Paper, lines and cutting are central to Kühne’s artistic practice. Printed materials are frequently used as media; she employs set lines wherever she finds them, be that in texts, maps or illustrations. Her interventions into and constructions with these materials emphasize the tension between the assurance of print and its fallibility. ‘Blank Spot Cartography’ illustrates her personal methodology as she physically and metaphorically extracts from different sources to inform her studio work. The book reproduces a card index Kühne produced in 2011. If the alphabetical arrangement suggests an objective methodology (though challenged by the fact that there are indeed two such orders, the English and the German editions) the book is also guided by the ‘Winckler principle’. Borrowed from George Perec’s ‘Life: A User’s Manual’, this describes a protagonist’s attempt to find a logic of ordering a collection of hotel labels by which each would relate to its neighbor, but each time according to a fresh principle. The Winckler principle is ultimately the conclusion that any two objects or subjects will have something in common.
To read each page of this book in numerical order would require the reader to ignore their curiosity, to be deaf to the call of their intuition. The user is instead invited to follow topics and associations through the pages at will, weaving a path back and forth through complementary ideas. A line can describe the shortest route from one point to another, but can also be enriched by diversion; so too should the reader meander through this publication. Though disguised as a sober reference volume, ‘Blank Spot Cartography’ subverts the fixedness of language and the compartmentalization of knowledge.
Sandra Kühne (b. 1976) is a Swiss artist based in Zurich. Having studied in Lucerne and Zurich, her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout Switzerland and in Germany including the Museum Bellerive, Zurich, the Kunsthaus Baselland and the Horst Janssen Museum, Oldenburg. In the autumn of 2014 she will take part in a residency aboard a tall ship navigating the international territory of Svalbard, ten degrees latitude south of the North Pole. This is her first publication with Kodoji Press.