demons and foreign powers to play a role, Groh's works demonstrate that the magic lies in the things themselves, that the objects take on a life of their own through their isolation in the composition.

The content-related aspects are congruent with the aesthetic aspects. The work is therefore more than just a vehicle for transmitting predetermined content. It cannot be explained rationally, but requires sensual and hermeneutic effort. In his writings on autonomous aesthetics, Karl Philipp Moritz emphasized that art cannot be communicated, but “only” experienced. As if to underline this, his essay “The Signature of Beauty” begins with a brief summary of the story of Philomele. The young woman's freedom is taken from her by her sister Prokne's barbarian husband, who lusts after her and rapes her, and her tongue is cut out to silence her. Traumatized by the deed and coming to terms with it, Philomele, who is a trained weaver, begins to make a robe for her sister in her isolation. She weaves her story of suffering into it with purple symbols. When Prokne receives the robe, she immediately understands the situation and plans to take cruel revenge. What is interesting for Moritz is the fact that the protagonist, who is literally robbed of her language, is able to translate her story into an aesthetic form thanks to her skill. Through the transformation of fear and suffering into a visual form, the woven description of the terrible crimes is more haunting through its mere existence in the form of the garment than any description that is only able to “hint”, while the garment “says more than words through its very existence”. For Moritz, the reason lies in the great “clarity” of Philomela's work, which is thus complete in itself, so that “one part always becomes meaningful and significant through the other and the whole through itself - that it explains itself - describes itself through itself - and thus requires no further explanation or description apart from the mere hint at the content”.

The inner order or clarity of the work of art is congruent with the aesthetic combination of parts into a whole based on an inner necessity. For Moritz, the work of art legitimizes itself through the resulting perfection and thus eludes any external determination through heteronomous functionalization. For him, the work of art is not a means directed towards a specific end outside itself. It opposes the dominance of a utilitarian reality and the associated assumption of usefulness. Therein lies its autonomy, which is, however, limited at the same time: Even Moritz points out that without a viewer, the work cannot exist in its aesthetic quality at all. Only with an adequate “viewing” (P. Ziff), i.e. grasping the specific language of the work, can it be constituted as an aesthetic object.

If science is the “disenchantment of the world”, then art rehabilitates precisely this enchantment, whose fundamental equivalent is the dream and the secret, because things themselves, without any mystical intervention by foreign powers, are characterized by their singularity, the collision of point and infinity, and the incessant multiplicity of sense-references, which, like the atoms of nature, can be infinity despite finiteness and the occasion of spiritual infinity despite spatial boundaries. The relationships of meaning between the objects in the work are “necessary” because the subject (be it the artist or the viewer) produces them as such: it is stubbornness that gives the searching subject a position and which is formulated by Hesse: “He who is stubborn obeys another law, a single, absolutely sacred one, the law within himself, the ‘meaning’ of ‘his own’”. Adorno also writes: “Immersion in the individual (...) also requires as its moment the freedom to step out of the object, which the claim to identity cuts off”. Yet the obstinacy that arises when looking at Groh's artwork is a reflective one: he knows of himself because he senses the inadequacy of his claim to absoluteness through the fragmentation and the individual life of the elements thus assembled. He absorbs the fragility and thus becomes a counter-model to the “dominant” subject.

The aesthetic object is affirmed as something “existing in a special way” (R. Ingarden) on the basis of its specific process of comprehension or constitution on the basis of a changed basic attitude from the natural of practical life to an aesthetic one. This affirmation marks the difference and establishes the freedom to experience and interpret the work as a completely autonomous whole of meaning, to lose ourselves in it. For Moritz, such a loss is the “forgetting of ourselves” and “the highest degree of pure disinterested pleasure that beauty grants us.” The aesthetic experience is thus an experience of freedom in contemplation. It thus establishes the openness and ambiguity that predestines the contemplation of the work of art to promote the “sense of possibility” (R. Musil), i.e. to encourage the viewer to think in alternatives, to attempt deviating and unusual readings and the creation of meaning. At this point, the argument of escapism should not be used, as if the idea of the production and reception of art as “freedom in appearance” (Schiller) were an attempt to escape from real conditions into beautiful appearances. The opposite is also conceivable, the intended criticism of the overpowering existing conditions and the associated constraints.

In doing so, the work brings us back to the view that things do not force us. Only the permanent dominance of the consumer and possession-oriented interpretation of values inherent in our society dispels the dream of being different. The freedom of self construction, stimulated by the inner tension that pushes towards dissolution, forms the counterweight to consumption. “Our ability to experience meaning is impaired by the compulsion to consume, which relieves us of the effort of personal commitment” (B. Grom). But this commitment is the actual substrate of “inner autonomy” (P. Bieri) and thus also a prerequisite for the vitality of our community. It is precisely here that the opposition of Groh's work becomes tangible: the fragments of a tangibly conceived order, through their dreamlike floating connections and their contrast in material and their breaks in design, create experiences of strangeness that urge precisely this commitment and the dissolution that a prioriizes what is humanly meaningful. In this way, art combines with its synthesis of the different to form a delicate - because broken - appeal for vitality.

