++++ Is something broken? Or does somebody just want to see what a high-tech device looks like from the inside? Probably not. Plain curiosity looks different, not so jagged, less jaunty. The fact is that someone is taking apart his laptop and putting it back together again. The fact is that he does this over and over again. Every hand movement is perfect. The video ReStart by Zlatan Filipovic which can be seen in Städel next to many others, shows a performance in real-time: hands which with great speed and enormous precision screw and lever, open up and close again. Like a demonstration video. The 28-year-old artist from Sarajevo practised for four days. He trained like a lover of firearms, for this is precisely what the action reminds you of at a second glance, of the militarily drilled handling of a rifle.
Zlatan Filipovic seems to have mastered his instrument. To take it apart and put it back together again takes four minutes and thirty seconds. And what would happen if he managed to do it in three minutes? The apparently well-practised, but totally inappropriate handling of a highly complex device is absurd. It shows that understanding is more than well-controlled handling, even if it simultaneously also induces a certain calming effect. After all, nothing is better than expert workmanship. "In my work with the computer components I am concerned with demystifying their function," says the artist from Bosnia-Herzegovina who has studied in Sarajevo and New York, well knowing that this is an unsuitable experiment.
Perhaps ReStart is also the record of an exaggerated need to control. Someone who compulsively has to check again and again to see whether everything is working properly and every screw is in its right place. "The need for things to work properly corresponds to the need for the proper initial conditions for making art," Zlatan Filipovic believes and he has already made a start.
Städel, until 25 August. ani