echønoeë as emergence

Emergence, as theorised by philosophers Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, is concerned with how things come into being through complex, relational entanglements. Barad’s concept of intra-action emphasises such things have no a priori existence; rather they are shaped via their relations.  In other words, things and their entanglements are active, always participating in the world’s becoming (Barad, 2007).

Braidotti’s posthumanism similarly sees subjectivity and identity as fluid and interconnected, embedded within networks that cross boundaries between entities such as, but not limited to, humans, machines, and environments (Braidotti, 2013).

This philosophical lens of emergence resonates with Margaret Atwood’s understanding of speculative fiction as a way of exploring possibilities that are already latent in the present, but not yet fully realised (Atwood, 2011). Atwood describes the speculative as “a way of dealing with possibilities that are inherent in our society now, but which have not yet been fully enacted” (n.d).

mk’s echønoeë series operates within this speculative, emergent space.

The first (ecological) emergence that underpins the echønoeë series was the making and subsequent exhibition of mk’s sculpture cnidølysis noeëidolon (2025). Although initially unintentional, this work
spoke to the South Australian coastline’s transformation during an algal bloom and the resultant purging of dead sea creatures onto the land. Beings washed in and out by the tides, there and then gone, gone and then there. Exhibited as part of Crosscurrents (2025), cnidølysis noeëidolon became prescient: a reminder that what emerges from crisis can be unsettling and strangely captivating. The sculpture’s hybrid form mirrored the uncertainty of a coastline in flux, speaking a language of climate change that caught in our throats and stung the eyes.

The second (technological) emergence of echønoeë came from the artificial intelligence haze that
follows visual and textual prompting, where shapes flicker, textures stretch and blur, and images feel unstable, half-formed in fog. Emergence, here, was both technical and ontological, the works co-produced through a network of relations: human, machine, prompt, material, code, repeated again and again and again, until, at some point, mk’s intuition intervened. A pause. Something in the rhythm of relations—code, material, prompt, machine, human—shifted and said “enough”. This is where things could rest for now. Form/s settled. An image, then a series of images.

A third (material) emergence occurred through mk’s use of photogravure, rendering the echønoeë series physical and tactile, paper to be thumbed, then potentially framed. Here, the marks of the digital (artificial intelligence) were embedded—literally pressed into and onto the analogue (paper)—via traditional printmaking techniques, creating a material hybridity.  As such, echønoeë’s emergence via the interplay of digital and analogue processes foregrounds an entanglement of old/new, echoing Barad’s concept of intra-action, where new things come into being precisely through their relations, through their entanglements.

A tangential, unexpected emergence took place in the space between creation and observation. Often,
as mg watched mk immersed in the work, they felt both connected and on the outer. Yet even from this threshold, their attention and response became part of the series’ unfolding. As such, echønoeë does not exist solely in studio or on paper; it resonates through relational spaces, including those moments of witnessing, discussing, sensing, and quietly participating in its emergence.

To recall Atwood, the echønoeë series, then, is not just about what is, but about what might be
possible—speculative forms emerging from the haze of crisis, more-than-human collaboration,
and material entanglement. In this, it asks: What futures are already on their way? What bodies,

what beings, what worlds might yet emerge from the complexity of now?

A fourth emergence is now yours to participate in.

References

Atwood, M. (2011). In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (1st U.S. ed.). Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.

MasterClass. (n.d.). Speculative fiction [Chapter]. In Margaret Atwood teaches creative writing. MasterClass. https://www.masterclass.com/classes/margaret-atwood-teaches-creative-writing/chapters/speculative-fiction

Artwork
Michael Kutschbach (mk)

echønoeë, 1-10, 2025

216 × 166 mm

Photogravure

Publication Design & Words
Dr Melinda Gaughwin (mg)

fuliguline

On a rainy August evening in 1952, a young American pianist walked on stage of the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. He sat down at a piano and opened its lid, raised his hands to its keys, and remained seated in silence for the next four and a half minutes. The aural experience that unfolded over three ‘movements’ – each movement marked by opening and closing the lid – would later become one of the most well-known experimental musical compositions of the twentieth century. 4’ 33” (Four minutes and thirty-three seconds) was a meditation on music, sound and noise; all three propositioned as a continuum and without beginning nor end.

Almost seventy years later, Michael Kutschbach’s fuliguline (2021), a multi-media response to the living collection of Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, reverberates with similar conceptual energy. Over the course of 2020, the South Australian based artist was invited to observe the daily machinations of the orchestra, not just their rehearsals or the talented musicians and conductors themselves but the architectural space they occupied, their box office, audiences, ushers, cleaners – a full body examination. Fittingly, Kutschbach’s methodology revealed just that; Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is a living organism, a phenomena of co-dependency.

As 4’ 33” sprung forth from mid-twentieth century conceptualism, fuliguline, too, reflects its twenty-first century context. Shadowed by the year that was (and, in many ways, still is), the iterative, screen-based work uses slippages of scale within macro photography to create science-fiction-like universes meets undulating interior landscapes, edging on body horror. The cell is the organ is the body is the symphony. 2020 couldn’t have afforded more attention to the virulent potential of our bodies, and our deeply co-dependent natural and constructed systems of living. And, fuliguline materialises aspects of this: the rhizome, the hivemind, the sym within symphony, collective action, anticipation and synchronicity – that universal inhale preceding the first note. Even its title was chosen onomatopoeically, the way the tongue might flick in the mouth of a flautist.

2020 was also a unique year for noise, or lack thereof. The grinding halt of the pandemic – a kind of global 4’ 33” – enabled our scientists the renewed power to hear the ocean, a first since the advent of the industrial revolution.[1] Deep listening is evident in Grace Marlow’s follow my hand, a phonographic response to Kutschbach’s observations. Rather than the strictures of the stave or traditions of musical scoring, the Adelaide-based artist and writer has used transparencies to transcribe the aural life of the orchestra: a dropped pencil, plucked strings, jarring snares, low whispers, unadulterated harmonies, the rhythmic movement of bodies in space. Under Marlow’s dictation, Kustchbach’s slippages in scale become slippages in time. The layering up of semi-permeable membranes produces a map, not just of sound and noise, and possibly even silence, but of simultaneity. Fuliguline and follow my hand together form one moment and every moment, the record of an instant without beginning nor end.

