Agnes Scherer at Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg

A society can be described by what it desires. By what it rubs into its skin, swallows, injects, uploads, gambles with, monetizes, disciplines, tracks on its wrist. By the little rituals by which it tries to remain alive.

Agnes Scherer’s exhibition Three Wicked Games departs from an inventory of contemporary obsessions and lets it drift backwards, or sideways, into two so-called tapestry cartoons by Francisco Goya: Blind Man’s Bluff (1789) and The Straw Manikin (1791). Both depict folk games. In the first, a blindfolded figure stands at the center of a circle, trying to strike one of the surrounding players with a spoon. Traditionally, the game could be read as an allegory of love’s blindness: desire that moves without sight. In the second, a straw man is tossed into the air by women, a carnivalesque inversion of gendered power. They belong to a period before the most explicit darkness of his later work, yet they are already troubled.

Scherer recognizes in these games a structure that feels uncannily contemporary. What caught her attention is their structure. In both compositions, a powerless figure occupies the center. Around it, society arranges itself as choreography.

Someone is blind, someone is thrown, someone laughs, and someone waits for their turn. Goya undoubtedly lived in wicked times: under the long shadow of the Inquisition, amid courtly structures of patronage, during the convulsions of Enlightenment, reaction, imperial violence and war. He was inside the system and besides it; commissioned by power, yet increasingly capable of showing power’s grotesque underside. In his work, the surface of social life often remains intact for just long enough to reveal its instability.

For Three Wicked Games the artist translated Blind Man’s Bluff (1789) and El pelele (1791) into a ghostly puppet-theatre. She quotes the compositions almost one-to-one yet empties the figures of their bodily fullness. Scherer has spoken of no longer wanting to make whole figures. The intact body no longer feels right. It belongs to a fantasy of coherence that the present cannot support. What interests the artist more than the body is life under conditions of late capitalism that is defined by a loop of for-profit transactions and ongoing dependencies.

To Scherer, the contemporary society is ‘‘undead.” Not dead, because it keeps moving. Not alive, because movement alone is not life. It consumes, optimizes, self-documents, gambles, disciplines, performs. It goes to Pilates. It measures sleep. It counts protein. It looks at its own face through the machine. It waits for likes. It buys a face cream. It speculates on bitcoins. It asks for delivery. It mistakes feedback for recognition, exposure for intimacy, and self-control for freedom. Three Wicked Games can therefore also be considered sadomasochistic structures (not in the narrow sense of sexual subculture, but as a broader grammar of power and disempowerment). Domination and submission here are folded into one another. The subject wants to be seen, ranked, measured, improved, punished, rewarded. The subject participates in the system that exhausts it because the system also gives it an illusion of agency.

The three wicked games of the exhibition are diagrams of social relations: circles of pleasure and punishment, theatres of dependence, and/or economies of thrill. The blindfolded player, the tossed puppet, the laughing crowd; each return as a figure of the present, where agency is promised precisely at the moment it is withdrawn. Scherer’s hollowed figures and suspended from the ceiling do not ask who holds power and who suffers it, but how power becomes ornamental.

What appears at first as play becomes a model of social life: a choreography in which everyone is implicated, or in which everyone is waiting to be thrown. This, too, is the logic of the capitalist system: a set of rules we did not write yet continue to perform.

Curated by Mirela Baciak.
Commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein.