What are we actually looking at? The basic question whenever we find ourselves looking at art is posed yet again when we survey the works of Benjamin Dittrich. Distant memories of old television test cards are reawakened, reminiscences of classic science-fiction posters and computerese retro-fantasies, intimations of worlds of technoid circuitry and physical cosmologies. It is not least the formal language of abstract modern art, mysterious and structured, which rears its head in these parallel universes.

But Dittrich does not leave us in the dark; he needs no nebulous esotericism. His art is an exploration, a picture-making in the literal sense. What the natural sciences once created as a visualisation of world processes across the millennia – tabels, spectra, waves – is divested of content and meaning, gutted and filled up again. The essence of the knowledge and information society lies in fragments, naked as it were before us, strangely familiar and at the same time alien. In this way, something that once claimed to represent a comprehensive portrait of the world is transformed into a coded graphical and geometric form, an artistic composition.

With the revelation of his sources – often encyclopaedias and scientific compendiums of former times whose content is now outdated – Dittrich succeeds in achieving a daring, logical turnaround: the dialectic relationship between art and the world, between human creation and supposedly objective science manifest itself starkly. The abstractions in the representations of nature and physics, caught up in the style and design of their time, become a contingent cultural technology which reveals the existence of the scientific object in the records of simplification, classification and combination. By rearranging and showing the relationships between the existing fragments of those interpretations of the world in a playful manner like a puzzle, but without the claims of strict conceptual art, Dittrich permits us to examine their fragile innermost being – thereby granting us access to a new world.

Maximilian Haase

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INTERSTELLAR ARCHEOLOGISTS

Messages from the event horizon of knowledge

People say that first impressions really matter. In the case of intelligent, extraterrestrial entities capable of abstract thought, that may potentially learn about human civilization, that first impression might originate from a golden record. In 1977 NASA sent shining, gold, circular volumes of auditory and visual data into space with the space probes Voyager 1 and 2, as a testament to our species: our planet, our culture, our language, our environment, and our scientific achievements — but tactfully omitting our wars, transgressions, crimes, ideologies and self-destructive tendencies. An idealized, distorted image.

First impressions matter - we do not want to be deemed homicidal and exploitative. Quite the contrary: we aim to be portrayed as beings of cultural and scientific prowess; self-aware, empathetic and enlightened; as explorers and discoverers. Five years before the launch of Voyager, scientists — among them Carl Sagan — sent the Pioneer space probe on its endless journey with plaques on board. Aside from a controversial depiction of a man and woman, the engraved message focused especially on symbolic representation of natural scientific findings: the position of the sun relative to the center of the Milky Way, a schematic depiction of our solar system, the hyperfine structure of the hydrogen atom. Universal knowledge for the universe.

No man-made object has ever ventured further than the Pioneer and Voyager space probes. Over 20 billion kilometers from the sun, Voyager now travels through interstellar space, through the final frontier, as pop culture would have it. And even though popular science and science fiction have been committed and ambitious in trying to acquaint mankind with the notion of infinity, numbers and dimensions still defy the imagination: before its expiration date, the space probe will oat through the gigantic void that is the universe, through planetary and dark nebulas, interstellar dust, and the remnants of supernovas for 500 million years. In 38,000 years it will approach another star for the first time, at a distance of 1.7 light years: AC+793888, located in the constellation Ursa Minor.

It is an idea as tantalizing as it is unlikely: the space probe one day being found by extraterrestrial life forms, possibly having embarked from their home planet in the local supercluster, which encompasses within its 200 million light year radius 2,000 galaxies just like ours. Embarking on a quest to explore new galaxies, new life forms and civilizations. At this point in time, mankind has likely ceased to exist. To acquaint oneself with the essence of mankind could mean to contemplate it through its relics, as an interstellar archeologist. The first impression of man: a life form of symbols and formulas.

But how universal is a symbolic depiction of an atom? How accessible are the schematic depictions and signi ers of human mathematics, physics and chemistry — a circle, wavelengths, an orbit, a planet — if the contextual distance is as far as a galaxy? How fragile is knowledge, acquired over thousands of years, in relation to the infinity of the cosmos? How anthropocentric is science, not to mention the semantics and semiotics of our language? Are history, psychology, reason — and the lack of it — adequately expressed through our fragmented remnants?

