Artist Valentin Beinroth shocked us in 2003 with his collaborative project with Florian Jenett, Freeze! But not all is chaos: he also shows an orderly world in his solo projects, where he engages the regulating forces of Sacred Geometry and Taxonomy.

In 2003, the lucky habitants of Frankfurt would find their lives a tad more interesting when they awoke to realize some suspicious handguns were left all over their city. While the reactions were varied, panic ensued and the culprits were stopped. These were two artists who, in 2009, repeated their feat by convincing the attendants to their exposition to put some handguns in their mouths. Don’t worry, though, all weapons were made of ice.

By now I hope you have figured out that one of the artists is Valentin Beinroth, who continually works with the frontier between order and chaos. Because, when he’s not creating havoc in the otherwise stable members of society, we can find his obsession in objects that quantify the world and carefully dissecting and classifying the pieces of an otherwise hectic world. His work revolves around the precision of geometry, the seemingly identity of reproductions, the arbitrary taxonomy that brings meaning to the world and even flirts with the universal laws of Sacred Geometry, leaving a trail of varied results.

He inhabits the liminal inter-space between the artist and the scientist, making valid argument for the creative force underlying in both. But, of course, we’ll always remember him for having fun while making a city panic.

When did you realize that you wanted to be an artist?

I probably thought of it first as a small kid, but at that time I was also thinking of becoming a fireman. But after finishing school there was a time I started doing some art projects. I founded a "Kunstverein" together with a couple of friends, started a new music band project and organized some exhibitions. Because of this I met a lot of people who were into the arts, and I liked the idea to go on and do my own works as well. So I went to art school. But even then I needed some more time to realize that I (really) wanted to be an artist.



Freeze! was a pretty shocking project. Did you receive any kind of backlash or had any problem because of it? (2003 were fearful times).

I did "Freeze!" together with the artist Florian Jenett in February 2003. And yes, in this fearful time "Freeze" made quite an impact. We placed about 50 hand guns made of black ice in pedestrian areas of the center of Frankfurt, Germany. It worked perfectly, the guns were very realistic looking, and the locations we placed them in immediately evoked questions about what might have happened there. Our main interest in this project was to create situations for the people who would find the ice guns rather than for external observers. We did not specifically watch how people reacted. The reactions we saw were diverse, some would willingly overlook the guns, others would stare at them, then go away. Only a few people decided to touch the guns and seemed relieved to find they were made of ice - especially children. One group we did not see but hear about was the ones that repeatedly called the police who - after a while - caught us and ended the project. The police considered further legal actions, but in the end it stayed at the warning "not to do this again".

Speaking about that, last year you did Freeze! revisited, where the context of the event changed the whole meaning. What were your thoughts after all that people took a gun into their mouths?

For "Freeze Revisited" we produced edible ice guns and handed them out to visitors of the exhibition. As with the initial Freeze project in public space, it was not that much about how we felt ourselves or what we were thinking about the reactions. Our main interest was to create situations of which the people would become a part. We wanted them to feel the situation and to shape it thru the way they act. For some this really became acting as they started posing. Some people started to point the guns at people while others ate the ice in a rather explicit way, putting the ice-gun in their mouth with the barrel first.

Many of your works include metrics or geometry as their core element. Where does this come from? What is it about it that makes you come back to it?

Well, I always had a strong interest in science and math. I spend my last school years at a science orientated school, which also gets you the education to an assistant physics technician, and so should leave you well prepared for a possible study of physics. In fact at this school I always wanted to do something more creative (not that science couldn't be "creative"), and so I was called an artist there, whereas later at art school I was the "physicist", starting works concerning numbers and math. I like it to come back to some of the things I learned at that time, now start looking at them from a different angle.

Incidentally, do you believe in sacred geometry? (the triangles and circles from Homo ad terra circulum and Pedetentim are golden, after all).

Of course I do a least cite that. The sine wave and the circle are very common geometric forms in sacred geometry. I also did some works referring to the golden ratio, which also fascinates me.



I find RTHK01 amazing, in a way that it organizes personal memories in with an extra-personal, objective method. How long did it take to collect and organize them and what were the intentions of the piece?

Even if it seems at first sight that I use a scientific order system, a seemingly objective method, it actually is all about being non-objective. The human compulsion to collect and to force things, events and often even persons into a classification system is what inspired me to do this work. In German the term »Schubladendenken« - literally translated »drawer-thinking« describes this very figuratively, although it certainly has a negative connotation, meaning stereotype thinking / pigeonholing. I stayed about eight weeks in Hong Kong to do all the collecting, and this was a full time job. At the end of this time I had taken over 3.500 "specimen" (photographs) with the associated data. About the same time I needed to process the data and put it in the works final form.

This reminds me, would you define yourself as a control-freak?

That's interesting, in this context I get much more often asked whether I am a collector, which I am not (at least I try not to be). In the work RTHK01, I didn't try to control anything. I just took the things as they are and used an empiric and more or less pseudo-scientific approach to realize this work. To control things, first there is the need to understand them, and all the measuring and categorizing eventually originates from the desire (or at least the attempt) to understand.

What would you say are the things or people (artists or not) that inspire most your work?

I think I couldn't give a general answer on that question, but regarding the mentioned works, probably museums of natural history and their heroes, like the natural scientist Carl von Lineé or Alexander von Humboldt or the Fluxus movement, gave some inspiration.



What are your plans for the future?

»MUST MEASURE AND CATEGORIZE MORE THINGS«

... or at least go on exploring.

Text by Oscar Gomez Poviña @ VNFOLD