Various Parts Corners World

Texts and art by Karl-Johan Stigmark, 2007

The warmth from a chair seat (that someone has just left) is in “infrathin” (inframince), writes Marcel Duchamp. When tobacco smoke also has the fragrance of the mouth that exhaled it, the two smells are united through the “infrathin”; “infrathin” is the time between the detonation sound from a rifle (at very near range) and the appearance of the mark of a bullet on the target (at a distance of up to three or four metres). These Duchamp-esque definitions of “infrathin” are one of many possible entry points (“the possible is something ‘infrathin’, Duchamp also writes) into Stigmark’s various parts corners world. This concerns different attempts to define “im/material”, to enlarge or document processes that are in principle impossible to document: minimal or invisible transitions, distances, or small system crashes.
Karl-Johan Stigmark’s conversation with a history of concept art and Fluxus is as pataphysically wilful as it is biographically charged. In earlier pieces, he has travelled to the Sahara, to the exact location of the letter S on a map, in the piece “Vie”, space at the Tensta Art Gallery was expanded to accommodate the image, which in turn was based on a trip to Vienna. In the piece "say yes say no", these words are projected randomly on walls, floor and ceiling. In various parts corners world we can witness the same preoccupation with both the geographical transplantation and the material inscription. The word “HELP” written with paper letters in a window in Damjanich Útcá, “TWO” and “SIDES” written in butter on sheets of glass in Visby, the distance between Plymouth and San Francisco in an index from an atlas, a rainbow-like light spectrum on a wall in Tallinn…
On the one hand we can see “documentation” of Fluxus-like pieces/events: the artist sweeps a car park and plants this material together with water and nourishment in his studio; the artist drops sheets of paper in a stream and then recovers these sheets and takes photographs of them in piles when they have dried. On the other hand there is documentation of dust and other left-over remnants of everyday life provided with “irrational memos”, corners of empty institutions or homely environments (“me and all my corners”), cables and string (“the connection that links the various parts together”), a finger pointing at a point that is too small to see with the naked eye…