Ute Vorkoeper: To Be Continued - Anna Oppermann's Paths of Perception and Understanding, in Katalog: Paradoxe Intentionen (Das Blaue vom Himmel herunterlügen), Hamburg und Brüssel, 1998, S. 8-14 in deutscher Sprache ebd.

Our first encounter with one of Anna Oppermann's visual worlds leaves us feeling bewildered. Or is it the works that are perplexed? Are not the »Ensembles«, as the artist termed her installations, no less entangled and intricate than we are confused and astonished?
The disconcerted eye takes in the profusion of colours and forms, the confusing flood of images and motifs, objects, drawings, photographs and texts flowing over the floor, up the walls, of the space. Disturbed by the glaring discrepancies in scale and perspective, by the intricate miniatures alongside massively blown-up details, by the slips of paper next to huge pictures, we take a closer look, and to our surprise detect a similarity between the single elements and the visual environment as a whole. The majority of the pictures, drawings and photographs show still-life compositions of found objects, sketches, paintings and photographs. Arranged in front of us are diverse views of arrangements featuring seemingly recurrent colours, shapes and motifs. Yet closer examination of the subjects reveals that nothing in the ensemble is constant or identical, that every repetition is different, shown from a different perspective or combined with new motifs and texts. The reading of each visual particle varies according to its spatial and thematic context; even the slightest change of viewing angle alters the aspect, the relative meaning.
Our initial astonishment is enduring, not diminished by any part of the ensemble. On the contrary: the more closely we follow the myriad trails and visual offerings, the more uncertainties and yawning chasms we encounter. Our unease grows as we become aware of the immeasurable quantities of pictures consumed in the visual flood, realize nothing we come across is whole or complete. If not fragmented or sectioned, then the visual and textual information lies concealed, to a greater or lesser extent, behind other pictorial elements, buried inside the ensemble's temporal gaps and spatial ruptures. Concurrent with the vast stream of graphical signals is an unprecedented flow of signs shrinking from, passing out of, view.
The ensemble proves to be a temporal/spatial process of visual formation, synchronously layered, extended into space. We can locate a kind of centre, a corner in which the components are concentrated, intensified, but no defined source from which a linear trace can be followed. There are borders, but these fractured, indeterminate, precarious boundaries make the vast object look like a fragment of fragments whose fragmentation might resume at any time. The ensemble demands that we never approach it from the same standpoint twice, that we constantly change our viewing angles and lines of sight. Trying to get closer, we concentrate on details, but new shades of meaning distract us before we can begin to decipher them. We start to draw comparisons, trying to assimilate our interpretations and test possible associations. Attempting to adopt a distanced view, we realize any overview gained can be temporary only. By this time, however, the ensemble has seduced us, made us involuntarily take that path of viewing and understanding on which it is based, and which is delineated in the work itself. It is a path by which we carry forward Anna Oppermann's movements through space and time, her sea-sawing between closeness and distance, between focusing and combination, between repetition and dislocation, between insight and overview.
From the late 1960s until her premature death, Anna Oppermann created over 60 ensembles in processes of work spanning years at a time, more than 30 of them consist of several hundred parts. Every component records a facet or station in the routes of perception, research and interpretation the artist followed while investigating questions like »Being a woman«, »Being an artist«, »Being different«, »Love, Eroticism, Sex«, the »Economic Aspect« or the »Paradoxical Intentions« (of making art). It seems (almost) anything was permissible on these paths. Startling the volume of materials, differences in scale and shifting perspectives may be, but on closer inspection the inventory of materials and styles is even more bewildering. A single ensemble includes not only virtually the full range of media and genres -- from found object, drawing, painting, photograph, writing to sculpture and architecture -- but also conveys a sweeping diversity of styles. Naturalistic drawings are presented alongside dashed-off thematic sketches, schematic studies and diagrams. Photographic portraits and found photos of everyday scenes add to the subjects of the ensemble, while a wealth of black-and-white or colour photographs apparently serve the primary purpose of documenting the work's development, with polaroids conveying fleeting impressions of phases in the work and installation process. There are striking differences in the type and content of written material: quotations from works of fiction, treatises on philosophy, psychology, sociology or natural sciences are recorded in handwriting, capital letters and printed types of varying sizes. Scattered throughout the arrangement are ripped-out newspaper excerpts and handwritten notes on drawings and canvases.
»I was unwilling to decide«, said Anna Oppermann in 1986, »what might be termed more important or more successful in regard to the message: the real object, the sketch, the intellectual analysis, or the completed picture. Each part had something the other lacked.« Stylistic pluralism is the declared hallmark, and not just a visible characteristic, of ensemble-making. Yet the astonishing diversity is not merely »arbitrary«; it is message-oriented: »Each part had something the other lacked«. The artist thus basically acknowledged the inadequacy, the ambivalence and context-dependence, of every message, the ambiguity of all knowledge and systems of classification and order. She investigated the changeability of views, interpretations and relations between things, words and images, showed how alterations of view can displace the substance of a message, revealed glaring differences in potential meaning and reading by varying the modes of representation.
