Dario Wokurka

Scores

Artist talk: Sabeth Buchmann in conversation with Dario Wokurka
Tuesday, April 21, 18.00

Guided tour by the Artist
Thursday, April 23, 18.30

The score is a notational structure—a document of the recording and transmission of a work that enables it to be read, performed, or executed. Reflecting on the post-serial music of the postwar modern era, Roland Barthes observed that contemporary scores do not merely anticipate a future performance but operate more like a transactional document, actively calling for interpretation or improvisation by the performer. Performers become co-authors, completing the score rather than simply executing it.[1] The score itself thus effectively becomes part of its own varying repetition.

Dario Wokurka, likewise, employs a system of variation and repetition for his visual production: one based on the reactivation or realisation of an image inventory originally conceived as a notational system. A repertoire of watercolours not intended to be shown to the public serve as the foundational structure and source material for various executions. Only through this activation—this painterly performance—do they become stand-alone pieces that nonetheless remain embedded in a broader system of image sourcing, storage, and realisation. The score functions as a catalyst for rewriting, overwriting, and recoding material that, in turn, refers primarily to images—graphics, texts, or photographs found online or created by Wokurka. Works from art history and art theory converge with stills from streaming platforms, news fragments, or documentation of Wokurka’s earlier works, accumulating traces of differently coded information in their rendering. Context lingers only as a mere suggestion or dissolves entirely through abstraction. What emerges is a carefully balanced relationship between contingency and intentionality. The subject matter that we generally associate with images seems to have been given less priority here, stimulating our gaze all the more—conditioned as it is to decipher meaning.

This ambivalence arising from deliberate selection and potential inscrutability also stems from the fact that the watercolours are produced following a conceptual premise that treats the source material more as visual data than as a compositional model: selected visual elements are systematically translated in modulated black brushstrokes on vertical A4 format. These painterly scores then lend themselves to a wide variety of activation in terms of format, colour, and support surface. Wokurka’s paintings are thus both performances and executions in another medium and format, for which the watercolours provide the primary information.

Such an approach consciously adapts practices from 1960s conceptual art, which revised the classical relationship between original and copy in favour of the development and implementation of a notational system. Back then, the focus had already shifted from representation or reproduction to specification. The template or score became a means of production, and the execution of a work inevitably varied from one realisation to another. According to Liz Kotz, the prevalence of photography as a means of documentation in the art of the late 1960s also reflects the fact that the artwork was reconfigured as a specific realisation of a general proposition.[2]

Nowadays, one can draw analogies to computerised database logic, to the appropriative acts of scrolling, storing, and reworking—while the transformation of the digital files ties into the analogue world of painting and drawing. Here, Dario Wokurka allows himself the kind of free interpretation of variation—in the form of superimposed, fragmented, glitched and distorted motifs—that is implicit to the score as a transactional document. There is intentional blurring in the imagery and in the way the works are combined, along with a refusal of thematic one-sidedness. It is not the subject matter that unites the paintings in an exhibition, but rather the concept: the transmission and systematic treatment of the images selected for the occasion. In this specific exhibition, the works are further unified in that they have been painted on frames stretched with fabric recycled from another project, the patterns creating an additional visual layer.

In these works, the score itself manifests as a form of production, as an index or referent of something that is simultaneously information management, data processing, and painting. These works bear the imprint of the process of their own becoming. Yet they negotiate their status not merely as final manifestations, but as propositions. What an image is or could be is ultimately determined by the active fulfilment of observation and comparison within the given situation and context. The exhibition thus becomes a temporary constellation in its own right, a space where the images come together and resonate.

- Vanessa Joan Müller

Translation by Signe Rose

[1] Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1977. See also Hendrik Folkerts, “Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness”, https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/464_keeping_score_notation_embodiment_and_liveness

[2] See Liz Kotz, Words to be Looked at. Language in 1960s Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, p. 194.