In 2010, the Buchholz bookshop window functioned as a device of proximity. Artists appeared beside one another, and attitude took precedence over category – something a book display is for.

Michael Krebber, together with Sebastian Höckelmann, placed Jack Smith and Antonius Höckelmann within a shared field. The relation unfolds temperamentally: anti-professionalism; theatricality against good taste; excess preferred to composition; the artwork understood as situation, ceasing to be an object.

Krebber has repeatedly positioned Smith as a proto-model for a non-heroic avant-garde – one that survives by refusing artistic dignity, taking a position apart from those who claim it.

The Buchholz programme, likewise, constructs unlikely genealogies. The shop window grants the license for an exhibition as occurrence. Outside institutional framing, it remains a proposition.

The window matters. It keeps the event in the register of a remark. At the same time, it is a passage through books – and toward the book to come. The shop hosts the encounter; the book stabilizes it afterwards.

A lineage emerges. Not through influence, but through proximity. Smith becomes a validating figure. The book multiplies the exhibition space.

A key reference within the ecology of Galerie Linger.

Presented by
Michael Krebber
& Sebastian Höckelmann

2012
48 pages
Fully illustrated in colour
Owrps
Silkscreened cover
21.3 × 22.5 cm