One of the strategic principles of the avant-gardes was scandal, a slap in the face aimed at the good taste of an audience reliant on the guarantees provided by the museum context, with a yen for a quick dip in the marshy entropy of established values: code as “confirmation”. For Harry Kipper art, on the other hand, is slippage, catastrophe, landslide,telluric motion, a bursting of the subjective image-bank in the tectonic equilibrium of languages: introduction to breakage. At first this meant working as a duo (with Brian Routh), a miniscule squad that forged its way to the most “avant” outposts, ahead of the rank and file of artists and collective tastes,in veritable performance-ambushes.The expedition to the future organized by the avant-gardes with the precise objective of disrupting the tectonic equilibrium of language becomes a mudslide of aesthetic actions about the present, in which the duo operates by experimenting with new forms of behavior, producing a line of artistic practice based on the polarity anorexic vs. bulimic. In this perspective Duchamp is undoubtedly an anorexic artist, who attributes value to the conceptual skeleton rather than the skin of things ? the urinal becomes a (ready-made) fountain. Picasso, the century?s leading cannibal, is bulimic. Warhol is anorexic, the Transavanguardia bulimic. The lines intersect, and they are always driven by an effort to communicate. An art that paradoxically speeds up its own creative processes, fleeing the present and seeking refuge in the future, from which it expects the confirmation of a renewal of life and behavior.
Entropy becomes, so to speak, a sort of obsession for H. Kipper, vexationart has always felt with respect to communication. Communication of what? With the indeterminacy principle Heisenberg helped art to remain “open work”, and the artist to think that an utterly indeterminate something exists, to be completed later by the observer?s perception and contemplation. This leads to the production of physignomically distorted photos, digitally altered.
With Kipper avant-garde art finally begins to give dignity to the audience, in search of the art?s completion, openly declaring its incompleteness.No longer a total system of knowledge and representation, it new leaves a split, an opening. This strabismus of the artist who lives in the present looking toward the futureto represent the present can offer an idea of this opening, which gradually becomes a philosophy of being and appearing to represent and produce forms.For Kipper the “open work” spoken of by Eco springs precisely from the possibility of utilizing indeterminacy in strategic terms, and restores the determining role of the audience, complementary to that of the artist.From the slap in the face to the offer of responsibility assigned to the voyeur,the person who looks upon the work assumes a role of completion with respect to a formal system organized in terms of problematic reception and active partnership. This is not, in any case, a pursuit of consensus, but instead the acceptance of the microcosm of the work, of the indeterminacy principle that becomes structural. This is not the result of desperation but of the assumption of a historical awareness on the part of the artist: the position “of the traitor”, a lateral position.
The traitor is he who looks at the world, does not accept it and considers modifying it, but does not act, because were he to act he would be a revolutionary. Instead, he retreats into the mental reserve represented by allegory and metaphor. In this space he broods over the need for cross-eyed communication. In this sense, in its ambivalence and ambiguity, the art of H. Kipper discovers the capacity or the possibility of escaping entropy, one-way meaning, significance. In the awareness of being a continuous signifier, a bouncing ball, a “coil” that descends the steps and takes advantage of social distraction to act more effectively,in channels and in broad daylight.
In indeterminacy art discovers its own useful black hole, the ideal opening for the development of a conflictual possibility of socialization. Because the artist,in the moment in which he creates the work, also produces a maximum level of asociality, domination of the world and reduction of the vision of things to his own impulses. Cioran speaks of the elation of the writer at the center of the sentence: imperial inebriation, through the apparent anorexia of writing, the author, art critic, philosopher or artist, condenses a bulimic attitude of absorption of the world. Therefore the indeterminacy of H. Kipper represents an opening to be utilized, the possibility of restoring power to the audience after the slap in the face, offering it a positive, constructive role of accompaniment or completion of his imperious meaning. In other words, the art incites and at this point obligates the audience to take part, to go to work: a “laborer audience”. The viewer can push the button and retreat,in skepticism about contemporary art, or accelerate, be intrigued, enter into a relationship of effort, participation, interaction, creating the link for the imperious meaning of the work.The link of meaning calls for a distance that permits the emission of the signifier, an efficient communication. The present proxemics measures a different distance between art and a society now dominated by communications technologies.
The dematerialized work travels on the web, the phantom has taken the place of the body. Detached from the sedentary spatial condition of the wall or the floor, it rapidly slides past the eyes of the spectator, with an acceleration that produces a vaporization of meaning. Therefore H. Kipper uses art as a phantom-catcher, capturing social attention to impose the fossil radiations of his own imagination, through a cheerfully dream-like utilization of photography and computer techniques.