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Bazon Brock, Anna Oppermann's Ensembles, in der englischsprachigen Beilage zum Katalog Anna Oppermann Ensembles
1968 bis 1984, a. a. O. |
In some respect this argument has to be agreed to. However, the fact that between 1950 and 1960, for instance, thousands of painters painted "informally" does not mean that every single painting had a personal style let alone an artistically convincing message. On the other hand, conceptual artists drew our attention to the fact that artistically convincing ideas do not necessarily have to be represented by their authors, respectively that the personal style of the draftsman or painter is hardly more than an arbitrary and interchangeable marginal characteristic.
Once it was comparatively easy to say that every artist's work seemed to have an individual contextual and formal appearance, because in general form and contents were mutually dependent. One had to be aware though that a certain formal identity without much substance could exist and that, on the other hand, artistic-conceptual ideas could demonstrate independence even if the language of form, the applied techniques, and the used material were fairly conventional. Today the argumentation runs as follows: Every person has his or her unmistakable way of expression. When we think to be unable to recognize this, the reason is that we are not familiar with the individual case. If we do not want to concede this unmistakable gesture of expression to non-professional artists which we unhesitatingly concede to professional artists then the non-professional artists have either not presented enough artistic works that allow recognition of an individual style or we did not take enough time to reconstruct the individual gesture of expression. Hence, the statement that those artists whose identity we claim to be able to perceive even from a distance of "one hundred meters" could be understood as if they are the ones whose works of art we have already contemplated sufficiently and for a long time. This is a very consoling argument for all those people "one" does not concede artistic significance to; they can convince themselves that time, conditions, and lacking interest prevented their potential audience from elaborating even the pre-condition for a possible identification. However, this conclusion only shifts the problem from the question "Who is an important artists?" to the question: "Which artists are perceived in a way that their identity is generally known?"
Anna Oppermann's works of art confront us with a different conclusion which, at least at the moment, is very plausible. With her ensembles Anna Oppermann has for more than a decade succeeded in maintaining quite an unmistakable and unique position in the art scene. In the first place the method of the installation of the ensembles is characteristic even though this method has no individual author; if we would still try to trace it back to Anna Oppermann, it would be that component of her works of art that could most easily be generalized and applied by everyone.
I consider Anna Oppermann's works of art remarkable precisely because she applies a method available to everyone. One example for the installation of ensembles in our everyday world are the big department stores that display the most different goods in the most different colours, forms, and wrappings in a way that an inner logic as well as an outer form of the ensemble becomes visible from every purchaser's position. A self-service shop's outer appearance presents masses of different products in a way that the potential buyer can get as close to them as to even touch and take them. The inner logic of the ensemble is either reconstructed from the signs or from the purchaser's ideas about their functions in everyday life.
In the private sphere everyone knows ensembles as house altars which assemble all the junk and the preciosities of our lives, as for instance little plastic figures, photographies, postcards, baby-shoes etc., things that recall our odysseys or conjure up the missing unity of our lives's courses which we hoped to find in extraordinary events like travels or love-affairs.
In the history of art the still-life is an example for ensembles, maybe because it wants to be a mis-en-scène of the improbable encounter of dead things, maybe because it presents itself as a most artful deception of the eye by showing the object-character of two-dimensional pictures, maybe it is a collage by Schwitters. In these still-lives many diverse objects, i. e. heterogeneity are combined as a unity by the individual's perception, description of perception or contemplation of perception. However, what does such a unity show? Totality, a sum, an entity that contains itself? Is it the stylistic unity, uniformity, the dominance of one characteristic quality?
Spoerri's fixations of available objects also form unities that are comparable to traditional still-lives, but hardly anybody would have the idea to define both Spoerri's and Oppermann's assemblages of objects as ensembles and therefore interprete them as being very similar. Arman's accumulations of cans and boxes, too, are unities of a multitude of uniform objects. However, even an inexperienced person feel's that Anna Oppermann's ensembles derive from an entirely different inner logic about the relationship between objects, respectively, they obey a logic of perception that is very different from Arman's. This again is not supposed to be a tautology: of course Oppermann's and Arman's perceptions are different, but are they different because of their diverse logical systems, or rather, aren't they different because of their diverse use of the system of perception that has been developed in natural evolution and reels off in our heads, because of the diverse use of the logical systems that are analogous to the structures of historical societies and that become visible with regard to artistic productions of cultural institutions, in creating a public interested in art, and, not least, in the reconstruction of art histories. The use of the different logical systems could, for instance, be differentiated according to an artist's work with regard to the degree of unity of the heterogeneous in its form, material, object-character (and we only speak of the unity of the heterogeneous when referring to Anna Oppermann's work) i.e. whether these unities are brought about only by the exemplification of logical systems or whether they strive for, or succeed in, decoding them beyond exemplification.
"Painting about painting" is a current reference to the reflectiveness achieved in works of art. It is significant that a code word to achieve enlightenment and cognition through artistic work does not exist for environments and ensembles. Arman exemplifies the logic of assemblages in his "Accumulations", but they do not provide explanations for logical systems. Spoerri's fixations of available everyday objects in subjectively determined sections actually force the viewer - particularly when these fixations are tilted from a horizontal to a vertical position - to ask which logical system of human action these strange assemblages of objects are based upon and which logical system determines Spoerri's utilisation of everyday objects.