The concept of the artwork as a complete whole in itself ensures independence from society's demands on the individual and on works of art. The idealization of qualities such as wholeness, coherence and purposelessness is therefore not only in opposition to the realities of contemporary art, which is committed to so-called participatory strategies, but also to the increasing trivialization of aesthetic questions in a neoliberal and market-radical environment.

But what is so specific about Groh's works? Aren't there a large number of works that play with the fragility of their elements? Adorno formulates in his Aesthetic Theory: “With the elimination of the principle of representation in painting and sculpture, and of the empty phrase in music, it became almost inevitable that the released elements: Colors, sounds, absolute word configurations appeared as if they already expressed something in themselves. But this is illusory: they are only eloquent through the context in which they occur.” The special feature of Groh's works lies in this last point: the parts form a context in relation to each other, which then takes on a clearly perceptible “narrative character” overall. The very delicately differentiated structures with lines and dots form a network and, together with the representational elements, allow the viewer to enter a world of their own. This effect is all the stronger because the entire work is a composition of individual work parts and they meet, overlap and contrast with one another. His work thus develops a landscape in which historical events, including memories and associations, blossom side by side and are transformed and expanded again in the next moment. This reveals a consistently socio-critical line. Critical through the refraction of the principle of identity, but also through the construction of relationships immanent to the work, with which a certain theme is illuminated, and the use of symbols and natural elements that have appeared ambivalently in the relationship between man and his environment.

The nature of the individual parts and their use vary depending on the work. They are mostly drawings, reworked photographs, natural and everyday objects. In many works, collected found objects are used - discarded, thrown away, fragments whose former usefulness has given way to a state of uselessness. Finding them is usually a spontaneous formal-aesthetic act. They are secured and visibly displayed. In this way, they wait to be correctly understood at the right time, i.e. to be redefined, i.e. to be placed in an important position in an intended system of order and reference - a new work. These are things in which the moment of temporality is clearly inscribed: ageing, decomposition and fragmentation, decay, destruction. In their visual and haptic qualities, they function as optical provocateurs. They demand their transformation, a new state of being through integration into a new context, through change and transformation. Inherent in this pictorial practice is the hint of caressing - a capricious design, a gesture of elegiac renewal and shaping of the beautiful, which rehabilitates the formerly worthless, fragmentary as preciousness.

As an example: the colored postcard with the furrowed whale dying on the beach and the walker standing next to it in the work “Places of the Gathered Ways” suggests the treatment of creatures related to us as mammals and their basis of life, the sea. This thesis is supported by the superficially decorative use of mother-of-pearl leaves in the other parts of the work, which were once used as fish bait due to their prismatic refraction of light and can thus be seen symbolically as a means of mastering nature.

Fish lures made of mother-of-pearl flakes were used for a long time, as they successfully deceived predatory fish with their iridescent shimmer. Deception, luck and bad luck also play a role in another use of thin mother-of-pearl disks: in various sizes and shapes, they were used in Europe well into the 19th century as tokens in casinos, but also in the salons and billiard rooms of the upper classes. Due to the elongated, oval shape of the hand-carved tokens used here, the association with the hulls of ships is not far-fetched. We can also think of a game that has been played for over 100 years under the names “sea battle”, “naval maneuvers” or simply “sinking ships”, in its simplest version on a piece of squared paper that is divided into coordinates and marks a section of the sea. Scapa Flow is this section of sea, the “place of assembled ways” a bay enclosed by the South Orkney Islands, situated at 59 degrees north latitude, a natural harbor that was not only the main base of the British Navy during the First and Second World Wars, and consequently the target for enemy submarines that brought destruction and death. It is also the site of the internment and self-sinking of 74 warships of the German High Seas Fleet after the Armistice of Compiègne on June 21, 1919. Seven of these steel colossi still lie there in shallow waters.

