Showcase: Dennis Reinmüller

On a face-achingly bleak early spring evening in the capital a quietly baffled audience trudged to a re-imagining of one of the most iconic spaces in contemporary culture. Just what was this magical place?

The dole office.

Our Pied Piper was the ever-enterprising Dennis J Reinmüller. He and Timothea Armour selected performance proposals from 28 of their peers for JobCentreSuperPlus. With degree show prep looming a few sweaty months away, it takes a certain gumption to confront the spectre of unemployment with such a precocious project.

On arrival, the cowed audience were brusquely ushered around a burlesque human zoo of grey-clad ‘bureaucrats.’ Posters told us: ‘Dreams are great; but do they pay the bills?’ We were offered little reassurance. Affirmation is not a language that Reinmüller is comfortable with indoctrinating.

Employees of the JobCentreSuperPlus from Dennis J. Reinmuller on Vimeo.

If it is in times of financial instability that the populace is most at risk of investing belief in authoritarian voices, Reinmüller challenges and subverts them at every opportunity. “Of course there’s anxiety about what’s next – at’s what people are these days: their jobs. I hate that outlook, but that’s the ideology of now,” he says. With absurdist tragicomic appropriation, he shows us that fear of failure is just another construct – we can chase our dreams, although it might cost us.

Reinmüller came to Edinburgh as a jobseeker after escaping the immersive augmented reality of video games testing (“an unbelievably weird thing to do!”). Now, following a successful degree show, he reflects on how his past experiences have informed his work. “With sculpture and performance you can create another reality, one which challenges our assumptions and can interfere with actual reality.” Reinmüller debunks myths, poking at ideological constructs to reclaim their power.

Growing up in West Germany in the 80s as the country asserted its reinvention, he was immersed in a world of heroic TV figures imported from the US. Kids were fed the idea that they could start afresh, aim high; could be heroes. The stark realisation that the bad guys lurked in his cultural heritage cemented Reinmüller’s decision to cut ties. His work Player 1 follows a series of self-destructive, failed super heroes. He inserts a bloody full stop into their cycle of reincarnation, vanquishing the myth of immortality.

“We imagine ourselves to be the most important things in the world,” he says, but by freezing the moment of “complete and utter failure,” he bursts our narcissistic bubble. His self-portrait (on show at GSS, from 13 July) is brought back to earth with an inglorious bump.

The dichotomy between aspiration and failure forms a cornerstone to his work, coming from a background in philosophy. “Art is philosophy in practise – you can dare to make statements that are silly or obviously wrong and see what happens,” he tells me.

On coming to ECA, he was amused by the quixotic lingering influence of Joseph Beuys, whose fleeting visit 43 years earlier has become local legend. Surprised that “there existed no criticism of the notion of trying to make magic with art,” the idea of ‘aura’ in objects made with materials “mass-produced, sourced from eBay” was laughable. “Art has an inner logic,” he says. Otherwise, it falls apart. “I try to have an inner logic in my work. It needs to stand by itself.”

The Exorcism of Joseph Beuys - Part 1 from Dennis J. Reinmuller on Vimeo.

At his degree show Reinmüller and a team of collaborators performed an exorcism rite: entrapping Beuys’'s mystic spirit ironically in the fat and felt which were the art shaman’s calling cards. The fat was ‘I bet Beuys' can’t believe he used a synthetic butter substitute’ while the felt was the real deal – sourced from the factory which produced Beuys’s.

Courting contradiction, the punchline is typically dry: in ‘re-branding’ the iconic corridor in Martin Kippenberger’s honour, the art exorcists have substituted one patriarch for another. The attempt to dispel Beuys’s myth propagates it for the next generation.

Now Reinmüller, who describes himself as a “subtle narcissist,” is inviting applications for the DJR residency (djr-residency.org) in which applicants are invited to create portraits of their host at their own expense. The artwork and rights will remain with him, as will the £310 fee. Such withering acknowledgement of the power and exploitation levied against aspiring artists is typical of Reinmüller’s irreverent humour. For a narcissist, he is uncharacteristically affable, and keen to acknowledge collaborators. Although I am certain this would grate on and please him in equal measure – Reinmüller’s own geist already seems to have evicted Kippenberger’s. What a hero!

The Exorcism of Joseph Beuys - Part 2 from Dennis J. Reinmuller on Vimeo.

The Exorcism of Joseph Beuys - Part 3 from Dennis J. Reinmuller on Vimeo.