Belinda Howden, 2021

[1] Tamman, M. “Pandemic offers scientists unprecedented chance to ‘hear’ oceans as they once were”, Reuters, June 8, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-climate-research-i-idUSKBN23F1M3

From the Guildhouse online catalogue:

https://guildhouse.org.au/michael-kutschbach-fuliguline/

1. Initially when I saw the titles of your works, I thought that you intended to lead the audience astray. But the nonsensical words, such as, 'gimble in the wabe', 'Manxome Foe', 'Callooh Callay!' which come from the poem, The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, refer to the similarity between your biomorphic forms and the poet's made up words. The context of the words, and their sounds lead us to associate them with existing words- much like your forms refer to existing natural forms. However, because both your forms and the words in the poem are without any explanations, we never really know their true meaning, making them seem from another world which we will never quite understand but can imagine. Is this a correct interpretation? 

Absolutely. It’s this not quite understanding that keeps me engaged in the work and continuing the process. Each form is based on a kind of a ‘happy accident’ and there is a lot of following up to attempt to understand what makes that thing work. I never really find any clear answers and in the end that is probably a good thing because I am after a very particular type of form, one that is abstract but highly suggestive, yet never able to reveal itself as something concrete.  

I am very interested in the fictional/other worldly potential of abstraction. The images and forms that I work with are deliberately associative and can be referred to forms that exist in nature and the everyday built environment. The forms that I am currently working on suggest things that are not restricted to contemporary society, but are suggestive of ancient history as well as the imagined future. I attempt to produce forms and images that are believable and strangely familiar, yet straddle this grey area of fiction and nonsense that Lewis Carroll is able to grasp so convincingly with words.

When making the work, I prefer to place myself in the position of the viewer, to contemplate what it is I am looking at. I strive for this freshness with each new work, the desire to look at something that is not entirely new but somehow didn’t exist in the world beforehand. In this sense I like to put myself in the position of the facilitator rather than the creator of the work. I play down the importance of my role as an artist in order to see things anew and to be surprised at the outcome of each new work. 

When it comes to the titles, I first started using suggestive phrases or words simply because I didn’t want to have ‘untitled’ as a title for my work, nor anything descriptive that would provide an answer to the work. ‘Untitled’ seemed to me at the time somewhat pretentious and too abstract for what I was attempting to do. 

The titles I give to my work are meant to add a certain flavour to the work rather than give explanations. I attempt to use words as a material to produce sounds and character that intuitively matches something in the physical work. There is rarely any meaning behind the words or phrases that I use. Sometimes I use people’s names within the title such as ‘Agnes’, ‘Beatrice’ or ‘Stanley’, names which I chose for their sound and friendliness, a kind of endearing quality I could use to connect to the work like it was a friend or pet. 

For a show at Greenaway Art Gallery in 2007 I used palindromes I found on the internet as titles for the work.  At this time I was interested in visual patterns and ornament and the mirroring quality of palindrome phrases appealed to me greatly. More recently I have been using words taken directly from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’ as titles for my work. -They just seem to fit.

2. 'gimble in the wabe', a mesmerising 3 minute video loop of what appear to be gases and powders in flux, is reminiscent of the brilliant after affects of a volcanic eruption. Again, they are forms that refer to a natural occurrence, however it would be just as much at home in Alice's Wonderland; or another planet. Is this your intention? 

When making ‘gimble in the wabe’, I was essentially interested in capturing a sensation, tied together within a certain aesthetic and physical movement. The sensation I was after was very simple and had something to do with forms and space being caught in a continual state of flux, a sensation of concrete forms dissolving and reforming in a very natural kind of fashion. 

The moving image lends itself perfectly to the generation of fictional space and the fabrication of another world where time and space can be played with and turned on its head. We, as viewers, are so accustomed to the format that we easily suspend disbelief and enter willingly into the world that is presented to us on the screen. 

As I was not interested in constructing a narrative or working within a timeline structure I decided for a looped format, where you wouldn’t be certain of the beginning or end of the work or if you had already seen a particular sequence in the video or not. I was also after a specific kind of abstract imagery, both dark and at times beautiful, imagery that you could get lost in, without really knowing why.

3. How was this work, 'gimble in the wabe' created? 

Part of the challenge in making this work was that it had to be made entirely by myself in my studio without any outsourcing or assistance. This constraint of working solo within the confines of the studio was something I imposed on my practice during an artist residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin the year before and continued for the making of this video. The studio constraint was simply a way of me getting back in touch with making work and with the studio environment after a period of experimentation and production that was largely conducted outside of the studio and in the hands of others.

I decided that I wanted the work to be made very simply and with as little post-production, computer trickery or specialist expertise as possible. Yet at the same time I was after a sequence of moving images that were visually mysterious and that would defy the simplicity of the making process. I spent a lot of time setting up an environment within which I laid out a set of ground rules and conditions within which the work could happily evolve… and then I filmed away.

The footage was shot with a standard digital SLR camera that had a built in movie function. For the props I made a setup that consisted of a 60 litre fish bowl resting on a rotating display platform. The fish bowl was filled with water and in it I placed a small plaster sculpture. For the lighting I set up some black sheets around the bowl and used several LED bike lights and a small halogens either suspended above or floating in the water itself. Then I simply started recording, set the platform to rotate and from time to time dropped in small amounts of paint and ink from above into the water. I repeated this process several times over, using different sculptures, different paints and different camera compositions. From roughly 80-90 minutes of raw footage I selected three minutes worth of details that I liked best and edited them together.