The identification of the title of the work with the specific location of the historical event is only an intermediate step. The sinking and safekeeping of the ships on the seabed is not just a reminder of the past: these objects still exist, they are still in our time, subject to decay but still part of our present through their mere existence. Of course they rust and change in material, but as the pictures show, their shape remains visible and the ships recognizable as such. They are not even tilted, but remain upright. Affected by rust, they sit on the bottom just as they floated on the surface. What remains the same in the shapes of the ships can be nothing other than their “idea”, i.e. the function of the ships together with their meaning and the number of attributions that must have been developed by the military of the time. Now, however, a further element is needed to make this peculiar meaning of the ships visible. And here again the openness of the work becomes apparent, which makes it so difficult to make a stringent calculation and a step-by-step analysis: this idea is not explicated and presented, but interpreted straight away. The leap from the concrete to the general is stretched and thus once again becomes a stimulus to understanding for the viewer. It is the image of the whale that provides further insight here.

The whale as a symbol of excess and greatness, stranded in exhausted motion, spent but outwardly intact. Above it hovers the threat of decomposition, which spares nothing on earth. The German physician and naturalist Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534-1598) used a passage from the Odes of the Roman poet Horace as the lemma of an emblem in the 4th volume of his collection of emblems “Symbolorum & Emblematum”, the illustration of which shows a stranded whale: MOLE RUIT SUA (He perishes by his own weight) The engraved copper image of the whale is signed with an epigram. It can be translated as follows: “My own greatness has brought me bitter death. So may everyone perish who defiantly trusts in his own strength!” 

But what does “my own greatness” consist of? It cannot just be a physical or territorial category. The former may apply to the whale and the latter to the empire's aspirations to world power, but behind it lies a mental attitude that has been inherent in mankind's increasing self-assertion over the last few centuries right up to the present day: in abstract terms, one's own greatness is “overestimation of oneself” and this in turn is the persistently corrosive element of an “enlightened society”. This false path of progress was clearly formulated in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”: “The awakening of the subject is bought by the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships. Compared to the unity of such reason, the separation of God and man sinks to that irrelevance to which reason has been unswervingly pointing ever since the earliest criticism of Homer. The likeness of man to God consists in his sovereignty over existence, in the gaze of the Lord, in command. ... People pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise power. Enlightenment relates to things as the dictator relates to people” (Th. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer). The counterpart of overestimating oneself, however, is self-doubt. And this is actually to be understood aesthetically: At its core, it means the self-recognizing dissolution of our concepts, the images we have of things. In this sense, it is also the counterpart to the brutality that emanates from the persistent self-conviction, the powerful speaker or the countless headlines. The adherence and search, even one's own stuttering in this sense, are actually commitments to an enlightened humanity, however insignificant these things may seem at first. However, society has never recovered from the pursuit of greatness. It is an anthropological temptation and the substrate of a society that is largely invisible but has a clearly perceptible hierarchical structure. The pursuit of greatness is the divide that, deservedly or undeservedly, forces people to separate.

As a counterpart to the whale in the foreground of the historical postcard, which has died because of its size, the reflections of ships' hulls on the surface of the sea point to a different sinking. They do not show what one expects to see, as these objects in the reflections are not visible, but can only be vaguely guessed at from the mirrored forms. Absent, because they have been retouched away, are the ships of the German High Seas Fleet that were sunk in Scapa Flow, symbols of the fatal imperial megalomania. Thus hubris and decline are revealed in the asymmetry of object and reflection on the mirrored surface of the water.

Scapa Flow, the graveyard of pride, a basin surrounded by the barriers of the high mountains, a rigid expanse of water, stretched out, murky like a large puddle. Traveled by hundreds of people on invisible paths. At the end of their journeys to this place, they look like figureheads, motionless among the remains of the ships, as if they had forgotten their existence, their purpose. They no longer bear names. Old postcards, covered in the lucidity of moving lines, bear witness to their arrival and their fate.

“To be alone and without gods is death,” says Hölderlin. Those who remain are alone, they are the drifting remnant and the descendants of the great dying. This is how history renews itself: it also erases those who live through the present. And the melancholy expressed by the drifting boats, frozen into a postcard, is about the passing itself. The lines draw a veil, a dislocation and disruption of the view, still echoing the movement of the present, but subject to the flow of time itself and distorting the given moment beyond recognition. Human life is rooted in death and draws its tragedy from it. This is how the existentialists saw it. However, Adorno accused this position of being “tasteless” because its proponents stuck to this definition, but Groh's work of art does not stagnate at this point: With the subtlety of the design, the color, the intermingling of form and light, the radical desire penetrates that the individual is experienced as special through its deficit of general determination and yet in this particularity alone does not endure. It is the self-refracting interplay of the individual and the collective, of impression and conviction, which only develops in the picture through the silken thread of free imagination, of the subject becoming itself. Many of the fragmentary splinters are messengers of death, set and designed in reference to the historical moment of the sinking of the ship. With the crass, reflective design, the encounter of material, form and idea down to the finest line, the artwork is also a protest against dying, because it conveys the unfulfillable desire of appreciation to save the special from decline by making it visible again from death and oblivion.