The experience man gathered as he shaped and explored the world, the knowledge arduously acquired and produced; that he categorized and catalogued; squeezed between book covers into lexicons, anthologies and encyclopedias; that he protected and defended from self-created myths and religion; and used in preparation and justification of savagery, annihilation and destruction; that was expressed in movements of both emancipation and counter-enlightenment; that he condensed and compartmentalized into areas of expertise, and finally deconstructed and thus questioned and challenged all over again — what if this decadence of knowledge vanished completely? What if it became a flickering, whirring buzz of symbols in space, a variation of statements devoid of meaning, a toolbox of shapes and forms only serving the aesthetic?

This fundamental, ever-present human fear of decay and decline does not concern the curious outside observer. And as the self-declared, human polymath dreads the fragmentation of the branches of cultural and scientific discovery; as scientists fear the ever-impending refutation of their theses, and advocates of canonization fear the free appropriation, accessibility and production of empirical knowledge; the resident of the local supercluster — unversed in the human cultures of writing and language — would encounter an almost infinite aggregation of signs, symbols, diagrams, schematic depictions, images and sketches. The division of the discourses of art and science that is so characteristic and essential to human culture — a concept not older than the centuries that passed since the enlightenment — might appear strange and negligible to him. Presupposing the physical and sensory ability to do so, the visual depiction of mankind may present itself as a playground, a place to frolic and playfully recombine the symbolic ingredients of human knowledge.

What if the cosmos of human knowledge — hard-earned, elaborated, revised, discussed, discarded, compartmentalized and re-compartmentalized, sometimes fatal — from the viewpoint of the resident of the local supercluster — lost all meaning? Without the subtitles of language and script, interpretations of meaning — much like the perception of a child — may vary wildly upon each viewing. The remnants and artifacts of our civilization would be recombined, similar to the gears of a clock, assembled in a different order: seemingly a clock, but not a clock at the same time. Imitation is an endeavor to gain insight into an alien world. If so, would the very essence of human cultural and scientific achievement, its dialectics, ambivalences and contingencies, rise to the surface and reveal itself? Is the susceptibility to regressive mythology, reificatory thought and ideologically determined forms of society inherent and palpable in the artifacts of human discovery, creation, production and distribution?

And while mankind strove to demystify the world, a rearrangement of these relics would restore that mystery. In Benjamin Dittrich’s exhibition “Lokaler Superhaufen” (“local supercluster”), that curious, enlightened grasp on our mysterious remnants, that may characterize the viewpoint of an extraterrestrial anthropologist, is arguably similar to the viewers’ perspective. The inconceivable, non-palpable properties of our world resurface through a playful processing of a shattered symbolism of science; and through an ironic appropriation of its logic and ethos that once strove to zero in on the meaning of our existence and inevitable transience, and who exposed themselves as cults — useful as well as potentially dangerous — through fragmentation. What will happen on the dissolving edges of a knowledge resting on a foundation of rationalism and intersubjective comprehensibility; what will happen on the event horizon of science and its symbols? What happens if, through re-layering of common knowledge — once a sign of allencom- passing learnedness, new meaning is generated in a realm where religious and scientific piety, where knowledge for the sake of control and economic paradigms of utilization are sidelined for a fascination and celebration of the infinite?

And finally: What would happen, if after our civilization ceased to exist, the golden record carried by Voyager and Pioneer guided alien life forms to our empty, forsaken planet — what would they make of our symbols and languages, our books and libraries, our anthologies and encyclopedias? Maybe — as man may envision from the vantage point of humanism — they would be admired and pondered as artifacts, by curious viewers somewhere in the center of the local supercluster.

Maximilian Haase (translation: Lukas Holldorf & Kathleen M. Krol)

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• 1987    born in Düsseldorf, grew up in Detmold
  2007-2015    Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
  2010    Class for Painting of Prof. Annette Schröter and Prof. Oliver Kossack
  2012    Diploma with distinction
  2012-2015    Master class student with Prof. Annette Schröter

lives and works in Leipzig

• Solo shows

  2023 Echo einer Ahnung, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig
  2021 Human Bird Song, Galerie Art Gluchowe, Glauchau
  2020 Into the Future as an Autopoietic Fruit Fly, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig
  2019 Erholung, aber wo, Thaler Originalgrafik, Leipzig
  2018 Zarter Fels — Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig
  Dünner Pelz — Galerie b2, Leipzig
  SUS — Salon Käthe - Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig
  2017 HERBST — Bistro21, Leipzig (with Paula Gehrmann)
  2016 Lokaler Superhaufen — Galerie b2, Leipzig
  2015 Back to the ruts — Spinnerei archiv massiv
  2013 GOLDFISHBOWL — Galerie M2A, Dresden
  2011 Damn nature — Raum 4.4, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
  