4. What is it that appeals to you about these abstract forms? 

The forms are all brought about by process and chance. In a way I could say that I didn’t choose these forms, they were the result of an artistic process and I have been trying to deal with the results of this ever since.

However there is also something appealing about the forms that continue to sustain my interest in them. The appeal has something to do with each form’s ‘potential’. I like the suggestive nature of the forms; the fact that each one is reminiscent of something in our daily life, yet locating exactly what that is, is difficult and evasive. For a long time I was producing only organic, blob like forms that were reminiscent of cell like structures. They seemed very much related to the body and I liked the way people were drawn to them for that reason.

More recently these forms have evolved into a much more complex vocabulary of shapes. Currently I am dealing with a far broader range of forms that stretch from the organic to the geometric, from the seemingly natural to the man made. This evolution has also meant that the range of associations within the work has also broadened and become complex. 

5. You have exhibited along side artists such as Louise Bourgeois, who also created biomorphic works. And although they refer to natural forms, they also have a space-age quality to them. Your works show a lot of manufacturing skill, have you used computer aided design and prototyping, or other technology in the design your works. If so, what have you used? 

I have played around a bit with computer aided design and prototyping in my work. 3D prototyping has been largely out of my reach due to the high costs involved, but I have explored laser cutting and etching processes in several of my works, as well as vinyl plotting, digital printing and animation.

I am very interested in how these technologies are used creatively in the architecture and design worlds and was interested to find out if there was a place for it in my artistic practice.

6. How has technology- both new and emerging, assisted you in your work? 

I have used computer technology as a design tool mostly. Drawing up plans on a computer and making alterations of form and colour before going to manufacture. The results can be quick and the variations and chance occurrences or accidents have been rewarding at times. 

I have also used digital imaging tools to make prints, played around with vector graphics for use in adhesive vinyl plotting and laser cutting and engraving, and I have also made a few video animations using 3d computer modelling programs.

7. The adorable work, 'Go you little Dynamo, go!' which has the appearance of a little robot alien, was a huge hit at the Adelaide festival. It was a work that you said was 'for the people.' Could you explain what you meant by this? What inspired you to create such a cute work? 

Late in 2006 I was approached by the then director of the Adelaide Festival Brett Sheehy and given an offer to develop a ‘look’ for the 2008 Festival. I put forward several proposals and in the end we decided to go with the idea of producing a series of life sized sculptures that would act somewhat like a mascot for the 2008 Festival. An image of one of the sculptures was then adapted for the posters, billboards, website, television commercials and all round branding of the Festival. The actual sculptures were placed at specific sites around the city during the festival period.

The project, for me, was a challenge to generate a physical form that embodied, in formal terms, the many positive and celebratory aspects that the festival had to offer. It was my intention to produce a sculpture whose visual and haptic qualities were at the fore, something with which the public could easily identify (even though it was essentially an abstract form) and link back to the Festival.

The sculpture was very much designed as a friendly alien. Its purpose was not to provoke or challenge the audience but to arouse their curiosity and have them question in a playful way what it might be that they are looking at, both in terms of the sculpture and the wider festival.

With the financial support of GAG Projects an edition of ten sculptures, each standing almost two metres tall, was produced. Each one was given individual character with differing colours and finishes. They were made out of fibreglass, laser cut steel, chrome details, aluminium and adhesive flock fabric. In terms of colour, scale, texture and form, they were designed to appeal foremost to the senses and to communicate on a very immediate haptic level.

8. 'Pleasure' and 'fun' is what comes to mind when I see your work. I could watch 'gimble in the wabe' for hours on a continuous loop, admiring the hypnotic, flowing forms. And installations such as 'Ushi and Urvin make merry masquerades' with their beautiful, smooth, white blobs rolling around the ground like little chubby creatures; there is a sense of fun to them. This is a far cry from the coldness of many Modernist movements and much angst driven contemporary art. Do you think that pleasure has returned to art? Is it important in your work? 

‘Pleasure’, ‘fun’ and to that I would add ‘humour’ play very important roles in my practice. They are terms that from early on I have used as guiding principles in my work and I try to work with them as often and as seriously as possible.

Perhaps this was a reaction to seeing a lot of work that seemed to me to possess too high a degree of self-importance, or to be cold or angst driven as you say. 

It’s not just that I want the end result to have such an effect on the viewer, but it is important to me that the process of making and developing work has aspects of fun, pleasure and humour built into it. 

9. 'Ushi and Urvin make merry masquerades' was exhibited in the Rohkunstbau XII “Kinderszenen- Child's Play”: Thirteen internationally renowned artists were invited to create works that reflected on the nature of being a child today. The exhibition was held in the Gross Leuthen Castle which had been used as an orphanage during the second world war. Your works were exhibited in the room adjacent to those of Louise Bourgeois. Although the forms are reminiscent of both toys and children, is there are serious side to the work? Could you please explain the title, and why the title is written in lower case? 

Rohkunstbau was an impressive show to be a part of. The curator, Mark Gisbourne, has a real sensitivity for inviting artists from different backgrounds and at varying stages of their career. I was clearly the unknown in the show and was at first quite intimidated to hear that Louise Bourgeois, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Michael Sailsdorfer, Via Lewandowski and a bunch of other artists whose work I knew well were to have their work installed in the rooms next to the one I was given.

My installation for Rohkunstbau consisted of around 300 individual plaster ‘blob’ sculptures scattered across a white, felt covered floor. The light in the room was dimmed and to one side I projected a video animation of flowing blob forms. The projection was accompanied by a soundtrack of squeaks and music that paralleled the movement going on in the video. 

The installation was set up in a room that was the former sleeping quarters for children who were living in the castle when it was still used as an orphanage. I chose to dampen the lighting and soften the acoustics of the room in order to give the space a more intimate and potentially sinister feel. Although the installation as a whole was quite playful in nature, there was a clear sense of a darker underbelly, a sense of distance from the real world toward one of dreams and fantasy.

