In 1993, Alke Reeh constructed a wall-sized box shaped object made of wood and glass for the Künstlerhaus Bremen, which she set up in the middle of the exhibition space. In its material clarity it was in concurrence with the sober functionality of this former industrial building in which it had been erected, yet at the same time stood confidently in direct contrast to it. The ambivalent title rigid order – random arrangement that described both the exhibition and the object itself makes reference to the Janus face of the furniture-like structure – at once a cabinet and a barrier, dividing the elongated hall space into almost equally sized parts. At the sides, just enough space existed for visitors to pass around the installed barrier in order to examine the structure from each side while not permitting both sides to be viewed concurrently. Describing it using its temporary designation, the cabinet has two, individual, glazed, compartmentalized display sides representing two different orders: a regular grid of identically dimensioned compartments which also possesses a partial degree of flexibility enabling the adaptation to rooms of different widths and depths and allowing both horizontal and vertical arrangements. Both orders stand back to back like the opposite sides of a coin. The number of compartments on each side is different, in one case there are 63, in the other, 54. The sizes of the compartment are not calculated with regard to the object’s dimensions. They divide and structure the emptiness through a rectangular arrangement of adjacent chambers, within which the space may appear compressed and yet at another time, expanded.
Equable repetition (rigid order) and rhythmic composition (random accumulation) create a duality of harmonious balance. Front and back form sui generis orders in their respective systems, each thereby representing its own ideality. It is obviously difficult to find a suitable (generic) term for this exhibition object. Viewed as a sculptural installation, the work is of minimalist simplicity and objectivity, and all subjectivity is substituted by precision craftsmanship. The object is built in the same way as a piece of good quality furniture is constructed, and yet, it also manages to convey a pictorial impression. Modern art history includes a large number of multi-field pictures. On the one hand, the division into compartments shows a proximity to classic De Stijl compositions by Mondrian, Vantongerloo, and van Doesburg, especially since the shadows afford the appearance of differing degrees of brightness to the compartments, while the rigid grid on the opposite side is reminiscent of Jan Schoonhoven’s geometric box reliefs.
The glazing lends the object the appearance of a display case. Usually, such display cases are used for the storage of objects, testimonies, documents, or, in the case of museum collections, for the presentation of art or natural objects. They should be as simple and inconspicuous as possible, protect the objects from being accessed yet provide an unclouded view. Viewed through a pane of glass, objects seem both close and remote, the glass increases the viewer's desire and sense of value. In display cases and on shelves things whose original context has been lost and are capable of visualizing the past are highlighted. Shelves serve to store objects of the same size and/or categorization and to separate them from other things. Everything must be hung, placed, labeled, and classified. In art, things are no different; the examination of objects follows systems of stylistic or contemporary classifications. Cabinets, compartments, and drawers, on the other hand, are repositories to accommodate personal belongings which can easily be accessed and removed with a simple movement. Nothing appears more dejected than an empty shelf literally waiting to be filled. Furniture dealers too display cabinets for sale their shelves containing inconsequential books and dummy television sets.
In Alke Reeh's box sculpture, however, the compartments remain completely empty, enclosed by panes of glass, and thereby preventing any possibility of storage. A conventional display case or wall unit can be opened and closed; here it is literally misappropriated (just as any art is purposeless). By leaving the ‘display case’ unoccupied, the artist denies the primarily functional object its purpose and elevates it to an autonomous object of observation. The expectation of finding things placed in the compartments is unfulfilled and the gaze is reversed and reciprocated, as in the reflections in the glass. The shelf object itself looks back at the viewer, so to speak, with its 'eyes', the empty compartments. And just as they in the absence of displayed objects do not serve an order of things, their systems embody an ideal order in themselves.