  

  Group shows

  2022 Present Collective, Spinnerei, Leipzig
  2021 Beat Covid. Malen in der Pandemie, ZDF Digitale Kunsthalle
  New, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig
  2020 Now! Young Painting in Germany, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
  Heute ist morgen vorbei, Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg
  We are open, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig
  Let's print in Leipzig 3, Museum für Druckkunst, Leipzig
  2019 Now! Young Painting in Germany, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstmuseum Bonn & Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
  Friends, Galerie b2, Leipzig
  Circlus, Thaler Originalgrafik, Leipzig
  2017 Colar - Galerie b2, Leipzig
  Black Sugar — Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus, Reutlingen 
  Lubok — Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst 
  New Acquisitions — G2 Kunsthalle‚ Leipzig 
  Maybe I knew the story before, but not that I recall — Galerie Billytown, Den Haag / NL
  2016 Geh doch (nach) Reude du Opfer! — Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig 
  Descriptions of it are incomplete — Galerie Loris, Berlin 
  Immer & Ewig — 23. Leipziger Jahresausstellung, Westwerk Leipzig 
  Lubok — Künstlerhaus Schwandorf 
  Descriptions of it are incomplete — Galerie b2, Leipzig 
  Klassentreffen — Kunsthalle der Sparkasse, Leipzig
  2015 2.5.0. - Object is Meditation and Poetry… — Grassi Museum, Leipzig 
  Teknology — Galeria Impakto, Lima, Peru 
  Versus Konstruktionen — Galerie Hoch + Partner, Leipzig
  2014 BGL#3 / Blaue Perle — Galerie Kleindienst - Kesselhaus, Bergisch Gladbach 
  Pulse - the contemporary art fair — New York City 
  No Fun — Galerie M2A, Dresden
  2013 No Fun — Galerie Rothamel, Erfurt 
  Thought Machines / Denkmaschinen — Heiligenkreuzerhof, Wien 
  Prints / made in Leipzig — Ungarische Universität für Bildende Künste Budapest 
  LUBOK. Gráfica contemporánea y libros de artistas de Leipzig — Galeria de Arte Contemporáneo del Teatro Isauro Martinez, Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico 
  LUBOK. Gráfica contemporánea y libros de artistas de Leipzig — Museo de la Estampa, Toluca, Mexico 
  WIN/WIN 2013 — Halle 14, Spinnerei, Leipzig
  Eagle with Crown — Bürgerhaus Sulzfeld (with David Röder and Jens Schubert) 
  LUBOK. Gráfica contemporánea y libros de artistas de Leipzig — Centro Cultural Clavijero, Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico
  2012 LUBOK. Gráfica contemporánea y libros de artistas de Leipzig — Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, Mexico 
  High End — Raum 4.4, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig 
  Sixpack — Galerie cCe Kulturhaus Leuna 
  LUBOK. Gráfica contemporánea y libros de artistas de Leipzig — Capilla del Arte, Puebla, Mexico 
  Diploma — Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig 
  Fortresses - Inside and Outside - Young Art from Leipzig — Festung Rosenberg, Kronach 
  LUBOK. Gráfica contemporánea y libros de artistas de Leipzig — Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City (► Katalog)
  LUBOK — Kulturbahnhof Eller, Düsseldorfn
  2011 Relief print — Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig 
  Junge Kunst 14 — Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig 
  LUBOK — Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus Reutlingen (► Catalogue)
  2010 The Print — Neuer Kunstverein Pfaffenhofen 
  Hipp Hipp Hurra — Raum 4.4, Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig
  Schnittstelle Druck — Gallery of The Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig Leipzig 
  Miss Waldrons Roter Stummelaffe — Galerie im Ganserhaus, Wasserburg/Inn

  Grants etc.

  2016 Art award winner of the 23. Leipziger Jahresausstellung
  Work scholarship Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen
  Work scholarship at Künstlerhaus Lukas, Ahrenshoop – promoted by Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
  2009 2 weeks work shop in Tripoli/Libanon – promoted by Goethe-Institut Beirut