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Ines Lindner: Anna Oppermann veröffentlicht in deutscher Sprache in Katalog:
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This pat diagnosis describes fairly accurately what happened when scholars and artists encountered one another in the "Bonner Kunstverein" in February 1989. But sparks also flew. Anna brusquely dismissed my attempt at localizing her work from an art historical perspective. And yet there was a mutual sense of openness, an exchange of address with a surprise: her work refuge is in the place where I was born.
It is there that I meet Anna for a first interview as part of the "Dialogue" project, with me holding my one-month-old baby in my arms. Together with the baby it is as if I had departed from the room's central perspective, which delineates where I am, where it/the other is, in which relations dominate in terms of size/distance/surrounding. It is difficult to say which way is up or down. Somewhat disturbing, but maybe the right frame of mind for a conversation with Anna and for her ensembles, which neither demand nor require a static subject position.
The interplay of facets, texts and emblems and its liberal propensity to allow all perspectives hinder the ability to seek comfort in the aesthetic distance from which "the totality" could be viewed. To submit one's self to the rhythmic structure of repetition, extract, enlargement, reduction of text and image requires you to make dancelike steps, spins, half turns: if you want to see, then you must surrender, downright physically, to the perspective rhythms of proximity and distance, enlargement and reduction, text and image. Every detention, every classification is a little lie which dissipates in the mumbling of commentary, the way in which the facets of the ensemble communicate among themselves and kindle a dialogue...
Dialogue?
Outspoken and demanding at times and timorous at others, I played the role of questioner, trying to track down Anna's work methods - as well as my own. From the moment I first encountered her ensembles, I have been preoccupied with how they crystallize around a central stake of fascination, which is the reason for the special way of seeing: Anna leaves traces of this branching out movement within text passages, various perceptions, the coincidental and the ephemeral that all become an integral part of her work.
The aesthetic design of the presentation form developed for this purpose by Anna gives the room that something which is usually dropped in the linearity of argumentative texts. How little remains in art historical essays of the battles between pictures and texts, with their amorous glances and swords crossed at bay, showing absolutely no desire to submit to disciplinary rules; battles between images and images, and texts and texts, entering into illegitimate relations and producing the most exultant bastards. They usually fall victim to the spiteful look cast by professionals in their usual anticipatory manner or are shaped and molded in such a way that the State can do as it pleases.
Anna tried her best to answer my questions and seemed plagued time and again with doubts about whether she had said that which should have been said. I began to ask my questions, the act of questioning. What type of answers was I actually expecting when I stare at my scribbled notes after an interview with a certain degree of perplexity? Precise pre-structured formulations did not change anything either. Since other scholars working on the project had also reported having similar experiences and one artist had entirely refused, with undisputed clarity, to answer the questions from the project context, the time had come for me to reflect on the mechanisms governing the dialogue's questioning and answering interplay.
SOCRATES: Let us observe it in this light. PHAEDO: How? Apparently. I admit it. Exactly in this way. Yes. How then differently? This way, indeed. Of course. How do you really mean it? Why shouldn't I! Necessary. Impossible. That must be the way it goes. Never. That must be the way (Plato, Phaedo).
MARCEL DUCHAMP: That was how it was. True. I don't know that either. Yes, that's right. I was tired of it then already (Pierre Cabanne, interview with Marcel Duchamp).
FLORIAN RÖTZER: Mr. Minsky, you used to be... TIMOTHY LEARY: Aa, burn out, take a rest (Kunstforum 110).
Apparently driven by curiosity alone, the play between question and answer in the conversation, dialogue and interview reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be a structure conveying cultural attitudes, with the rules being determined by an orientation to results: Position of the speaker, publication type and location determine what was said, what was perceived of the one speaking and what, once transcribed, is cited as the "source". While thoughts, emotions and words converge during speaking, and there is always the possibility of adding something in reaction, a separation occurs once they are written down. What will she do with this? The wary return-questioning of the one being questioned demarcates an area of contention between the artists and art critics who have exposed themselves to one another during the ''Dialogue" project far more than is customary, more and differently, more intimately than had a routine interviewer come to write an article to appear in a magazine or catalogue. A dizzying game sets in of deviations: permitting, retracting; desire and apprehension towards discursive unequivocalness inspire the most wondrous buds.
