down the backstreets (dead end/yoga)

Contemporary memorials do not usually rely on drawing as a medium. The large-scale 16-part series down the backstreets (dead end/yoga) by Moussa Kone is based on a study of animal training handbooks. In this series, Moussa Kone engages with the way circus animals are trained in comparison to the physical conditioning undergone in dance training and goes on to apply these to conditioning in a social context. He constructs a stage-like pictorial space with pen and ink that breaks with the objectives of central perspective and its processes for rationalizing and regulating visual perception. A constant element is usually formed by flooring in a black and white striped design and reminiscent of a dancefloor from the legendary swing era. The Forum Stadtpark exhibition space became a stage in an installation produced in collaboration with the artist Corinne L. Rusch, where the black-and-white striped formations continued out of the drawings as a pattern adhered to the real floor. As Moussa Kone already expresses in the title for one of his exhibitions, he attempts to realize a kind of resetting of his drawings in real space.

The headline of a recent interview with the artist and media theorist Peter Weibel ran “Casting Shows are Universities for the Ambitious” (Castingshows sind Universitäten für Aufsteiger). Here Peter Weibel trenchantly emphasises how recognition and success are dependent on stage-compatibility and a readiness to employ selective training to embody precisely the type of person who fulfills the demands of social conditioning. According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the individual’s history is socially determined in its most individual aspects and even in its sexual dimension. Social worlds and their processes of determination, the fraught relationship between psychology and sociology, between the individual and the collective, are transfigured and transformed in the meeting of animals and human beings, the creatural, brutish and intuitive in the drawings of Moussa Kone. The standard terminology of deconstruction becomes easyto grasp as “de-training”. The slogan-like titles of the individual drawings trenchantly establish a referential context for their contents.

In A&O (king alpha/queen omega) a kind of spatial monumentalisation is achieved by figures with four arms crowned by the initials for alpha and omega posing on a front-facing horizontal block brandishing swords – as seen on war memorials – while conducting themselves as animal trainers for an act with tigers. The transfer of motifs in the arrangement, from being on a pedestal as four-armed figures positioned in copulation, arouses associations with the Indian goddess Kali, who stands for death and destruction but also for renewal in Hinduism. In Indian mythology, she embodies the wrath of Durga, from whose brow she stems, and fills the skies with her roars. The horizontal block forms the pedestal for the acrobatic tantric exploits of the four-armed figures as well as providing a frontal surface for an empty speech bubble. In another drawing, the monopoly on definition held by art experts is subjected to sceptical scrutiny. In mirror, mirror on the wall ... (who is the artfairest of them all?) Moussa Kone uses wordplay to show the extent to which fairness is relevant in art. Especially conspicuous are often the gestures and postures adopted by the faceless protagonists characteristic of Moussa Kone’s drawings, whose bodies he lets do the talking. At the same time there is a perceptible oscillation between the all-permeating strongly composed, content-based aspects to be felt along with that constructed moment of the design of stage sets, arenas or locations that makes the drawings the setting for a space of projection and imagination.

Text by Ursula Maria Probst, Vienna, 2011 (translated from German)