KunstStückchen

kalff & lessau exhibit in the galery schlachthof

"loyalty is an airy neurotic" judges "sterex" and is right beyond doubt. "sterex" is a digital aphorism machine, a computer program, thought out by sibyll kalff and donald lessau, who have an exhibition right on Good Friday in the "galerie am schlachthof". marcel duchamp would have been utterly pleased with their talkative invention, they would have probably only to fear artcritics like us. for the one-time price that equals my pay-off for this article, "sterex" diffuses nonsense of the highest niveau: " the formalization if the art-order funcitons objectively as the continous pattern of a singular story". there is not much more to add to that.

even if sibyll kalff and donald lessau are blissfully happy about the attempts to talk by their (digital) child, it is not possible to call them a harmless artist couple. maybe they would pass as one, if this therm would have not been completely discredited by HA Schult and Elke Koska. the bohemian life, that they live in a room of hardly 30 square meters would have surely appealed likewise to Puccini and Kaurismäki. they passed as an artist duo in this column once, making you think of think of cindy and bert in the worst case. but that leads us to the right track: kalff and lessau aka "the horse cock kids" are the most famous tape band that never ever played one live gig.

"darling quotes" by sibyll kalff, congregates hundreds of hand coloured cake doylies, on which she stamped with an incorruptibility of a jenny holzer, some of her favourite lines of rock 'n' roll songlines. is there a nicer compliment but david bowie's " you're such a wonderful person but you got problems"? as a matter of fact she really found the programmatic line " and i swear i don't have a gun" in a curt cobain song. kalff and lessau love the endless variation of an idea, that they celebrate with absolutle inexhaustible patience. kalff's work "1000 opunzien" consists of exactly that number of sheets, complimentarily to the prickly pear cactus inked in deep red. her favourite animal is the camel, known as a highly patient animal.

donald lessaus new series fills the second room of the schlachthof galery. he drew hundreds of photos from the tv agenda of the tv magazine "tv movie" along with their subtitles. the laconic style of those subtitles is known, "gong" paraphrased the story of " dr. jeckyll and mr hyde" with recently just 6 words, without telling the secret of the stevenson novella "dr. jeckyll dares a dangerous experiment....". it is soothing, that the tv magaiznes trust in us still being as innocent as the medium demands. our illustration shows liberace, who will still be present on all channels long after his death caused by aids.

lessau had thematized the functioning of the screenmedia in one of his most beautiful works, by stapling numberless photos of one (!) filmstill by the filmclassic "drole de drame" by marcel carnés together in one flip-book. inspite of nothing moving at all,

the spirit of cinema was alive in the flickering in this minimalistic form. a figure in carnés criminal comedy is an author of crime stories who has a secretary that tells him all her stories and who herself heard them from the milkman. that-s exactly the way way kalff and lessau work, who complement eachother perfectly in their serial work.

daniel kothenschulte, stadtrevue, cologne 4/96