CELLE; TUESDAY; NOVEMBER 27, 1990
Anna's ensembles can be discerned through a store window. Women are wandering among them, with most being project participants. Maybe I have allowed them to enter. Perhaps against Anna's wishes. Walking abreast, some Asians go down a slight stairway. Without a word, not impolitely, they signal us to leave the place. Maybe they are Chinese.
This dream sequence takes up the game between revealing and concealing, inviting and rebuffing and casts a spotlight on my own position.
Not until I misspell a word when writing something down for Anna do I become aware of the an(n)agrammatic structure, the coded message in the "Chinese" which encases "I" and "Ines". She first exposes herself through writing, which in itself may exhibit a montage-like character.
The text is always just a half of the text, in this case literally, since I suppress my lines of commentary, which I have given Anna, and the photograph displaying her installation through a window at the bottom of the paper. Having itself become a part of the installation in Kiel, it has submerged into new reading and visual contexts, interpretable for me as a trace of our dialogue, interpretable there as a part of the other elements of dialogue. There are other traces which I also rediscover during the last set-up phase and just now begin to grasp that the ensemble is not the object but rather the site of dialogue, Anna's manner of responding; With almost unbounded surprise, yes, a pounding of my heart, I realize that my own arbitrary text selection in apprehending the "Blue", my text production and the innumerable contact sheets of photographs designate the object behind the project's concept of "dialogues": a form of aesthetic application. Anna's methodology, perhaps the kernel of fascination and the dynamic of the ensemble itself, have turned my pockets inside out and transformed the finds, dreams and reflections into segments of a word and web of images, which construct their own space.
To lie a blue streak, Kiel, April 1991 The colors of the ensemble, red, blue in particular, are luminescent in the brightly lit gallery room. Daylight streams through the bay window panels above, which line the 17 meter-long and 6 meter-wide room. The room's length and the upper row of bay windows, which protrude 2 meters inside, present considerable difficulties for installing the ensemble. Evidence of this is contained in small drawings placed in the ensemble, which display two figures: One is holding a collapsible measuring stick in her outwardly stretched right hand, the other, frustrated, next to her, duly recording the measurements. The challenge of the room proves fortunate for the ensemble, for the artistic mode of working which, through its conflict with a given space, establishes its own as heterotypical. A wood paneled wall has been situated within the gallery room on which to hang pictures. Old windows have been fitted in it: One, which lies at the same height as the bay windows, provides a view of the gallery room behind it, in which the initials A.O. and the year '91 can be read in mirror-writing on the reverse side, and four more which create a bay window. They mirror partially and are partially covered with red and blue paint. Two panes provide a view into the room behind and vice versa. Mirrors and windows cite the surroundings, also present in picture details, in the ensemble. Defined by its walls and white stages, the location is both marked off and pervious; it opens out and shuts in views from across and mirroring effects, setting interior and exterior spaces as pictorial details adjacent and concurrent to one another. Through the window with the initials, which is mounted in the paneled wall between the ceiling and upper bay windows, you can see, from the doorway, blue strips of light on the ceiling of the gallery room behind the ensemble. Transparent plastic painted blue, as a membrane separating exterior and interior, utilizes the bay windows as an integral part of the installation. The intermittent blue lighting directs the gaze to the picture on the rear gallery wall: a portrait by Anna through the door of the glass shrine with its red and blue leaded windows. Its depiction and color spectrum are iterated in multiple refractions. The bay window, which the portrait is placed next to, is cited as an element of the room and doubled. Small drawings, photographs and texts are arranged within both and in their common surroundings. By mounting them on wooden blocks, she has placed them at the level of the viewer's gaze. This gesture of display is subsumed both through the limited view into the room and through the small image formats and their abundance. Many motifs return in the large picture formats installed in tightly arranged rows on the walls, floor and ceiling. While the paintings on the walls and floor are aligned in a single direction, those on the ceiling stray in various ones. Observed from every angle, the loosely arranged asymmetric hanging pictures let some lie upside down, others sideways. If you don't submit to the movement necessary for seeing them, then it'll spin your head around.