The title I chose for the work was “uschi and irvin make merry masquerades”. I chose this title largely for its sound and suggestiveness of childhood games but it does have some further meaning for me. Uschi is my mother’s name and refers to her fond memories of growing up for a time in a small castle in the north of Germany. She and many other families were living in the castle as ‘refugees’, post world-war II. The second name in the title, ‘irvin’, is a nod to Irvin S. Yearworth who is best known for directing the classic 1958 horror/science fiction film ‘The Blob’.

The decision to use lower case writing for the title was a way to keep it all less formal and bring out the innocence in the piece as well as the underlying darkness.

10. You moved to Berlin and are presently based there. How does the art scene differ from Australia? Is Berlin more conducive to producing art? Do you intend to come back to Australia?

I have been based in Berlin for the past five years. I met my wife here and we have recently had our first child together. Berlin can be an exciting place to live and work for an artist. There’s always something happening on any given day or night and that makes for a great place to meet other artists, curators, gallerists etc. and to get involved in various projects. It’s also not a bad place to hide out and make work. Berlin is known for being one of the most affordable cities in Europe and cheap studios and apartment can still be found.

There are many differences between Berlin’s art scene and Australia’s. The main difference I see is the sheer size of it here. The number of artists living and working here from all over the world is quite amazing. And that is reflected in the amount and quality of galleries, museums, art spaces and art related festivals and events situated here. In comparison to Australia the scene is also more international, which is to be expected of a city planted in the middle of Europe and with a large immigrant population, but also has something to do with Germany as a whole being a very outward looking country, always interested in what’s going on in other parts of the world.

I am not convinced that Berlin is any more conducive to producing art than Australia. One can draw a lot of inspiration from what is going on here but there are also many more distractions to keep you from doing your own work.

I try to make it back to Australia at least once a year to visit family and friends and to exhibit or plan projects. I do hope to return to Australia some time in the near future. There are many things that I miss about the place and I would really like for my son to experience at least part of his childhood growing up in Australia.

11. Could you please talk about the driving force behind the installation, 'All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe', 2008. Could you also please talk about KoCA Weimar. 

KoCA Weimar, or the Kiosk of Contemporary Art as it was called then, was a small newspaper stand, an architectural remnant from East German times that was acquired by a group of artists to use as a public exhibition space. I first saw this kiosk while visiting friends in Weimar in 2007. I was immediately taken by the architectural form of the kiosk and was working at the time on ideas using adhesive vinyl patters that I thought would be perfect for this site 

The friends I was staying with in Weimar at the time put me in contact with the artists who were running the space and they then later invited me to put forward a proposal for my installation.

I’m not sure really what the driving force behind this installation was. It was a very instinctive and intuitive desire to do something with the KoCA architecture. I was working a lot at the time with computer cut adhesive vinyl patterns and was working on ideas for light boxes. I liked the idea of the kiosk itself becoming a light box, a freestanding sculptural form. The introduction of a smoke machine inside the kiosk was a last minute decision and worked well in diffusing the interior light and in transforming and animating the architecture into a living, breathing object.

Interview: Sculpture and the Enemies Magazine, p.28-32, July - September 2011

Switched on by creative dynamo

Those scratching their heads over the strange figure we are being asked to associate with during the 2008 Adelaide Festival will be pleased to know they're in good company. The artist responsible is not entirely sure what it is. South Australia’s Michael Kutschbach says the curious blob-like shape appeared in his work a number of years ago. It has since been inveigling itself into almost everything he does. “I don’t really know what it is,” he says. “I find it a lot more interesting to produce something that raises questions rather than gives answers – something I can look at and go, ‘wow, that’s interesting, but I don’t really know why’.

“At the same time each body of work has its concerns – technology and the use of technology, decoration and ornament and how they function, the way graphic design and architecture affects us. These are all things I’m very interested in.”

Go, you little dynamo, go! – the slightly alien, 1.8m tall red and white sculpture that seems to eyeball you from the cover of the 2008 Adelaide Festival program – made its appearance at the Festival launch in October. Pulled on to the stage in a crate by artistic director Brett Sheehy, it arrived with a bang in a cloud of smoke when the crate suddenly exploded. The effect was a bit like the astonishment experienced by characters in a movie when they find the spaceship they were expecting contains friendly cargo. Adding to the intrigue was the discovery that between now and the festival this benign creature would grow into a family of 10.

“In a way it’s a mascot for the festival,” says Kutschbach, 32. “Brett Sheehy was very clear that he wanted something that would attempt to embody the festival. So far the response has been very positive. It seems to put a smile on people’s faces, which is wonderful.” Kutschbach says pop art may provide a way into the work. “People can read what they want into it but for me it has references to art history and to modernism, and to sculptural traditions of abstract art,” he says. “But on the surface it’s designed as a people’s sculpture. When we get a few more made, and they start popping up around the city at festival time, the public will have a chance to get a bit closer to it.”

While Kutschbach has been thrust into the spotlight with Go, you little dynamo, go! – affectionately referred to as the “gizmo” among festival staff – to those in the know he’s one of the state’s most exciting young artists. His work has been included in important group and solo exhibitions here and overseas, and bought for public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of SA. Presently based in Germany, he was among a small group of artists singled out to watch at the 2006 Cologne Art Fair, and he was included in an annual list of 50 promising emerging artists in the British visual arts journal Contemporary Magazine. He has received numerous residencies and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant from the U.S. to support his work over the next few months. Last year he showed in Germany alongside leading contemporary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Dzama, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Laura Ford.

Melbourne-born, Kutschbach moved to Adelaide in 1996 after studying at the Victorian College of the Arts. He was offered a studio at Adelaide Central School of Art and was already familiar with the city. As a child, he made regular trips to SA with his brother to visit relatives. Awards gave him the opportunity to travel overseas and he gravitated to Germany, where his parents were born and he still has family. Now he is based in Berlin with his German-born wife. The couple married in Adelaide last year and hope to one day divide their time between Germany and Adelaide. Kutschbach says he makes a living in Berlin with his art, and framing work for other artists in a city that is “overrun with artists”.

