Ralf Christofori (Text from the catalogue "Out of the North", Stüttgart Kunstverein)

Hello ... - who's there???

Perhaps all that futile drama at home started in the claustrophobic toilet. "Kafka rules the world", it says there, diagonally above the loo paper. But perhaps this insight into Kafka and the world is actually the end of the story that Nikolaj Recke presents in his work Knowing You, Knowing Me (1997). If we start to unroll Recke's story from the end, then his search for a supposed phantom is just as futile as that of K, Kafka's surveyor. K is trying to confront a castle, and Recke is hoping to clear up a mystery.

Recke's dramatic structure could not be simpler: recordings of an exchange of letters are underlaid with slow, pallid images; each of these devices sets up an open-ended encounter. From the very first line he is trying to make personal contact with Robert Morris, so that he can find some explanation for his mysterious encounter with three felt pieces by Morris that he saw in a Cologne gallery. It is not clear when this correspondence is supposed to have taken place. The images alone are the driving force: they are ahead of the text from the beginning. Recke on the way to New York, the journey from the airport to Manhattan; Recke on the phone, smoking in a tiny hotel room, waiting. The underlaid images appear behind the text like events in one and the same trance. Fourteen lurching minutes, and the exchange of letters is condensed to precisely the same time-span.

Two felt pieces were produced to accompany the video, which Recke made in allusion to and imitation of the Robert Morris story. The two predicates, "True" and "False", folded to make two large wall objects, were intended to flank the video on both sides. They relate to the origin and the outcome of the story - from Recke's encounter with Robert Morris's work, which made a lasting impression on him, up to the abrupt end of the conversation. It is up to viewers to decide whether to assume that the correspondence is fictional or whether a real event is being seen from Nikolaj Recke's point of view as a first person narrator. Is it about a skilfully staged discourse on the legacy of Modernism or a singular search?

Early works by Recke point the way. The search for so-called models in (art) history is central to his artistic approach. It has rarely been as kafkaesque and futile as in his most recent work. But appropriative qualities are always present - less in the sense of classical acquisition, and more like a conceptual game. They read like commentaries, sometimes absurd, often in a supposedly muddled exchange of identities. In the case of the work called Return of Innocence (1996), Recke's appropriations are presented as real-absurd glosses, which - again in the form of both text and image - comment upon each other. The video shows the artist building a cave of materials relating to his personal history, in the manner of Joseph Beuys. The absurd character of this game is further heightened in the recorded conversation that Recke conducted on the phone with some randomly chosen person.

- Hello ...

- ...

- Hello!!!

- Hello ...

- Who's there???

- Joseph Beuys ...

- Who???

- Joseph Beuys, alias Nikolaj. I'm trying to do the same stuff as he once did ...

- I don't think I know any of you. Why do you call this number???

- I'm building a cave from the materials which are in my living room, and I'm gonna live there for a week ...

- Why???

- Maybe you should tell me ...

- No ... I wouldn't ... I don't know anything about this ...

- The cave is my self created world, and perhaps inside here I feel safety ...

- That's it. I had enough of this ...

- Didn't you build caves, when you were a child???

- NO ... - Hey, wait a minute!!!

- ...

A fragment in Beckett's head could have looked like this, or similar. The stage conversation is also reminiscent of the short pieces that flow directly into the pictorial world of Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen's paintings. But Recke does not transform them first, he uses them one to one. They are unprocessed conversations, and they actually happened like that. There are about 200 live recordings in total, all variations on a dominant theme. All that changes are the protagonists: Yves Klein, Houdini, William Tell, Joseph Beuys, as above, or Nikolaj Recke himself. In one Internet project it is even George Michael - alias Nikolaj Recke. Recke's stories have to be taken at face value, even if the idea behind them turns out to be pure fiction. Against this background, Knowing You, Knowing Me is only one of the numerous variants that feed on this fiction. The Robert Morris story has an unhappy ending. It ends by the bell at the door of his New York apartment, drawing to a close with Recke's statement: “I went out on all this hoping to find you, I never did, so now I'm asking: did I ever find myself ..."

There it is again, that claustrophobic toilet in Nikolaj Recke's home. "Kafka rules the world."