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Hans Peter Althaus, Kreative Bildsprache, veröffentlicht in deutscher Sprache in Katalog: |
The work of Anna Oppermann presents every serious observer with an unusual challenge. Pictures and photographs containing a wealth of details and perspectives, arrangements and assemblages consisting of numerous individual pieces preclude any speedy grasp of the totality and hinder the organizing understanding of the parts and of the whole. And yet there proceeds from the individual plastic works just as from the large spatial arrangements a particular fascination. Perhaps this stems from the fact that here a plastic work of art is presented with particular consistency and perhaps also that here is provided to a degree greater than usual insight into the connection between artistic sensitivity and plastic creation.
The work confronts the observer with many an enigma. An ensemble cannot be comprehended at first glance. But nor are the variously combined perspectives of a picture or a photograph immediately grasped. If the details are considered, then the connection is soon lost and one has to inquire after the principles according to which the material has been collected, grouped and presented. Thereupon many a thing appears familiar, almost everyday. There are objects from the banal world about us and pictures of them which might be familiar to anyone; and yet their significance in the context is unclear, sometimes perplexing. Individual objects can be clearly distinguished but the relationship between them is uncertain. Then, too, an ensemble that has already been seen some time before is re-built in another place and so altered fundamentally that its connection with the remembered impression has first to be re-established. Such a work cannot be understood at a first attempt, above all not when the effect of a first approach is re-questioned, confronted with other conceivable effects and confirmation established. For it is precisely when the spectator is proceeding through the seemingly certain territory of his accustomed way of seeing things and of understanding art that he often finds himself unexpectedly transferred to a setting where there is neither path nor indication. The more he attempts to enter into the work, the more enigmatic to him must become everything he sees and has believed and understood.
The work seems - especially in the large structures and exhibitions - to resemble an enchanted garden into which one has penetrated without the key to its understanding. Only precise observation can help here, as with evidences of some unfamiliar culture. In this situation one can no longer read, things must be spelt again. Through, such decipherment of the important and less significant details relationships are established, structures become clearer, motifs and themes are revealed, intentions and aims become clear. Points of departure can be established and stages of work delimitated. Above all are revealed the artistic means which make possible understanding and an assessment of form and content. Such a procedure of step by step approach to a complex work of art resembles in many ways the process of learning a language. But, for the artistic language there is no dictionary, no grammar nor any translator or language teacher. The observer is always at one and the same time both learner and teacher. What he gains in understanding serves not only to decipher the work but also to extend his capability to perceive and to recognize; and this in turn he can utilize for further penetration into the artistic microcosm. In this regard the plastic work of Anna Oppermann offers many an opportunity and plastic form makes the attempt worthwhile. Pictures and assemblages can be understood as formulations of an individual plastic language, the decipherment of which can be attempted through a comparison of some essential features with their equivalents in natural language.
An arrangement of everyday objects, e. g. a tablecloth with a plate and a few leaves, is frequently employed by Anna Oppermann as a starting point for her plastic invention. The objects derived from the world of nature and civilisation can often function appropriately as symbols: They may already possess this quality in general artistic usage or it can be effected for the first time through the particular form and organization of the arrangement. This is the case, for instance, with a knife, some individual scissor blades, bricks, fruits, etc. Drawings and/or photographs are produced of such an arrangement and these are added to the original arrangement. The thus altered arrangement containing now a depiction of its former state becomes in turn an object of depiction. Expansion of the arrangement and its depiction can now be repeated at will. In the course of this process new objects are introduced, others omitted and the original parts arranged differently. Once established as an image the standpoint of depiction has been changed. A particular situation can be depicted not only from different perspectives but also in quite various proportions, in distortions and by means of very different techniques - drawn, painted, photographed in black and white or in colour, reduced and enlarged, overpainted and overpasted.
The original idea has become altered in the course of its treatment, sometimes to a greater and sometimes to a lesser extent. Sometimes subordinate themes are split off and developed independently, sometimes themes are brought together or particular arrangements from another context are quoted. Sometimes a theme remains long neglected before being taken up again, sometimes a thematic formulation is already altered again in a short time. Such alterations can be determined by external and internal causes. The reconstruction of an ensemble for an exhibition can almost never be produced as a re-construction of a former structure. The very act involves alterations. In addition, the artistic process underlying the embodiment of the theme does not remain still in the time between two different constructions of the same ensemble. Thus, new viewpoints, citations and objects but also drawings and photographs collected throughout the artistic process are going to be incorporated permanentely. To the materials which must always be taken into consideration in any re-construction belong the pictures, drawings and photographs by which the final situation is established and which designate the process of transformation and the ageing of the formulation.
