About

Alice & Andrew

Andrew Walther, born 1952, USA                             Alice Kinser, born 1955, USA

Alice & Andrew have been working together since 1988 and have been associated with the Ultimate Akademie in Cologne, Germany since 1989. Since 1990 they have functioned as the “Mobil Unit”, which was formed under the auspices of the Al Hansen Welt Kunst Labor System Deutsche Amt to carry out independent travel-related research projects. Alice and Andrew have given collage workshops in Germany, the Netherlands, Thailand and the USA. They received the Otzenrath Stipendium in 2000. While working with ecoTribe Teuge in The Netherlands from 2002 to 2009 they founded the Teuge Institute Off Technology and Gallery Boven. In 2009 they returned to America to participate in a community development project with “Rancho de los Gatos Locos” and establish the New Ultimate Akademie, both in Modesto, California.

Selected solo exhibitions:

1990 Ultimate Akademie, Cologne Germany
1992 Bonte Zwaan, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
1992 Weekend Gallery, Berlin, Germany
1992 Ultimate Akademie, Cologne Germany
1994 Kunsthalle Weyertal, Cologne, Germany
1994 Ultimate Akademie, Cologne Germany
1995 Teatre Recreatiu, Llucmajor, Majorca, Spain
1996 Weekend Gallery, Berlin, Germany
1999 Arting, Cologne, Germany
2002 Ultimate Akademie, Cologne, Germany
2008 Escola d’Art d’Olot, Olot, Spain
2014 Gatos Locos Art Gallery, Modesto, California

Selected group exhibitions:

1991 Syndicat D’Initiative, Le Boulou, France 
1992 Piazza Virtuale, Kassel, Germany
1993 Weekend Gallery, Berlin, Germany
1993 Halle Kalk, Cologne-Kalk, Germany
1995 Atelier Dupont, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany
1996 StadtBibliothek, Cologne, Germany
1996 Rhine-Ship “Helvetia”, Cologne, Germany
1996 Bangkok Skydome, Bangkok, Thailand
1997 an gardin geal, Bricklive Mountain, County Sligo, Ireland
1998 Calcographie, Cologne Germany
1998 Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland
1998 La Ruta del Viento, Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands
1998 DuMont-Kunsthalle, Cologne, Germany
1999 Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland
1999 Galerie 68elf, Cologne, Germany
1999 Weekend Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2001 Theron Business Consulting, Cologne, Germany
2002 Art Bar SamSam, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands
2003-09 Gallery Boven, Teuge, The Netherlands
2005 KelderKunst, Deventer, The Netherlands
2006 25th Anniversary Weekend Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2007 Fira del Diboux, Olot, Spain
2006-2009 Kunstroute Teuge, The Netherlands
2009-2011 Modesto Art Walk, Modesto, California
2009-2012 Peer Recovery Art Project, Modesto, California

Selected projects:

1989-90 “Wall Song”
1992 “Wet Networking”
1990-94 “Take It!”
1994-96 “Violating Thoreau”
1997 “In Search of the Great Irish Elk” 
1998 “Nostradamus”
1998-99 “The Cologne Exchange”
1998-99 “God’s Nails”
2000-2001 “Green Portfolio”
2002 “Sold Picture Gallery”
2002-2009 “Teuge Institute Off Technology”
2007-2008 “The La Garrotxa Project”
2009-2015 “Rancho de los Gatos Locos”

Project Details:

“Travel Art”: The travel projects were events. Our performance was the part we played in whatever happened. The leap was the heroic feat. The bungee tethered to faith in people and faith in Art. There was always a mission, if only to survive. Survival was always in question. We believed in the magic that “need would provide”. We had a reason to be there. In survival or esoteric cause, we were part of wherever we were. To count the cats in Zanzibar, you have to live in Zanzibar.

1989-90 “Wall Song” This was a performance at the Berlin wall, wearing a diving mask with a musical staff inked across the glass and playing a song flute to the holes and gashes on the wall. It was expanded into a sound collage; an aleatoric composition which was performed as a junk-speaker room installation, at the Ultimate Akademy, powered by a battery of Walkmans. It was a collaborative effort with interpretations by eight artists. One of the artists was Al Hansen’s grandson, Beck. The others were friends and professors at the Ultimate Akademie. It was more or less our senior project and our entry into the Ultimate Akademie.

1992 “Wet Networking” This performance involved hitchhiking the riverboats of the Netherlands and discovering the isolation of the river world and its people. At each port we faxed drawings and impressions to a fax and photocopy installation called “Back to Nature” that Ultimate professors Yola Berbesh and Pietro Pellini had installed and were manning on the steps of the Fredericianum for the ongoing Documenta in Kassel. An exhibition of paintings and photographs was held at the “Bonte Zwaan”, a floating building in Amsterdam that occasionally crosses to the other side of the river for cleaning and serves as the center of life for the river world.

1990-94 “Take it” is a book of poetry published by Vilter Verlag (Rolf Kirsch, Roland Kerstein) that tells the tale of our three year journey through street level art. Sponsored by the “Al Hansen Kunst Labor System” we hitchhiked south to let the journey guide and teach us Art by random chance. We learned to live rough, to photograph and paint the world around us and carry those images door to door to sell and trade for our subsistence. We had no money but we were independent. With the portfolio we could go anywhere and realize any project we desired, as long as we were willing to be poor and keep moving. The related performance for the Ultimate Akademie Lecture Series was called “You gotta ask!”