Yet this is insufficient as explanation of the artistic goal underlying the ensembles. Anna Oppermann was concerned less with representing the inexhaustible repository of possible messages and the fundamental ambiguity of these statements than with visualizing the possibility and necessity of making statements and choices in view of the wealth of possibilities, in the light of complexity and transitoriness. The passing on of temporary views and modes of writing, and how way she does it, is what counts. Every ensemble is at once a site of handing down and (potential) writing on. The ensembles, far from being mere reproductions of our information-swamped realities or archives of the world's material and intellectual pluralism, guide us into selected interspaces of reality, into spaces of unfinished perception, discussion and evaluation.
At the centre of Anna Oppermann's confrontation is »everyday reality«, the object of her observing, thinking, evaluating approach is always a »slice of reality« -- as she herself noted in numerous texts on her »method«. Her recurrent references to the »methodical« rules applying to the ensemble processes were above all an attempt to repudiate frequently voiced accusations of arbitrariness and subjectivity. In such notes she re-traced her procedural movements, which ranged from the »relatively simple« to the »relatively complicated«, and emphasized that the volume and diversity of forms of articulation are not merely valid, but structured and reflected, that on-going viewing and description are allied with focusing, combination and selecting. If we briefly re-trace the path she described, then her real concern becomes all the more obvious: to visualize potentially changing perception and thought around the fractures and seams of the visible and conceivable.
Even if produced over a number of years, every ensemble does indeed have a surprisingly simple beginning in time and space. Specific »starting objects« motivate all of Anna Oppermann's visual and linguistic expeditions, namely a small number of nondescript objects of everyday use or decoration, leaves of flowers or plants, sometimes supplemented by a snapshot, or the occasional colloquial phrase or figure of speech. The point of departure for the ensemble »Paradoxical Intentions -- Lying the blue down from the sky«, for instance, is German phrases and proverbs relating to the colour blue, a blue glass shrine which is a piece of nonfunctional, but beautiful, kitsch, as well as the homely plants tagetes and indigo, and an unflattering photo of the artist (see Fig. and text on page 17/18).
The artist would arrange these found objects into small tableaux on a table or platform, displaying them to herself for the purpose of closer study in what she termed the »meditation phase«. In predominantly naturalistic detail studies and sectional drawings, she intensively recorded the shapes and colours of this first arrangement of the objects. The basic objects thus reveal their immeasurability at the very beginning of the ensemble process. Like all seemingly familiar things, when we try to get infinitely close to them they begin to reveal unsuspected, puzzling meanings, unfathomable depths and oddities. A familiar word, repeated over and over again, disintegrates into a random string of letters the tongue stutters over. The shape of an implement previously taken for granted suddenly begins to irritate, unnerves us with its brute materiality. The objects reproduced in a picture often viewed with no great interest begin to lose their connection and anchorage, and the invisible, uncertain concealed behind them begins to take hold.
The close-up »meditation« in front of the starting object was preparation for the next step in the process, one which permitted every form of articulation, »as far as possible without allowance for conventional standards of art and behaviour«, as the artist remarked. She called this step »catharsis«; little evidence of it remains to be seen in the ensembles, since she frequently concealed or eradicated the results. Anna Oppermann was not striving towards »catharsis« in the classical sense, but a productive »purging« of unthinkingly adopted prejudices, clichés, stereotypes and banalities. Spontaneous reactions bring forth our preconceptions and biases -- all the opinions, blind spots and mental patterns everybody, consciously or otherwise, carries inside.
The purpose served by the two steps the artist grouped under the heading »Primary Process« was that of concentration and opening up. Anna Oppermann met her found objects with an open mind, not anticipating, but always aware of her own biases. Of all things, it is exhibiton and microscope-like contemplation that lay bare the antecedent signatures of the objects, images and notions, private /personal and general relations and value judgements. No less striking, however, is how clearly the linguistic and visual inaccessibility of what is laid bare emerges. Every designation, every message hovers on the brink of a precipice, every deciphering opens up a new puzzle.
Anna Oppermann followed up the close-up viewing process with the adoption of distance in what she termed a »secondary process«. First she subjected the collected views to »reflection«, to »feedback from a distance« through photographing and sketching, produced summaries and surveys of her found objects and views. She noted down associations, sought and collected referential material in cultural archives. In the subsequent step, »Analysis and Production of an Overall Reference«, she began to arrange, to try out apt and clashing combinations. In a note which is part of a »methodical diagram« drawn up in 1984, she described the goal of this step as to »determine, fix, new standards«.