Nunn, Louise. Switched on by creative dynamo, The Advertiser, 24/2/2008 (review)

crash test at seth’s arc

Patterns operate on a very deep level within our biological organization. Rhythms and patterns lie at the heart of all life processes. Tangible or intangible patterns are the fundamental structures that bind everything together. Principally we are patterns.

Indeed engineer Charles Babbages accurately designed his Analytical Machine, the precursor to the modern computer, on a principle that had been developed by the French silk weaver Jacquard who had employed punch cards to direct the manufacturing of complicated patterns in brocade fabrics. From this as much pragmatic as metaphorical integration of decorative patterns and abstract algebra, come Michael Kutschbach’s latest works. As matrices they refer to how the weaving of then has retreated behind the camouflage of technological progress. 

Michael Kutschbach’s works possess a confident, idiosyncratic look that suggest that the importance of the aesthetic cannot be dismissed. Biomorphic forms that conflate the traditions of abstract sculpture, echoes of design and comics, have and continue to dominate. The works present a remarkable, curious kind of playfulness. The objects cause viewers to grin; they depict a miniature world from another galaxy. New is the emergence of ornamental graphics, although the repetitive wall treatments from previous study groups of amorphous beings signal a tendency.

For years Michael Kutschbach has explored an extensive array of diverse techniques, mediums and artistic approaches: from his beginning as an abstract painter to the ever-developing, pop-esque, self-sticking vinyl plots that cover walls, furniture and windows or, in a similar form but different materiality, appear on wallpaper or are applied to textiles, to the blobs that are formed from plaster. Over a longer period these appear in various sizes and groupings- – monochrome, colored or chromed, and their formal language is repeated contemporaneously in his digital animations.

A series of various sized, black felt loops is the latest work. At first view these objects, in their dark black elegance, have something dominant and exceedingly masculine about them. Upon closer inspection, an equally black, ornamental velvet appliqué visibly emerges on the endless, self-looping surfaces. These works link to and yet contrast with a new group of mounted computer graphics while pursuing and broadening the rhetoric of the proceeding series through the reduction of color. The interplay between sharpness and blurriness opens up scenes of tinier pictograms and eccentric characters. That another layer of vinyl has been applied to the complex graphic makes the work much more communicative.

By the end of the 90s Kutschbach began experimenting with biomorphic forms through painting and elementary sculptural structures. Influences from architectural language, product design and developments in graphic design are visible and deliberate. Above all, the advantage of deciding on a readable source of inspiration is that this reference averts primary art-based associations and methods of argumentation. In this way Kutschbach’s purposefully articulated ornamentation, which refutes the romantic claim of an artwork’s originality in its repetitive structure and anchoring in the everyday, reveals the historical division between art and design as questionable, if not altogether negligent misinterpretation.

Instead the material opens up a possibility to reflect upon the entire popular realm of design from industrial product design, to decoration to advertising. This holds especially true for the vinyl stickers that thematically link the past several years and finally end up covering surfaces as serial wallpapers; separated they can also function as graffiti tags. Kutschbach consciously mixes art and design. He plays with suggestive causal interrelationships that are potentially simply a matter of analogies and confronts the consciously critical questions regarding the difference between art and a real object with ideas for the design or aesthetic optimization of our living environment.

With Marge, Gretel, Otto, Celia, Uschi or Irvin we dive into an associative world of animated beings, whose communicative desires, through titles such as 'uschi and irvin make merry masquerades (sheeping sleep)', 'where celia sticks it to stanley' or 'elf farm raffle', are triggered and the starting point of a possible story or dialogue is presented.

Jendricke, D. Crash test at seth’s arc. Catalogue Essay. Greenaway Art Gallery, 2007

Contemporary Annual, 2006

‘It’s blob, it’s lasercut, it breathes, it moves, it’s alive’. In 2005, Australian artist Michael Kutschbach participated in the Rohkunstbau XII exhibition Kinderszenen (Child’s Play) at Gross Leuthen Castle (an erstwhile orphanage) near Berlin with twelve international artists including Louise Bourgeois, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Laura Ford and Marcel Dzama.

Kutschbach’s Kinderszenen work uschi and irvin make merry masquerades [sheeping sleep] (2005) - a floor installation of his trademark sculptural biomorphic forms and a DVD projection with equally quirky ‘blob music’ soundtrack by Duann Scott – was notable on a number of levels. A preoccupation with surface (albeit a surface in flux, ‘capable of infinite adaptation, manipulation and transformation’) dominates his oeuvre. Yet the unequivocally white and unembellished sculptural objects for Kinderszenen – created during a Berlin winter, when the city was shrouded in snow – represented an uncharacteristic repudiation of colour and ‘skin’, since Kutschbach has repeatedly demonstrated that he is an accomplished colourist. 

Although the multi-award winning Kutschbach has typically given his works idiosyncratic titles that are without significance, unusually ‘uschi’ refers to his German mother and Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. was the director of the 1958 cold-war, sci-fi film The Blob. Punchier and funnier than its predecessors, the mostly monochromal globules of the 2003 strawberry ut’s (trudy’s turn) animation made way in uschi and irvin make merry masquerades for colourful and variously-patterned biomorphs that sensuously hover, divide, amalgamate, multiply, metamorphose. Momentarily resembling old-fashioned carpet bowls, several were differentiated by an assertive black spot, suggesting the possibility of a more sinister reading (viruses, diseased cells), but Kutschbach is adamant that his animations are intended as ‘upbeat’ works.  