1994-96 “Violating Thoreau” In our search for a road philosophy Al Hansen played us the recording “Cage Talking” where John Cage extols Henry David Thoreau as the source of everything. We took Walden to Majorca and read it in a shepherd’s field hut. We lived what we read and when supplies were low we made excursions to sell. Just as Thoreau’s native American sold his baskets we offered paintings. We hitched and walked all over the island and sold to bars restaurants and hotels. We joined the purveyors and the traveling salesmen. Al Hansen died while we were there and we returned to Cologne to do the report, “People Talking” at the Ultimate Akademie in his absence. People talking was a performance where each visitor was presented with a drawing or a photograph and the story behind it. They were instructed to tell the story and pass it on. A video of Jungle Book played in the background. People were happy to talk.

1997 “In Search of the Great Irish Elk” Thoreau had stated that the Great Irish Elk is greater in magnitude that any living creature and so we left for Dublin to find the meaning of “magnitude”. Our first stop was the Natural History Museum and a meeting with Ivor Harkin who was carbon dating the remains of Great Irish Elk to determine their migration patterns. He supplied background material and became the first web address of the Elk Watch network that we established by walking and hitching between the internet cafes that were just opening up all over the island. From each new cafe on the network we sent out the triumphant mailing “Moose are Magic”. Ivor told us that, while we were walking the web, the overwrought director of the carbon-dating project (whose email address that really was) had received our messages and to Ivor’s amusement had no idea who was sending them. In our search for the meaning of magnitude we canvassed the length and breadth of Ireland, north and south. We set up watch posts all over the island and even enlisted the help of an ocean floor monitoring crew to keep an eye out between Cork and Nova Scotia. We sold collages made from found scrap paper and stencil work from the portfolio and did signs and murals to survive. After four months of searching in vain for the ice age creature, we learned to hitchhike the ferries and returned to the continent. We had been living with the elk at the Galway City Hostel but we were unable to recognize them.

1997-98 “Nostradamus” On the Canary Island of La Palma we were guests of Britta Druda. She is an occultist, a healer and a Nostradamus expert. She’s a witch and under her guidance we entered the world of witches and warlocks and pendulums and magic stones. We translated the quatrains of the centurion into collages and regularly celebrated the end of the world, according to Britta”s calculations. One day we were arrested, investigated by the secret police and thrown off the island for lack of visas. The exhibition in Cologne was held under surveillance cameras at gallery Calcography (Roland Bergere, Nini Flick) together with the poet, Stan Lafleur who was present at the arrest and wrote the “Nostro-Rap”.

1998-99 “The Cologne Exchange” Al had complained that he couldn’t get artists to come to Cologne unless he paid them but the ones who did come were welcomed and taken care of. Our Cologne exchange involved no money – only faith in the art community. The project was twofold. We were still looking for the elk and the meaning of magnitude. We joined forces with the Glasgow artist, SweetScience, to build parade entries for the West End Festival. Together we built a full size Great Irish Elk decoy on Argyle Street as a performance for a group show at Transmission Gallery and we set a moose trap for the Great Irish Elk. Transmission gallery sponsored us and through their newsletter we found our exchange artist, Magnus Lawry. The Cologne artists welcomed Magnus warmly and he stayed and worked with them for several years. We had found the Elk and the meaning of magnitude.

1999-2000 “New Zealand Project” We developed the antipodal collage workshop and attempted to take it to New Zealand. We made it only as far as Thailand, where we worked with the University of Chiang Mai and the Sunathorn School for the Deaf. We were sponsored by the Chiang Mai artist, Woneke Juntaratip.

2000-01 “Green Portfolio” We adapted an “activity” designed by Woneke Juntaratip: “travel the country with art supplies and make art with friends“. We changed the idea and missed the point. We made our friends and their homes into art. We used the contents of their wastepaper baskets to make antipodal collages from sketches of their surroundings. These, along with collages from the homes and neighborhoods of previously visited friends, were taken in the Green Portfolio from door to door throughout their neighborhood and shown for sale to the local business people, their neighbors. In this manner we visited with the neighbors of friends and chatted about other neighborhoods of other friends and so extended the neighborhood to range from Prague to Amsterdam.

2002 “Sold Picture Gallery” Hans-Joerg Tauchert of the Kunsthalle Weyertal coordinated the online gallery. We rode bicycles and followed the Netherlands’ trails for seven months. We sold collages and drawings of the trip for our survival. Hans-Joerg’s on-line gallery displayed the pictures that we sold and included a plug for each buyer. In the end it became a wonderful display of the journey and a small business directory, a network of the people who took part. We were also looking for a Dutch art project in which we could take part and we stumbled across and helped to found “ecoTribe Teuge”.

2007-08 “La Garrotxa Project” The School of Olot is the legacy of the impressionist painter, Joaquim Vayreda. The surrounding “La Garrotxa” landscapes became a favored motif for post impressionists. We walked the volcanic trails and made paintings of their landscapes. Together with teachers and students from the School of Olot, we staged the happening, “Mountain Song”. In a darkened room, with the echo of it’s high vaulted monastery ceiling, the paintings were projected onto a large screen and the students were asked to simultaneously and independently sing a song that comes to mind The students were instructed to sing their parts according to a list of variables which altered volume, pitch, rhythm and orchestration. The changing landscapes on the screen cued the musical changes. The overtones were unexpected and impressive. This was the final project of a twenty year journey that led us back to the Pyrenees and back to that original project which Al Hansen’s Welt Kunst Labor System had set in motion.