Ordering Processes and Paradoxes
One afternoon when alone in Anna's studio with her ensemble, I tried to capture the movements on film that my eyes made when observing it. The last film exposure captures a total overview with my hand on an Ektachrome film which happened to be lying around. Against the luminous blue sky, only colored dots can be discerned in the picture. Anna integrates these photographs into the ensemble: In drawn, painted and various other formats, I encounter in Kiel my arrested view, which disperses in the ensemble against the blue streak of sky. A caption translates this view into a pun on the facets: »Try and lie a blue streak«. The view becomes perceptible as a projection and segment of a scene. The flipside to that consists in a legerdemain that opposes a clarifying view, the totalizing gaze which attempts to reduce the game of truth to a single perspective. Is there a visual truth? »lf you say that you are a liar and you tell the truth, then you are lying« is a classic example of how paradoxical structures are used by Anna seeking to cause confusion in her ensembles. Yet at the same time this sentence breaks them down. Does it describe the truth of a lie, the lie in truth? The reflexivity of a paradox is an open one; it is referential and non-explicatory. Paradox is a phenomenon which reverses and pushes the limits of the systems of reference in which it appears.
'When you say "hill,"' the Queen interrupted, 'I could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley.' Anna integrates this quotation from the Red Queen out of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass into the ensemble. Alice contradicts her by calling it nonsense and the Red Queen responds 'You may call it "nonsense" if you like...but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'. A landscape of chess-board squares stretches before Alice. No matter how fast she runs, she is not able to cross in a straight line.
Even though most of the ensemble's square paintings border one another on the floor and walls in a checkered pattern, the observer will have a just as difficult a time as Alice in traversing the supposedly geometric arrangement.
Red and blue glass shards are strewn across the floor in the Kiel version. On the one hand they are a fragmented echo of the red and blue glass panes of the triangular shrine and, on the other, can be taken to be a diagram of a kaleidoscope which is placed conspicuously on top of a large tableau in the front row. Using elements such as colorfulness, glass, reflection, and the pattern of dispersion and repetition as points of departure, Anna tried applying the term kaleidoscope during a reflective movement surrounding her work and personal life. In Kiel we exchange our materials on this buzzword she has introduced into the game. I bring her a photocopy, from an old "Brockhaus" encyclopedia, of a kaleidoscope diagram with a precise description, which she in turn transfers to canvas using red paint; she gives me a card on which she has jotted down her thoughts. The principal parts of the kaleidoscope are mirrors with the corners placed pointing towards one another, bordered by transparent and matte pieces of glass. This design construction causes a prismatic dispersion of the enclosed objects. To the observer the objects and their partial views join together to form a symmetric pattern, a »pretty picture« (kaleidoscope = Kal(ós) beautiful + eîdo(s) shape). The basic kaleidoscope components are situated within the triangular glass shrine which the »legend« to the exhibition »Das Blaue vom Himmel herunterlügen« has shown to be among the ensemble's initial motifs.
Within, reflections are deflected and multiplied from its colored glass panes as well, in accordance with the nature of mirrors. Close-up views of the shrine resurface in drawings and on canvases. They are even subjected to a dispersive and multiplicative process which is characteristic of Anna's ensembles. In a few of the pictures depicting this close-up view you can spot a reflection of a star-shaped area in the red border frame of the shrine door. An ideogram draws this star to the forefront of the series of basic ensemble characters. Some pictures reveal an eye sketched in blue above it. It marks the positioning of the focus sight, perhaps the eye of the observer. At the same time, when overlapping the star with the eye, a further abstraction comes to mind: »eye star«, so that the compiled image could be interpreted as a lexical image.
Writing intrudes throughout the ensemble, eclipsing and lodging itself behind the images. Seldom serving as a description of the image itself, it creates dissymmetry where it appears, allowing the spectator to venture different associations to the title and to various parts of the ensemble. Constructing the associative relations determines the rhythm of each person's line of sight when reading the ensemble's visual language. I interpret the lexical image »eye star« from the closeup view in the glass shrine to signal that which the shrine bestows: A different departure point motif in the ensemble: »A photograph - Anna O., January 1976, particularly unflattering, in side profile. The words written in blue felt-tip pen on the back of the snapshot identify it as a birthday present: 'Gift coupon: One day of doing whatever Anna wants! Alex'. Memories are awakened of distant times witnessing special mother-son relations...«. In the midst of reconstructing the crisscrossing movements of reading, I must subside here; in the room next door there is a screaming child who is sick, the child who causes thorough turmoil to the ways in which I work and perceive my environment, whose existence is certainly of no minor consequence to the fact that the mother-son relation has acquired additional dimensions in her use of photographs and drawings...