The note is interesting in two respects. It underscores Anna Oppermann's desire to say something »new«. At the same time, it addresses the decision-making process, refers to the necessity of looking through, selecting and combining material in order to pin down, and convey, appropriate messages. The ensembles closely combine either aspect. The »new standards« -- the constellations fixed on the canvases -- are a jointed selection of what was collected in the foregoing process: the sensations of the inconspicuous, the unthinkingly reproduced preconceptions, the discoveries of repressed and concealed substance, her distanced valuations, the utterances by others, the quotations gleaned from libraries, art history and mass culture. Even then, they remain interim decisions, temporary results that have to be subjected to renewed study. The work process starts from the beginning again.
What Anna Oppermann finds (invents) in this way is unfamiliar, but never radically new. The effect of her »method« is like a magic wand that unfreezes the familiar, the handed down. She destabilizes the conventions, standards and intellectual traditions of the visible, breaks them down into layers of meaning that are as disturbing as they are familiar, then deploys them, twists them, shifts them into new contexts, in order to make visible and discussible a changing process of thought pivoted on the selected »slice of reality«.
Once initiated, individual ensemble processes could be distributed over several years, decades even in some cases. »Paradoxical Intentions« began in 1988 with the still life described above, and grew in several stages until shortly before her death in 1992. The ensemble was small enough still in 1990 to fit into one corner of a room for its first public presentation in the Kunstverein, Heidelberg (Fig. on page 15). After the show, Anna Oppermann returned to work on the ensemble in her Celle studio (Fig. on page 20f.). When it came to the ensemble's second public showing in the Städtische Galerie im Sophienhof, Kiel, 1991, its inventory had been expanded by countless drawings, watercolours, objects and canvases. The artist now installed it as a vast »room within a room« which visitors could enter and walk about (Fig. on page 27f.). Early in 1992, Anna Oppermann prepared her ensemble for shipment to its next public venue, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Models and sketches show her initial installation plans. The exhibition had to be postponed, however, and came about only the year after her death (Fig. on page 32f.). It was the fourth posthumous assembly of an Oppermann ensemble, and represented a particularly difficult »translation task« for the team involved. While the room in Kiel, the Ensemble's last public site, had been spacious and high-ceilinged, the relatively small, low space in Sydney meant an identical installation was ruled out from the outset, and the team had to exercise all its powers of interpretation in order to keep visible the central goals and demands of the ensemble. The reinstallation in Celle Palace is more similar to the earlier version in Kiel, although spatial differences again required several changes (Fig. on page 6).
It is very much a living archive left behind by Anna Oppermann in crates and warehouses. After all, anyone wishing to show her ensemble art today has to »preserve« precisely its procedural, temporary character, its capacity for continuation. Even after the artist's death, the works still possess no conclusive, definitive form, and stubbornly resist any attempt at true-to-detail reconstruction. Thus, the principles and claims of her mode of working are transferred upon the »interpreters« entrusted with each re-assembly. They also demand, where necessary, new solutions, realignments of the passed-on ensemble inventory in line with new spatial and situative conditions.
»I detest conclusive formulations that pose as absolute«, insisted the artist. And true to this avowal, she left all her spatial and visual arrangements in a temporary state. Anna Oppermann's art consists precisely in addressing or articulating something that is multiple and ambivalent, without saying it out loud, or completing the sentence. She creates reasons, fields of motivation that are open to supplements and alterations. In the same way, her collected phrases insist on being read, interpreted and added to.
It is a fitting circumstance -- coincidence? -- that one of the very last ensembles she began work on urgently testifies to her distaste for bold claims to knowledge and perfection. »Paradoxical Intentions« is connected with many of her works, touches aspects of subject areas she began to elaborate many years before. Mirrors and reflections, refracted and altered reality were a »crucial experience« addressed in her first installation »Mirror Ensemble« (from 1965 onward). The questions about lies and truth radiate directly from the work »Pudding or soap -- ensemble concerning honesty or the different aspects of sheep«, but also from a whole series of ensembles about art, being an artist, the practical and economic aspects of art-making. The same questions are carried forward with a decisive shift of emphasis in the fragmented, kaleidoskope-like »Paradoxical Intentions«: now everything is about appearances, about illusion in particular, about the magical capacity to transform the ugly into the resplendent, the drab into the colourful, about reflection, delusion and pretence of all kinds, about lies and honesty in art and life. With verve and irony, Anna Oppermann seizes upon references to the romantic aspects of her mode of working, places under fire her own aesthetic: the inherently paradoxical intention of meeting the complexity of life and art, a truth which cannot be expressed, with a generative, unfinishable art form which has no intention of either comprehending in stages or getting to the root of its subject matter. She, too, had to lie for this »truth«, was even prepared to touch up, make mysterious and enchant. But only to a certain degree, for »schmaltz«, as she said, »calls out for some dry bread« (cf. text on page 18). And she did not leave us short of »dry bread« in the form of the unseemly, the questionable, the unfathomable and offensive.


[Übersetzung: Tom Morrison]


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