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems paradoxical that Kutschbach’s ongoing blob aesthetic made its first appearance in 1998 as a painting – the consequence of a gestural mark, made with the heel of the artist’s hand (an interesting genesis, given his subsequent and systematic distancing-strategy). There were for example, no perceptible brush strokes in the luscious automotive-glossy surfaces and intense chromatics that characterised the sweet violet series (2001), in which several of the paintings insinuated themselves around the corners of the gallery – thereby anticipating a heightened emphasis on a more liquid materiality. 

In a satirical reference to the perjorative critical use of the expression ‘wallpaper’, the evolution of Kutschbach’s biomorphs achieved a satisfying sense of circularity in late 2005 with the exhibition at Adelaide’s Greenaway Art Gallery of eight metres of computer-generated wallpaper, inscribed with multiple blob motifs (a resolution paralleled in the comparable evolution of the blob-motif’s negative, cartoon-like outline). 

With deceptive effortlessness, the elliptical trajectory of Kutschbach’s fluid and ever-evolving practice migrates seamlessly between disparate media – painting, works on paper, sculpture, installation, DVD animation. The use of the term ‘masquerade’ in the title of the work for Kinderszenen is instructive, since in the manner of his animated, chameleon globules that sheath themselves in alternating colours and patterns, Kutschbach enduringly masks a serious and intensive investigation of surface and form, necessitating labour-intensive methods of production, with an engaging veneer of playfulness.  

Wendy Walker, 2006

 Walker, Wendy. Michael Kutschbach (profile), Contemporary 2006 Annual, 2006

Surface in Flux: Michael Kutschbach

Nearly a decade ago, Michael Kutschbach indirectly unleashed a form that has proliferated and consumed his practice to date, manifesting itself in a range of media, from paintings, reliefs and sculptures, to mammoth mixed-media installations and hi-tech multimedia projects.

The form in question emerged in 1998 when the artist inadvertently made a gestural mark with the palm of his hand on a white enamelled board using oil paint. The result of this unintentional gesture was a curious, enticing blob that immediately absorbed the artist, directed his subsequent work, and which continues to preoccupy his prolific output. 

Kutschbach’s fascination with the blob derives from his longstanding inquiry into painting’s position in a contemporary visual landscape overflowing with fluid, constantly shifting surfaces (artificial, reflective, translucent, holographic, electronic).  As an expanding, organic surface in continuous flux, the blob, for Kutschbach, serves as an exemplary analogue for the present-day visual landscape.  In reflecting on this amorphous figure, Kutschbach writes,  The blob motif that occurs throughout my practice is a form […] without a fixed state, it is active and lively, unstable and unpredictable, continually in flux, capable of being divided or multiplied infinitely and reformed again into a single form.

In practice, with every new corpus of work, the protean blob has assumed a plurality of faces, materials and techniques, including: hand-painted, cellular-like stickers; computer-cut vinyl adhesives that resemble membranes, distorted hoops or ‘speech-balloons’; luminous, lacquered plaster globules whose wilted forms conjure confectionary (picture gigantic, glossy Nerds candy); laser-cut, Perspex and aluminium reliefs with Anime colours and styling; and shiny, shape-shifting 3D computer-animated biomorphic forms. 

The driving force behind Kutschbach’s practice is a desire to visualise the transformative power of paint and surface. From the luscious, candy-coloured plaster blobs with their alluring acrylic coating, to their wobbly, mutating and morphing virtual counterparts, Kutschbach strives to develop surfaces that are seamless, fluid, organic, mobile, seemingly alive and perpetually shifting. 

The Adelaide-based artist has an impressive list of critically acclaimed solo exhibitions in South Australia to his credit, and has also participated in a number of important interstate and international collective exhibitions.  As the recipient of several prestigious awards and international residencies, Kutschbach’s extensive travels abroad (including Toko and Berlin) have expanded the scope and formalism of his art and enhanced its audacious engagement with new media.   

Audiences can expect a bolder, grander and deliciously unconventional treatment and transmutation of the blob in Kutschbach’s forthcoming show.

 Hosseini, Varga. Surface in Flux: Michael Kutschbach, Australian Art Collector, issue 34 (October-November), p.241, 2005

Kinderszenen - from June 26 to August 28, 2005 - Wasserschloss Groß Leuthen

The Rohkunstbau XII “Kinderszenen - Child’s Play” reflects the history of the building as well as the individual memories of the artists. Rohkunstbau XII is a trip down memory lane - a journey which is rewritten each time it is taken, always revealing its relationship to the here and now in new and unexpected ways.

 Thirteen internationally renowned artists have travelled to the countryside to find inspiration as they remember their childhood and reflect on the nature of being a child today. They have created their works specifically for Gross Leuthen Castle, which during and after the Second World War served as an orphanage and has thus for over a half century been witness to hundreds of experiences, children’s dreams and children’s fates. Very different from one another, the rooms of the castle mirror the conglomerate of styles that characterise the whole structure. Their spellbinding diversity has served both as a challenge and inspiration to the participating artists. Robert Schumann, the romantic composer who wrote his thirteen pieces “Kinderszenen” in 1838 reflects upon childlike impressions from an adult point of view. A more poetic understanding of “Child’s Play” makes reference to imaginative powers and remembrance in generell.

.......

In Michael Kutschbach’s installation we have a fictive playful environment, an array of organic forms like melting biomorphic bricks, a passing reference no doubt to the toys created by Friederich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, whom the artist recently discovered. The analogy between the child’s play-room and the artist’s studio are very important to this Australian artist, and since it is located in one of the sleeping rooms of the former orphanage the work is called uschi and irvin make merry masquerades (sheeping sleep). The deliberate use of the lower case by the artist in the work’s title reinforces and underlines that which lies hidden beneath the surface of the mind. And, it’s location next to the room containing the Louise Bourgeois works further emphasises those troubling mentors of the unconscious. 

Gisbourne, Mark, extract from: Scenes from Childhood. Rohkunstbau 12 catalogue essay, 2005 p.32 Rohkunstbau XII, p.138

Mikey’s world, (his beau monde).