The occupation, with the plastic formulation of a theme thus extends from the first arrangement to the final depiction. However, there always remains preserved the fundamental principle that the construction of an arrangement or ensemble in more or less extended three-dimensional form always follows the composition of the whole or individual parts in the two-dimensional picture. In this Anna Oppermann's ensemble art is a dynamic process making possible an infinitely manifold formulation of a limited number of plastic means and in accordance with a small number of rules. The potential limitlessness of plastic formulations in an ensemble results from the repeated application of a few rules concerning the incorporation, fixation and elimination of plastic elements. In this the plastic artistic process resembles the employment of natural language. In language this phenomenon, known as recursivity, guarantees the creative capability of man in so far as it places him in a position to produce and understand within limited means an infinite number of formulations. To be sure, Anna Oppermann does not employ the recursive rule schematically or serially but entirely freely and controlled only by artistic intentions and aims. This, too, resembles the use of natural languages. The recursivity of her plastic art does not therefore restrict artistic creativity but on the contrary creates the freedom necessary for artistic expression in various formulations.
The individual plastic works and ensembles created in accordance with the principle of the recursivity of artistic means correspond in their character as artefacts in many regards to the texts which are produced, transmitted, understood and established as linguistic utterances in communication processes. Consequently, through a comparison of plastic artistic assemblages and texts of natural language an attempt should be made to reveal similarities and differences in order thus to gain further access to the understanding of the work of Anna Oppermann.
Any drawing, picture and photograph can be understood as a plastic text composed of a multitude of individual plastic elements produced as part of a sequence of similar plastic texts. These form into groups, for example, as parts of former states / installations of an ensemble and form larger units as the assembled individual parts of an ensemble: finally, they comprise the totality of the plastic works of the artist - her plastic text-corpus. Together with such a static view according with a plastic hierarchy, the observation of dynamic factors also plays a part. All plastic texts can also be understood as parts of a plastic communication process. This process is a dialogue which the artist conducts with herself, with her creative sensitivity and with her works as the depository of her recollections. This does not at all mean that at the same time pictures which follow one upon the other are to be regarded as direct respondences, there occur variously ranked retrospections, supplementations, expansions, recapitulations which variously structure the sequence of plastic production according to the content and the significance of the individual plastic texts. In this, too, the plastic texts resemble linguistic texts, the linear linking of which is interpreted through syntactic and also semantic structures independent of the linear sequence.
Still more clearly than in the case of linguistic texts it can be seen in the evolvement of plastic production that the given composition is connected with the rheme of new plastic utterances as a theme of new plastic creation. In this, the new rhematic information can also refer to a section of the theme and thus make possible for example a particular emphasis or a separate explanation of particular qualities. The relationship between plastic part-texts is established however not only by the course of thematic progression but also by the development of the process of plastic communication, which results not only in an internal dialogue of the artist with herself but also in a process between the artist and the public. Experiences and events derived from the very presentation of the sculptural imagenaries flow over from the plastic formulation back into the work and thus alter it just as much as does the artistic process itself.
The plastic work of Anna Oppermann appears differently to the public than the artist herself perceives it. She can experience her work as an ordered thematic and temporally incorporated multitude of plastic texts. The public must experience the ensembles primarily as a totality of plastic texts equal in principle. Relationships, priorities and subordinations, temporal sequences, thematic developments, confirmation of earlier conceptions and their negation, omissions and additions which are ever present to the artist in her particular role must be carefully observed, established and assessed by the public on the basis of all the details. Thus, the large installations have almost entirely the characteristics of a palimpsest, of a repeatedly used manuscript in which moreover the earlier entry is not entirely erased but used as the basis of a new formulation. The decipherment of similarly overwritten plastic texts is just as difficult as the reading of linguistic palimpsests. The task is to establish what has been introduced and how, what represents the earlier and what the more recent formulation, what accords with something else and develops the plastic formulations, what merely re-employs the plastic plane as contrast, what must be understood as the expression of a particular plastic formulation of the theme. For the textual analysis of natural languages the historico-critical method is employed which distinguished between the individual formulations according to the sequence of their production and recently as for example in the Frankfurt edition of Hölderlin - makes the process of re-formulation and new formulation something to be experienced as the product of artistic struggle. There may be compared to the work of Anna Oppermann not only the linguistic artistic work of a poet striving after a final version of his poetry but also the work of the philologist who in an historico-critical edition of poetry wishes to document the creative process itself as well as the work. Whereas in poetic work the stages of production are lost in the material of language, in the spatial work of art of Anna Oppermann the temporal components of the work remain visible and experiential.
