Galerie Judin is delighted to present The Mass Ornament, American artist Ian Davis’ (*1972) first-ever exhibition in Berlin. On view are 16 paintings, mostly on panel – a few on linen, and all created within the last four years. They confront us with obscure and uncanny situations: A giant, flickering server fed with data by countless employees; the exploration of the acoustics of a mysterious cave; boxes stowed away in glacial caverns, and something – possibly evidence – burned in an antique-like arena or in the bed of a drained pool. The elaborate slopes of a rollercoaster stick out of the flooded parking site, the brightly lit playing field of a stadium is littered with people – while the stands remain deserted. Just as puzzling as the situations in Davis’ compositions are the stereotyped characters crowding them. They are faceless, generic men in lab coats or suits. While these austere protagonists point to the seriousness of the situations unfolding, it remains completely obscure as to who is doing what and with what intention.

Davis’ bureaucrats usually come in herds and packs, and as such the artist likes to arrange them somewhat ornamentally. His work thus seems like an illustration of the famous essay by the German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer with the telling title “The Mass Ornament” (1927). In it, Kracauer states that the ornament of masses can always tell us more about a particular time than any contemporary theory: “The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself.” Supposedly, if one looks from a slightly elevated angle at people and at how they – as private individuals, professionals, and citizens – are arranged into masses, one could learn everything about their relationships, organization, and dependencies. In this sense, Davis’ “mass ornaments” may be read as mirror images of today’s society and its structures. They reveal something we do not yet fully grasp: that our own time is shaped by an extreme division of labor and the resulting interchangeability of “human capital” – while the occurrence of catastrophes, ranging from natural disasters to terrorism, is on the rise.