Tobias Spichtig: Pretty Fine: Cat. Cfa Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

In Spichtig’s work a similar push and pull between attachment and repellence produces a certain form of iconicity, but one that does not ask for devotion. You recognise something about the pictures, and want to be in proximity to this something, congratulate yourself on how it resonates, bask in the cool, grunge speed of it. But the familiarity at play here stems not from likeness–to you, or your life–but from strangeness. What you recognise is not the content but the outline; if an experience, then of absence… It was actually Stichtig who told me what Marlene Dietrich said of how to keep an audience hooked: who is the one person everyone knows? The one who is not there. Sing to them, she said. Dietrich and Spichtig practice seduction without betrayal. It is also iconicity without idealism, or even idology. Let me try another one: recollection without memory?