This partly ironic, self-conscious Will to Order – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the "art of classification" that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called "the fundamental event of the modern age" – the "conquest of the world as picture."

And with Wood, Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a ‘clearing’ [Lichtung] comes to mind – as well as his way of thinking ‘off the beaten track’ [auf dem Holzweg, which literally means ‘on a track in the wood’]. Whatever weight the viewer might put on such references, they indicate that Brunner’s pictures, which on a first glance might appear formal and strict, at a closer look also have a playful, even ironic side.

¶ 11:01 AM