Horst Bredekamp
„Die Tropfsteinmaschine“ (The Dripstone Machine)

Excerpt:
The Rite of Attendance
(...) Bogomir Ecker’s Dripstone Machine will be at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg for a very long time: it is designed to grow a stalagmite, and that will take many generations. The idea dates from 1983, but it needed so long to build and refine the machine that it was nearly the change of the millennium before it was finished. Nevertheless, Ecker resisted the temptation to make it a thousand-year project and thereby capitalise not only on the event itself but also on the portentousness of the eschatology. Especially in view of the numerological messianism of the twentieth century’s totalitarian movements, setting it up to last a thousand years would have been a big mistake.

(...) After five hundred years, continuously dripping water will have formed a dripstone about five centimetres tall, so its height becomes the equivalent of the time limit. Ecker’s exact choice of time and height shows his intent to avoid any impression that his project is either hybrid or merely daft. In fact, it is a miniature Tower of Babel that folds the problem of height into the problem of time as if to avoid a penalty. We are talking here about the construction of a longue durée, which is neither a small undertaking nor a pipe-dream.

Natural Form and Technology
(...) Ecker’s project alludes to stalactite caves such as the San Giovanni Grottos in Sardinia, where dripstones have grown into great stalactites and stalagmites. The Dripstone Machine tries to isolate and limit temporally the power that Nature, without human agency, has brought to bear on the earth over millions of years. But this sort of microcosmic emulation also imitates artistic spaces, which themselves are attempting to reproduce Nature’s artistry.

(...) Ultimately, technology belongs to this imitation of Nature’s formative power. Natural form and machines combined in many of the public grottos which were furnished with a historical concept in mind and which purported to cast the timeline as far back into history as Ecker now tries to cast it into the future. Because in the grottos Nature and technology overlapped, they were taken as a distillation of the moment when Nature merges into civilisation.

(...) The motifs that Ecker devised in The Dripstone Machine have their ancestor in Mannerist grotto systems that tried to emulate Nature’s superior creative power; just like every artwork remains linked to the spawn of nature’s “quarry” by countless intermediate steps. By uniting the two poles of natural form and artistic technology, Ecker, in The Dripstone Machine, forces Mannerist art theory onto the tip of his dripstone.

The Museum in Measured Time
(...) In choosing the museum, Ecker has gone for one of the most variable as well as one of the most stable places. The treasures which are stored there almost guarantee the desired longevity. The fact that art is held in esteem by all cultures regardless of time, politics or social upheaval means the artist can have some confidence that this will remain so. In the sense that the artist places the museum under a long-term obligation, he is in effect making it hostage to the survival of his work. This probably is the most ironic artistic reaction possible to all the talk about the “end of art” and the redundancy of museums.
However, confidence in the The Dripstone Machine’s long-term maintenance is also linked to something completely different, where the need to guarantee continuity over centuries is dictated by incalculable danger. The storage of exhausted nuclear fuel rods in man-made subterranean caves can only occur in the certainty that coming generations would find it both in their own interest and that of their children and grandchildren to maintain them over some quarter of a million years. Whether they can actually do so is an open question – as is whether Ecker’s Dripstone Machine will still be intact generations later. However, if that is not the case, then one can assume that the basic conditions necessary for the stewardship of radioactive materials will also have disappeared. In this respect, its laid-back presentation is misleading: The Dripstone Machine is actually a feasibility study for the creation of spheres of continuity.

(Translation: Christopher Cordy, 2007)