As far as I can tell, it began in an almost scholarly fashion. A blob of paint, instinctively smudged by the artist’s hand: a consciously arbitrary starting point. (As perhaps, in this modern world, which mocks those who try to make sense of it, the only place that an artist can start, is arbitrary.) John Cage might have approved of the blob, for it was as near to random and empty as you could get—without dumping painting altogether. Mikey observed the blob’s surface, listened to its silence, and hand painted the random gesture to various scales. He sculpted it, traced its outline, and mirrored its characteristics in abstract photographs. This ‘process orientated’ practice was as up to date as you get; firmly located in a contemporary context through its responsiveness to the dazzling surfaces that surround us in a consumer society. He started to play with consigning out the industrial manufacture of his ‘blob’…

Indeed, words like ‘playful’ and ‘light’, are about all Mikey does to direct your interpretation of his work. He seems to be saying, ‘don’t try to read too much into it, don’t go and intellectualise it, just enjoy it, like I do.’ And you can’t help enjoying it-fuck, I’d even enjoy my own art, if it looked half as good as M’s. Anyway, it has been an intelligent, scholarly and investigative play. Extensive travel overseas has meant that M’s practice is highly informed about historical and contemporary trends in visual art, and his practice is underpinned by thorough research. At the level of process, it has been purposeful about exhausting the possibilities of new materials, freeing painting from the boundaries of the picture frame, and inventive with technology. What we’ve seen is the prettiest, most radiant tip of an iceberg. It rises gracefully from a solid foundation of practise that is immersed in the often-freezing water of contemporary art and culture (sic). 

Yet, research and process cannot account for what it has come to today. It seemed like, one perfectly ordinary day, the shapes just woke up and started to chatter. Mikey’s motif became Mikey’s pets. Affectionate little things, they played at the birds and the bees. He told me that he made ten of the little sculptures one night, and the next morning there was eleven. Not quite in jest, he said that they seemed to be multiplying.

It seems so natural for the blob to have started to breathe, wobble, bend and squeak. But I want to stress that this sudden liveliness is not merely a logical extension of process-orientated work or a reflection of a fashionable cutesy aesthetic. It is not the 3D animation software that has fertilized, Frankenstein like, inert matter to create life. Nor is the cartoony style of the wall paintings just a natural characteristic of laser cut vinyl. I think it is fair to say that previously the blob was a contingent form on which to hang experimental processes and techniques that reflected aesthetic experiences of contemporary life. Yet now we see that all of this time, Mikey has been nurturing a wonderfully eccentric personality within his blob. In this show, where that personality is fully hatched for the first time, we no longer locate the work against our experience in the ‘real’ world, but let ourselves be charmed by the personalities of Mikey’s world. It’s so nice in Mikey’ world, all those pretty colours and peculiar things.

Television space is fishbowl space. There’s a world going on in there’ (Vito Acconci). One of the things about the plasma screen is that it is not a box, like televisions are. Not an aquarium that we look into. Nor is the plasma screen anything like the experience of projection, where, in the dark room, we become totally immersed in, and enter into, the world that is projected. Instead, when the plasma screen gets turned on, it brings things, hologram-like, into our world. Similarly, when we turn the stereo on, we almost feel like whoever sings or whatever makes the sound is in the room with us. Sculptures, of course, always share the space of a room with us. M’s Vinyls crawl around the gallery, celebrating its walls, rather than themselves as ‘paintings’. The work in this exhibition has this presence. The characters from Mikey’s world have joined us in ours’.

Strickland, James. mikey’s world, (his beau monde), stanley, beatrice and friends, Greenaway Art Gallery, 2003

Luxe, Calm, Volupté and Something Else: Michael Kutschbach

Michael Kutschbach makes good-looking work. Super-glossy, glib, seemingly effortless, it’s aesthetically pleasing and apparently perfectly superficial. And that’s OK. Beauty’s back after all – not central, perhaps, but a force nonetheless – it’s something that’s once again valuable in itself. But it’s different too – not just old aesthetic prejudices carted out, but a new sense of pleasure responsive to the contemporary world. The gloss enamel finish, the smooth perfect forms, these are what give us pleasure. Michael Kutschbach’s work is beautiful in this contemporary way. In his paintings, gestures are reduced to surface and that’s a photo-finish surface that gives nothing away, except pleasure. 

Which is not to say there is nothing going on. Kutschbach’s forms are like teeming protozoa. His concerns are traditionally aesthetic – but he uses contemporary processes and forms to articulate these concerns in a vital way. Flat, abstract, they’re often suffused with colour, their forms mobile and labile, blurred or amorphous, shifting as if caught in movement, moving beyond the frame. This principle of flux is something we respond well to – it’s not threatening, but life-affirming. You look at these growing, expanding forms, and you feel that growth, warmth, expansion. No limits, a world without boundaries – where everything is warm, soft, empathically modelled to one’s own forms. It’s a good feeling, and contemporary too – we live in a world of flux – a mobile fast shifting world of surfaces. 

Kutschbach’s practice is process-based to an extent – exploring materials, exhausting themes, formal experimentation – but it goes beyond a faith in paint, or the act of painting itself. It goes beyond a look or style too of course, but that’s what is most immediately striking about Kutschbach’s oeuvre. Even his experimentation it seems is methodical, controlled, nurtured, exploited. But there’s something else in Kutschbach’s work. Process, work – thought even – there’s an invisibility to these things, but despite being self-effacing, like his brushstrokes and other more idiosyncratic methods of mark-making, they’re there, underpinning the work, making the pleasure possible, and showing up as a persistent undercurrent. 

