NICOLAS ANATOL BAGINSKY
Troublemaker in the artificial machinery

Would you give a place to machines in your art collection? Would you exhibit chain-rattling muddles of cogwheels next to Joseph Beuys’ Inner Mongolia? Or set sloppily packed Quasis at a table dinner gathering by Katharina Fritsch? Or allow Elizabeth Gardner to flicker in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s or Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa? The machines Nicolas Anatol Baginsky unleashes on the world are unsettling. Baginsky calls his early machine generation Killer Asseln (killer lice). The name is both a play on words and a programme. He mockingly formulates his anxiety about the perfect machine parts produced by the war industry. His concern is a step towards more closely defining the relationship between man and machine. On this level machines are products fabricated by mankind and drawn into a spiral of destruction in which men and machine control and besiege each other.

Baginsky’s subsequent machine generation are the Quasis. Here it is not the destructive aspect of machines which is being examined – the theme is man’s contempt for the machine. Quasis are clumsy things which behave awkwardly like small-time losers and lead the viewer feel that machines deserve pity. They are beings which have turned out badly, which are pushed aside by progress because they don’t meet the expected notions of economic viability.

Elizabeth Gardner is the title of a further machine generation. The name stems from a scientist who spent her short life investigating nerve cells and the origins of thought. Gardner posed the question whether machines can think, in other words whether artificial intelligence is at all possible. Baginsky continues this inquiry by evolving a situation in which the viewer of the machine is transformed. The viewer becomes its interlocutor and thus someone who treats the machine as a living being. If Elizabeth Gardner is asked the right questions she will provide answers.

Baginsky’s machines represent an artistic approach to the artificiality of laboratories. In the tradition of scientists and machine builders he asks what it is that distinguishes a human being and offers answers in his role as an artist. People are not perfect, predictable beings, and humanity starts at the juncture where one is willing to venture the question as to the nature of man. Baginsky embarks on this theme by taking mechanical movement in order to express irritating and bizarre habits. What is the difference between man and machine? The Philosopher René Descartes struggled with this question in his search for measures of scientific knowledge. The computer pioneer Alan Turing pursues this question as a means of criticizing U.S. immigration policies, and it is this question which lies behind Duchamp’s “chances of several tubes of paint becoming a Seurat”. This will always remain a burning issue whenever human self-awareness is affected by technical innovation. Baginsky approaches the question with the artistic experience derived from the tradition of inquiring into the essence of art. His works turn the machine into a question of art. Is the essential quality of art defined by perfect craftsmanship, the skilful invention of an artifact which demonstrates the “chances of several tubes of paint becoming a Seurat”, or is art out of sensitivity responsible for the twilight zone where our consciousness is irritated by something other than that which can be dealt with by calculation?