The display-like, in its dimension almost shrine-like impression of the object, for which the artist may have been inspired by sacred architecture, artifacts, and devotional containers during her South American travels appears too sober and rational in its unadorned execution to impart any attribution of spiritual effect. First and foremost, it presents itself as the result of a radical reduction to the most elementary construction principles. At the same time, a peculiar aura and sense of mystery emerge from the contradiction between the visual openness and factual unity of the display case and the dialectic between its transparent and hermetic nature. Precisely because of its supposed resemblance to a container (cabinet, display case, vitrine) and its unfilled cavities (compartments), it inevitably becomes an imaginary object of individual fantasies and interior dreams, which Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space has associated with cabinets, chests, and drawers, among other things. For the French philosopher there are manifold correspondences between the geometry of the box and the psychology of the hidden: "The theme of drawers, chests of drawers, locks, and cabinets will repeatedly bring us into contact with the unfathomable stock of interior dreams. The cabinet and its compartments, the desk and its drawers, the chest with the false bottom are real organs of the secret psychological life. (...) In the cabinet lives a center of order that protects the entire house against boundless disorder. There is an order, or rather order is a domain there." At the same time, Bachelard describes how the intimacy and memory niches identified by him as dwellings of the human soul override the fragmentation dialectics of time, space, and corporeality. "In the box are unforgettable things, unforgettable for us, but also for those to whom we will give our treasures. The past, the present, and a future are all concentrated in them. And so the box becomes the memory of the unexpected. (...) This object that can be opened is the first differential of discovery. At the moment when the box opens, there is no dialectic any more. The outside is crossed out with a stroke, everything belongs to the new, the surprising, the unknown. The outside no longer means anything. And even the dimensions of corporeality no longer make sense, because a new dimension has been opened: the dimension of inwardness."
Does Alke Reeh's box-like object really show something of the inner immensity Bachelard speaks of in Poetics of Space? Does it contain a similar diffusion potential? Is the contradictory appearance of the open yet closed nature of the shelf-like display case an indication of the dialectic of the outside and inside described by the philosopher? And how does the object’s ostentatious fan structure function in relation to corresponding systems of thought and classification? Does it even correspond to Bachelard's criticism, according to which "the deepest metaphysics has its root in an unspoken geometry and this geometry – whether one wants it or not – spatializes the thought?"
Even almost three decades after its creation, Alke Reeh's Bremen room installation has lost none of its mysterious aura. Looking back, it seems to mark a cesura between her previous outdoor sculptures (such as the bunker installation Unterwelt, Hanover 1989) and her mobile and smaller-scale wall and floor works for the gallery and museum space. Over the years, objects and installations made of textiles, paper, concrete, and plastic, whose origins lie in architecture or architectural ornamentation, have followed the prototype of her double-faced fan construction. Alke Reeh's sculptural concept is typically derived from the design of hollow volumes, cells, and chambers that arise from the penetration or unfolding of surfaces. The substance of their framework ensures the equilibrium of the objects in terms of the complexity of their extensions, the results of which take on different forms ranging from large rosette-like formations, and meandering bands, to small asymmetrical fragments. At the same time, Reeh's sculptural concept, for example through the implementation of photography, light, and sound has not only expanded medially, but has also entered into new connections with traditions of craftsmanship such as embroidery. With this shift in context, the artist reacts to intercultural transfers, the possibilities of which seem to have already been laid out in her work before the present globalized view of art. Consequently, Reeh's removal of the taboo attached to the ornamental moves her into the focus of thematic group exhibitions such as Ornamental Structures, which were once disdained as superficial, uncritical, and decorative and lead to new ambivalences in the observation of serial systems of order in international contemporary art. Above all, the artist does not shy away from experimenting with different techniques and materials to make unusual media transformations. Thus the initially strongly installative aspect of her work in recent times seems as it were, to give way to vagabonding aspects. Architectural details such as a concrete ceiling or tracery are dislocated and perceived as an image through re-staging (release). In reciprocal transfers from the built and the fixed to the yieldingly light (and vice versa), Alke Reeh's work takes on various forms of wrapping – as dwelling, clothing, or vessel. Compared to the Bremen installation of 1993, in her more recent works the boundaries between inside and outside have become even more permeable; in her nested nomadic tents – symbols of non-sedentariness and migration –they become wafer-thin membranes that offer at best minimal protection to the people they accommodate.