Kutschbach’s first solo exhibition [Adelaide Central Gallery, 1998] featured large immersive abstracts painted from out of focus polaroids. Big beautiful blurs, these works were basically colourfields, but reconfigured in an acceptable way through photography, they came out looking cool and contemporary. It was impossible to tell exactly what the photographs [and thus the paintings] represented, but the sources were invariably banal [some at least, Kutschbach has said, were shots of shelf displays in a supermarket]. The paintings derived their impact purely from their physicality, their seductive size and their tactile painterly surface. The series was not without a certain referential anxiety though. Unlike, say, Richter’s use of photographic imagery, the source photographs Kutschbach used were taken specifically for the purpose of making paintings, thus, one imagines, contrived and selected for their ‘painterly’ appearance. So, it would seem, the paintings looked like paintings [that is to say ‘painterly’] because the photographs did. Boy! 

This self-referentiality has been a constant throughout Kutschbach’s practice. He based the work in a second solo show at Adelaide Central Gallery [2000] on a multicoloured biomorphic form, a motif that has featured in various guises in much of his work since. Vaguely bean-shaped, with colours blended together rather like rainbow plasticine, the design originated from a ‘painting’ made by squishing paint with the palm of his hand. Using the motif repeatedly in this show, Kutschbach toyed with the purely decorative, in particular with large white canvasses which sported the blobs in an ‘all over’ design like wallpaper or giftwrap. In the same show, Kutschbach carried the theme over into a group of small sculptural blobs finished in either high-gloss white or chrome. Grouped together on the floor, the look was part sci-fi [think mercurial morphing scenes], and partly like a mouthful of malformed teeth.  Certainly their polished appearance belied the low-tech manner in which they were made [the forms themselves were in fact simply plaster moulded inside balloons]. 

Increasingly, Kutschbach’s paintings have taken on the appearance of industrially manufactured products as well, with his utilisation of enamels and auto-paints, aluminium supports, airbrushing and digital prints. His photographically-derived paintings retain that atmospheric blur, but are now smaller, super-glossy, seamless, brushstroke free. In his exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery last year, several of these were paired with wall mounted MDF panels sprayed a monochromatic high- gloss acrylic-lacquer, and plugged with neatly fitted kidney-shaped panels of a slightly different shade, or sporting biomorphic concavities. The paintings [all 50x50cms] were contrived to be displayed in a frieze around the gallery, and so utilised the constraints of the gallery walls, wrapping themselves around corners and support posts like perfectly made to measure fittings. Not so well behaved was a huge yellow ‘table’ exhibited with the paintings; based on the form of one of the inserts in the MDF wall works, a ubiquitous blob, bent to fit around a corner, the piece was ridiculously enlarged and propped in the centre of the room. This recycling of the form is further evidence to Kutschbach’s process-based working method, but also revealing is his decision to provide a stylistic and aesthetic counterpoint to the otherwise rather well-mannered paintings. 

Other Kutschbach’s paintings are luscious blurry colourfields punctuated with delineated silhouettes – simplified cartoonish bubbles – that resemble speech balloons, or racing tracks, or something else you can’t quite define. The silhouettes here are painted over or scratched into the immaculate surface of the panels, or the paint is meticulously wiped away with a finger, although this is so neatly done that actually recognising the hand of the artist on the otherwise slick surface is difficult. At times the cartoon is not perfectly bound either, extending beyond the borders of the painted panel, slipping off the edges to be painted on the wall. It never gets out of control though. It’s more like a tracing of a projection, a layering, or a sanitised exploration of space, than any messy sort of boundary crossing.

The closest Kutschbach’s work comes to referencing anything even slightly abject is another large yellow flat blob-shaped sculpture made to be displayed like a spillage on the ground, a little like a surrealist melt [particularly in its showing at Riddoch Gallery where it seemed to ooze out from under a false wall]. The piece was perfectly hermetic, and its colouring a clean and artificial yellow rather than one of possible corporeal origin. 

Kutschbach has reconfigured the paintings as installations in other instances as well. In Roundhouse [220 Hindley Street 2000; and recreated for a sort of mini- retrospective show at Riddoch Gallery, Mt Gambier 2001] he paintedthe walls on the upper floor of the gallery a high-gloss purple and dotted them with multicoloured hand-painted stickers based on his palm-print painting. The work was, I think, more playful than totally immersive or affecting. Viewed from a distance, or with eyes blurred, the effect was something like gobs of chewing gum stuck to the walls, reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s lickable wallpaper maybe. 

In the Contemporary Art Centre of SA’s Project Space during the Adelaide Festival earlier this year, Kutschbach presented his computer-generated graphic images as vinyl cut-outs stuck directly to the walls and floor [some straddling both]. Each outline was a simple single colour cartoon, similar to the anthropomorphic silhouettes layered over his paintings. His least painterly work to date, this was also in a way his most suggestive. These weird empty speech bubbles, or stylised Rorschach inkblots, filled the gallery space, whilst also remaining empty, ready for projection. The shapes themselves were perfectly judged, so close to resembling something familiar that they enticed you to keep searching for an elusive solution or meaning, without actually giving anything up. Less sensuous than the paintings, of course, but there was a different sort of pleasure to be had here. Because whatever else it is, Kutschbach’s work is undeniably, and unashamedly, pleasurable. And whether it has to be worked for or not, pleasure after all is good in itself. Indeed if Jeremy Bentham is right, [and who’s to say he’s not in this increasingly utilitarian society of ours] pleasure is the only good. 

Currently Kutschbach has in his studio a group of panels, subtly, minimally modelled, the edges contoured like pieces of laminex benchtop. These will form the basis for a new painting [or installation], fitting together into a single contoured modular unit, glossy, and largely monochromatic. The work, as I imagine it, reminds me of that quote from Matisse: that he intended his paintings to be like an armchair in which one could relax after a hard day’s work. Kutschbach’s painting and sculpture is a little like this too. But against Matisse’s well-stuffed armchair, Kutschbach’s work brings to mind a cool, minimal modular lounge.

Bilske Maria, Luxe, Calme, Volupte and Something Else: Michael Kutschbach Broadsheet, vol 31 no2, p.14 - 15, 2002