CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 4

INTRODUCTION TEXT
“Die blinden Flecken unseres Denkens
interessieren mich.” (Observatorium, p. 108)
Christoph Keller’s practice coheres around the
question of how we know what we know. His
works articulate his continuous artistic inquiry into
the mechanisms of how knowledge is accrued,
transformed from observation and sensation into
belief, shaped by explicit or tacit assumptions, and,
finally, organized into models. Taking on different
roles—among them, naturalist, explorer, scientist,
occultist, journalist, test subject—Keller in his work
invokes, reconstructs, sometimes enacts, charged
moments in the history of science, of scientific
models, and their utopian visions. Comparable to
extended case studies in science, his projects develop
from the artist’s investigation of other disciplines and
partial immersion into their diverse methodologies.
His installations, which often recall experimental set-
ups, translate his findings into the context of his own
artistic thinking and to the spaces of art exhibitions as
privileged sites of observation and analysis. 1
Detail: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, 2001, 40 dvds with
looped motion sequences of 40 animals, shown on 40 monitors
(CK 063)
A specific emphasis has been on the history of
science, especially forgotten or marginalized pockets
of knowledge. Several of Keller’s installations, films, or
photographic projects engage with existing historical
entities: literary works that internalized philosophical
models, the psychological interests of a tight-knit
artistic avant-garde of 1920s Berlin, a found medical
archive, or an abandoned behaviorist film project from
the 1950s. 2
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Cloudbuster Project, 2003, Clocktower Building, New York
More often the artist chooses oblique scientific
inquiries as the focus of his artistic surveys, enacting
moments of discovery in which the entanglements
of scientific method, technological apparatuses and
mythic structures are given shape, making apparent
the reciprocal indebtedness of disciplines. These
moments show the constant ebb and flow of scientific
models, the fickleness of epistemological standards
and its shifting parameters—changes that can make
one scientist famous for his rigor while another may drift
from former respectability into marginalization. Acting
as archeologists of such instances of intellectual drift,
Keller has said: “…some of my works could be seen as
an attempt to reactivate modes of subjectivity and of
existence that have been displaced or marginalized by
mainstream science.” 3
Keller’s work finds precisely calibrated formats that
appear to resonate with the subject of his projects—a
sculptural recreation & enactment of the Cloudbuster
apparatus devised by Wilhelm Reich, a documentary
with extensive interviews & curatorial project, or an
installation of a suspended mirrored spiral in reference
to a literary take on expanded consciousness with
audience participation in an experimental component. 4
The practice of an artist working radically across
many mediums may be a challenge for an audience,
even as the traditional separation between painting
and sculpture, photography and print has become
more fluid. While the definition of what constitutes
an artwork continues to expand and the concept of