Anna Oppermann's ensembles are works of art of high reflectiveness. Obviously they are more than mere variations of forms of installation, more than the mere spatiality of presenting many single graphics. Perhaps they also were pure environments at the beginning, i.e. "works of art that embrace the viewer spatially". The room corner Oppermann prefers might still refer to this origin of her ensembles. We may also suppose that only technical installation problems prevent her from presenting the ensembles as self-contained rooms in whose centre the viewer stands. However, this assumption is erroneous which becomes evident when we know how these ensembles come into being, respectively, when we consider the installation of the ensembles as highly developed displays of an inner logic. Anna Oppermann confronts a problem of perspective: Does the viewer have to take the same fixed position like the artist when she created her work under conditions of experiment that are hardly valid for the viewer? If this is the case then the artist is just as much a beholder of the original material as the viewer when he or she confronts the work of art the contemplation of which is just as much a productive achievement of perception as the creation of the work of art itself.
In the foreground, at the centre of the picture, mostly the artist herself can be seen sitting on a chair at a table contemplating some objects in front of her: pot-plant, cutlery, tablecloth, curtain, writing utensils, hand-mirror, fruit. This position in her early works also remains basically present as a problem of perspective in the later ensembles. The problem is: how can an artistic personality, capable of expressiveness succeed in uniting the manifold approaches to one aspect of the world in one image, i.e. how can an individual succeed in appropriating the world in cognition?
As much as cubists, futurists, surrealists tried to achieve this in panel painting, painting still arrives at these achievements through the restriction of the forms of perception, the multitude of perspectives, the variations of methods, the change of material. Anna Oppermann did not want to yield to this constraint either. As one panel painting does not seem to be sufficient to her - because of the predominance of one form of perception - she wanted to combine many different panel paintings in order to show that their mutual relations would eliminate the unavoidable restrictedness of every single one. For the normal single panel painting one can sometimes presume such a method if, for instance, we suppose that the artist draws many sketches that are later evaluated and realized with respect to one aspect only. Anna Oppermann's sketches of the manifold perceptions of one segment of "world" become autonomous, they are re-evaluated to independent entities, their reciprocal relationship is not transferred to a definite and obligatory language of panel painting. The spatiality of Oppermanns's ensembles is defined by the artist's or the viewer's scope of action. The spatial structure is on the one hand determined by the moment when the single elements of the ensemble were put together (closest to the drawer's and painter's hand are the earliest, farther away the later creations). On the other hand, the spatial structure of the ensemble is interpreted according to simple aspects of perceptibility (the smallest elements in the foreground, the bigger ones in the background). In any case, the approach, the perception, the decoding, the appropriation develops more or less according to one's personal dynamics of cognition which change from detail to the whole, from unmediated to mediated representation of objects (by means of mirrors, for instance), through the exchange of the original object and the semiotic representation of the object after it has been dissected into many aspects of the perspective so that it becomes possible to have a view from above, below, and from the sides at the same time but from different angles and with different techniques of representation.
After having gradually continued like this Anna Oppermann takes a photograph in order to get a general view of the whole, a survey she then integrates in the ensemble. This method could lead to an interpretation that might emphasize ideas that have been unconscious so far, or unnoticed preferences for a single technique might become evident which can then be opposed or used productively. It may be said that this creative process could basically be called unlimited; it has to find an end though because the artist might have exhausted her curiosity, her potential of activity in the particular case, because of ineffective repetition, the limitations of materials or the surface of presentation, the time available for the installation. Of course, when contemplating one of Anna Oppermann's ensembles one has to ask oneself whether the theme or the problem has actually been sufficiently elaborated. Now, this is the actual core of Anna Oppermann's creative method. It does not know failure when confronting certain assignments which the classical methods of artistic production are only all to often threatened by.
Oppermann differentiates according to the distances of confrontation (close, half-close, three quarter or total view) according to techniques, formats, the character of colours (local colour, topographical colour, psychological colour), differentiation according to textual and visual representation, description, analysis, association - and all these distinctions have an inherent meaning which can be reconstructed from them, for meaning, always results from differentiation. Anna Oppermann as an artist hence tends to the same kind of reasoning for her activity as scientists do. In a negative but clear sense this would mean that her enormous achievement of differentiation would be acknowledged like that of scientists, but one would immediately ask what this immensely toilsome work of differentiation is good for, where it leads. This exactly is the point where we have to extend our normal identification with artistic personalities and their work. If we would only admit the possibility that the meaning of artistic as well as scientific activity lies in producing the capacity of differentiation, and that these differentiations should possibly be accessible at the same time - this is what they are in Anna Oppermann's ensembles - then the identity of an artist becomes comprehensible as exemplary activity. We are not invited to bridge the enormous distance between ourselves and the artist's capacity with admiration so it becomes bearable; we are neither invited to imitate the artist in some kind of irresponsible euphoria of the "do-it-yourself", rather, we become aware to which degree the conditions of the world that dominate all of us can be successfully appropriated. Not truth leads us, no doctrine obliges us, no sublime love forces us that is not derived from a particular act of differentiation. If we want to free ourselves from the pangs of obsession, the fetters of the dogma, and the quiet self-censure we have to train our capacity of differentiation on all levels of perception and activity, as a capable artist like Anna Oppermann demonstrates in her work. Her ensembles achieve enlightenment and, particularly, cognition, but beyond that the contemporary presentation of alternative contexts of meaning demonstrate their respective relativeness and only justify them because of this relativeness.
[Übersetzung: Margret Berki]
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