Julius von Bismarck: When Platitude Becomes Form, 2023

Medium: Acrylic paint on cloth in cassette with book
Dimensions: Cassette 28,5 × 35,1 × 3,8 cm; Cloth 43 × 56 cm
Edition of 25 + 5 AP
Numbered and signed

Julius von Bismarck’s (b. Breisach am Rhein, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) artistic practice scrutinizes what is commonly thought of as nature. Intertwining visual art and research, his work takes a wide variety of forms: installations, happenings, sculptures, or land art. Voyages—most recently, he traveled to Papua New Guinea—are important points of departure for the genesis of his works, enabling him to decode the interpretive hegemony of Western culture.

The special edition When Platitudes Become Form was created on the Bismarck Sea as an extension of the artist’s Landscape Paintings series, in which he toys with the methods underlying Western representations of the landscape by means of imaging technologies. In the case of When Platitudes Become Form, it is a cloth panel measuring 12 by 9 meters that renders the sea in a novel way: the delicate lines of the painted fabric stretched out over the surface of the water and recorded the Pacific Ocean’s movements, transmuting the real landscape into its abstract likeness. In creating this artistic reproduction of the sea, Bismarck gestures back toward the historic use of engraving in colonial contexts. Under the guise of scholarship, engravings and photographs from the Bismarck Archipelago—a scene of German colonial violence—served to visualize and exoticize distant landscapes. To disrupt the continuity of German appropriation, Julius von Bismarck has championed an effort to rename this and other geographical features in the region.

Divided into thirty equal parts, the work is released as a special edition in a cassette together with the book.