If on observing the plastic text one considers detail, then numerous parallels to the texts of natural language can be established. Like language, the picture by means of an arranged relationship is also a symbol between the depicted object and the depicting sign. For this a relationship of similarity is employed such as occurs also in language - for example with onomatopoeia - though not playing such a dominant role. Other than in linguistic texts, however, in the plastic texts of Anna Oppermann the object of depeiction is also incorporated. In this respect the plastic texts surpass linguistic texts and resemble the totality of a communicatively relevant situation. The presentation of the depicted original makes possible direct reference by means of a deictic act. Such deictic elements occur in language only in rudimentary form - in German, for example, through indicators such as 'hier', 'da', 'dort' ('here', 'there'). In the plastic art of an ensemble they can be systematically employed and extended.
Individual plastic elements can be reproduced, modified, combined and interchanged. In this they resemble words in sentences. Through its reproduction a plastic element is isolated, removed from its environment and simultaneously lexicalised. Modifications which can be produced by various plastic means can be compared to lexical and grammatical variations such as made possible in word-formation by derivation and combination, by inflection, declension and conjugation. The combination of different plastic elements can be understood as syntactic composition, their replacement as the constructing of a field made up of plastic elements.
In arrangement and composition language possesses two procedures which similarly occur in the plastic texts. Freely associated composition and contiguous arrangement characterize the possibilities of linear arrangement, which unlike language however is not restricted to running from right to left or left to right. Hierarchies of compositional elements such as occur in repeated depiction within the framework of an arrangement correspond to the hypotactic compositions of language as contained, for example, in compound sentences. Just as linguistic co-ordinations often cannot be unequivocally established and linguistic super-ordinations and sub-ordinations frequently are only to be deciphered with difficulty, so too is this true of the plastic texts. Here too the co-ordinating of relationships has need of various interpretations and the organizing principle demands that we systematize likewise.
Of the more complex linguistic phenomena which Anna Oppermann has been able to extend in plastic texts by means of a great number of perspectives is the description of agency usually expressed in language by the choice of active or passive forms. Not only from the point of view of the one or the other (the agent or the sufferer of the action) can a particular content here be expressed as is the case in language, but from behind and before, from above and below, and even from any desired viewpoint. The orientation of the objects in space makes plastically possible a total spectacle but one which however in the case of drawings, pictures and photographs is again restricted by the perspective chosen. In an ensemble though various perspectives can be communicated simultaneously. Thereby they can comment upon each other, a possibility which albeit potentially contained in language is yet precluded in general usage. Also in the indication of temporal and actual relationships Anna Oppermann has created in her plastic work possibilities which otherwise occur only in language. Through the various different conditions of objects in the ensembles and their recurrence in new pictures and photographs a temporal stratification is attained such as has not otherwise been expressed so generally in plastic art. Admittedly, temporal indicators are nothing new in pictures, one need only think of the allegories of transitoriness in the baroque. But the consistent employment of temporal reference in the ensembles presents a characteristic which considerably extends plastic powers of expression. Within the plastic text can thus be presented simultaneities, anteriorities and posteriorities, the plastic elements being related to each other on a wider plane. The actual relationships can also be modified. Already the surrealists have placed the depiction of the impossible alongside the representation of the actual or presented it as something conceivable in actuality. In Oppermann's ensembles further modal differentiations occur: for example, the representation of the possible or the necessary. In this, pictorial and symbolic means are employed: impreciseness, cuts, blurs, but also the introduction of symbolic indicators such as knife and scissors.
Finally, the plastic texts also resemble linguistic texts in their composition. Repetitions of individual plastic elements by means of their recurrent reference to the plastic content serve not only for coherence between the individual parts of an ensemble but also present rhythmic relationships and correspond to textual unifiers such as are produced by alliteration and rhyme. The composition of the ensembles from parts divisible into still smaller parts can be compared to linguistic elements such as line and stanza. In recent exhibitions Anna Oppermann has revealed the inner composition through installations which have amplified the earlier arrangement over wall and floor or later over two corner walls and floor by means of internal spatial integration. In such manfoldly differentiated Gesamtkunstwerk there are also found forms of expression contained in general artistic genres, for example instances of irony and parody. This indicates that Anna Oppermann's plastic language has attained a point where it is possible for the artist in the struggle for artistic expression to capture sensations and experiences in an artistic plastic composition which is unique in its totality, its many levels and its power of expression.
The artistic microcosm which Anna 0ppermann has created with her ensembles can rightly be compared to the Gesamtkunstwerke of the past, for example to the constructs of Kurt Schwitters. As with many other works aiming at the whole of artistic forms of expression, an approach to understanding of these ensembles is not easy either. The creative process of the artist which has led to the inspiration and production of the assemblages must be accompanied by a re-creative process of decipherment and reading. Many seeming enigmas then prove to be plastic works in which alienation and condensation are necessarily involved in the attainment of the aim of expression. To unravel the coexisting nature of an ensemble in a comprehensible arrangement of pronouncements is therefore a task in which every observer of the work must take part creatively. He will be rewarded not only with the experience of incomparable plastic art but also with the sensitivisation of his own capabilities.
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