I could subsequently describe the drawing showing Anna's hair which blends into the willow branches in one of her son's sketches; I could address the targeted contradiction in the juxtaposition of shrine and »A.O. portrait-ugly« (Anna in so many words: »wipe up the drippy sentimentality with a dry towel«). I could follow its variations throughout the ensemble in which it is itself projected as a part of the ensemble, located next to a torn-out Trakl quotation concerning the »blue cave of childhood«, and I could insert a general interlude over the color blue or examine the question whether the appropriative glance of the other, of the son on the artist once she includes the photograph which he has taken and modifies it...Stop! you shout out, stop! Rightly so. How can it record the movements demanded by the ensemble that correspond to the eye when observing and reading, how can he logically follow the room's spatial presence, its thematic breaks, leaps? Nothing seems more futile than endeavoring to forcibly advance through the range of material, from one interpretation of motif to the next, although my longtime involvement with the ensemble and the conversations with Anna have caused my box of notes to overflow.
So let us return to the kaleidoscope, which has directed us from the colored glass shards on the floor to the furthest corner of the ensemble, the corner which constitute the side walls of the shrine. Situated in the wood paneled wall next to the shrine, the adjacent bay window reiterates this shrine. Approaching it from the rear, you can see multiple reflections of the drawings and photographs within, through the red and blue stained glass window panes. But images of objects that are standing and moving in front of the ensemble are also reflected, without having to enter the closed symmetry of the kaleidoscopic effect. Anna's written comment on the kaleidoscope underscores it as a point of contention: »Opening the system by way of others taking effect (happenstance) is permitted and desired.« Other points made as well do not establish any equivalence but signal differences. First and foremost: »Symmetry is not allowed«. Symmetry is a means of establishing order, always containing a moment of stasis, arresting the eye, maybe even secretively guaranteeing a secure overview for the spectator who stabilizes an - illusory - sense of inner unity.
»The dissected and repeated and newly recombined motifs are united into a single design pattern, in other words returned to a single geometric unit,« Anna critically comments on the kaleidoscope. While being interested in the patterned structure of the displaced areas and their points of intersection, she firmly emphasizes her conceptional approach to her own work. »It is not the mirror, but rather my eye which determines the intersecting areas, enlarging, reducing and modifying the proportions.« She sets her own eye in the position of mirror, an active and reflexive look, which the ensemble demands from her, just as from any other observer. Images which continuously present single elements of the ensemble in different formations demonstrate this visual process in progress. While it is altogether often the case that you can detect a particular object's status as the main motif - with this even being specifically designated by the »legend« to the ensemble - derivative elements, however, which seek to reconstruct a chronological sequence, become obsolete. As for the room, there is little reason to divide the simultaneity of the objects into model and portrayal, into »original« and reproduction. Is the photograph the original to the drawing; the drawing, as an object among objects, the original to the painted photographic canvas which displays a section of the ensemble?
In the figure which comprises the kaleidoscope out of partial views of the enclosed objects, we consider the mirrored objects themselves as a picture. The object creates an image in the right mirror. The lefthand mirror then perceives this reflection once more as an object. With this volleying back and forth, you can no longer determine the status of object to image, of image to likeness. A deception? Have not paintings, or art in general, been suspected since Plato of simply producing fraudulent images? »When painting you must convey the concept of the real with help of the false (Degas)« is quoted in the ensemble, as is Oscar Wilde's summons that the lost art of lying is to be cultivated. In the patchwork of quotations, each has its moment among the different reflective particles which, in effect, illuminate the insistence on truth in representational systems. A quote from Lyotard, making an issue of man's arrogance in constituting sense and speaking the truth, becomes itself swept up into the vortex of truth and fabrication: One visitor insists that it stems from Luce Irigary. Anna crosses the one name out and replaces it with another, crosses the second name out once again upon my objection and places the first name again beneath it. She draws a red square below these crossed-out words. A few drops of blood remain as a trace of this process in which Anna injured herself. The quote as a cut-out, a severance in the text, from which it makes a copy of a piece and allows it to surface in another context in the room of the ensemble; inadvertently casts doubt upon the ascription of »authorship« as a guarantee of origin. Just as the status of image to likeness can hardly be apprehended through division and multiplication, that of quotations can also hardly be determined: they free themselves from the act of ascription within the visual language of the ensemble.
Anna also employs writing to reclaim a picture, yes to practically erase her own work by overlapping it with writing. In the case of a tableau, which displays a section of the ensemble with »Portrait A.O. - ugly -«, the dedication on the back is superimposed on the picture. Its reversed image, writing, appears in the painting, the writing of the other as the Other of the pictures, which covers, traverses and interrupts her.
[Übersetzung: Heidi Lewis]
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