David Weber-Krebs and Jan-Philipp Posmann
In 1967 the art critic Michael Fried made the “strongly disquieting experience of coming upon a literal object”. Fried unexpectedly entered into a theater, the theater of objecthood. The object was one of several black cubes of perfectly symmetrical proportions that appeared on the art scene like alien timeless travelers of our cultural history: From the Egyptian temple of Leto across the Muslim Kaaba to Tony Smith’s sculpture Die from 1962. This lecture performance is an effort in tracing the dialectics of these peculiar apparitions and making the encounter with one of them immediate. „These works are black and they might also be evil minded.“ (Tony Smith 1966)
Inside the Black Cube was developed in residency at zeitraumexit, Mannheim with support from the ARTI research group at Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten.