Commodity Flows and Target Groups
Henrik Schrat's cut-out signposts in the jungle of the economy
Ludwig Seyfarth
10/2005

Where conditions become complex, the power imagination is needed to keep one's orientation. Since time immemorial, fairytales, fables and legends, which like parables demonstrate with easily understood examples what is right or wrong, good or evil, and which path one should take, have helped in this.
Finding the right path is difficult when you don't see the forest for the trees, which actually means that because of all the trees one doesn't recognize them anymore. Too many trees were for example the 'exaggeratedly large stocks of information' which Niklas Luhmann identified as 'the real problem of the Enlightenment'.
The beginning shocks of the experience of modernity, to speak with Walter Benjamin, and a world that started to completely change through industrialization, overtaxed the capacities of perception of many contemporaries, who were swept away to imaginary flights by the greatest mass event before the French revolution, the first balloon flights. The view from above, the overview, did not always clarify conditions, but rather, it often caused a reeling of the senses, like Jean Paul makes his aeronaut Gianozzo experience extensively.
The attempt to explain the horizontal view consists of felling many trees so that an open space appears and contours become visible again. That was the programme of the drawing and print of classicism which reflected the world - or rather, an ideal of beauty derived from antiquity - almost only in pure lineation. The art form of the silhouette, which plays a decisive role in Henrik Schrat's art, is also based on the expressivity of the line.
After the tradition of East Asian shadow plays became known in Europe, in the seventeenth century contoured shadow images were cut out of black paper und pasted onto white cartons. The drawing of silhouettes with black ink onto glass or ivory also became increasingly popular. This art received its name from Louis XI's finance minister Etienne de Silhouette. There are different stories about how Silhouette came to this honour: either through a silhouette picture which was a fitting caricature of the minister's exaggerated thriftiness, or perhaps because of his preference for silhouettes in the decoration of his apartment. That, too, would go with his miserliness, because silhouettes were cheaper than precious paintings.
The most prevalent form of the silhouette was the portrait which made the profile stand out in contours. But patterns and ornaments were also cut out with scissors. The art of the silhouette, which as it were transforms things into their own shadows, is a vivid equivalent to the frequently articulated view (underpinned theoretically by Marx), that the capitalist transformation of objects into the exchange value of commodities gives them a shadowy and sign-like character.
Writers of Romanticism, like Adalbert von Chamisso or E.T.A Hoffmann, have found many poetic metaphors for this, and in so doing also awarded the silhouette literary honours.
As early as the mid-eighteenth century, a famous English landscape gardener started to cut silhouettes directly into nature. What we today see as a typically English park landscape can be traced back to the ubiquitous activity of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. He designed extensive landscapes by imposing order on the existing visual impression and rearranging it. He always based his work on the possibilities he found, which gave him the name 'Capability'. No excess, nothing superfluous, nothing capricious: Brown's silhouetting of the landscape has nothing to do with the geometric cutting of hedges and plants typical of Baroque gardens, which Alexander Pope made fun of by calling it the trimming of courtiers. His art consists in apparently only underscoring nature, to subtly give it contours. We know that he called his planned interventions 'improvements', and described them as punctuation marks, to visually illustrate them and make them clear: 'Now there I make a comma, and there, where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject…'
Capability Brown assigns to nature something like a linguistic syntax, and it is precisely that which gives it a graphic silhouette. In this, too, he is 'economical', because the connection of linear movement and pointed breakthrough is to this day characteristic of the representation of economic processes. It is also the structural principle of the skyline, of which Capability Brown could perhaps be considered the inventor. The city silhouettes of the most important economic centres can be seen as an analogy to the graphic representation of the course of share values.
Graphic representations of complex processes, however, have only meaning for people who are familiar with the material, such as events on the stock exchange. For everybody else, the line remains abstract and meaningless, like so much since reality slipped, as Bertolt Brecht remarked, 'into the functional line'. A photograph of the Krupp factories does not say anything about what the Krupp factories really are. What happens inside of them. And today, in this advanced electronic age, often one can't really recognize a production facility from the outside.
The production of material goods increasingly becomes a mere accessory to an 'information' that is being transported, such as a specific attitude to life for which the commodity now is merely a sign. When 'target groups' are focussed on in order to direct the 'commodity flows', the language of economists works with visual metaphors which however do not become visually concrete.
In his silhouettes, which are often entitled after such economic terms, Henrik Schrat literally cuts the lost visual imagination back to size.
He confronts the abstract language of the economy with a magical joy in narrative and fable, and thus brings this language back to a literal understanding. This insistence on the power of visual imagination is by no means naive. The forms of representation chosen by Schrat are hardly able to provide a parable-like orientation in today's economic world. When the silhouettes take on larger spatial dimensions (and become three-dimensional as well), as is the case for example in Pumpstation und Sterntaler ['Pump Station and Star Coins'], which fills a large shop window at the entrance of a building of the KfW Bank Group in Berlin, we quickly get disoriented in the labyrinth of mirrorings. When Schrat seems to enlighten us about complex processes, and at the same time leads us completely astray, he holds up a satirical mirror to the absence of experience of the economic information age. This mirror reminds us constantly that we should always visually imagine the terms with which we move in the world. Of course, an artist like Schrat cannot explain everything that is behind them. But he shows us very precisely what it means today to not be able to see the forest for the trees.