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Ines Lindner: The Paradox and Other Fuses - On transfigurative
structures in Anna Oppermann's ensemble in: Faltblatt Paradoxical Intentions, Sydney 1994 (auch abgedruckt
in Katalog: Paradoxe Intentionen (Das Blaue vom Himmel herunterlügen),
Hamburg und Brüssel, 1998, S. 24-31) |
The ensemble here has acquired its ultimate complexity out of an ironic play with the German saying, »to lie the blue down from the sky«. In colloquial English, this would be rather like: »to swear that black is white«. The »blue« from the German expression is the key-colour of the installation that has evolved. The »lying« aspect had been teased out to explore questions of paradox and contrasting forces, to the degree that Anna Oppermann finally re-named the ensemble, giving it the new title, Paradoxical Intentions. The ironic play on truth and falsehood has been heightened in such a way as to re-assert the old exemplary paradox of accidental philosophy: »If you say that you are lying, and you are speaking the truth, you are lying.«
Does this describe the truth in the lie, or the lie in the truth? A paradox is not discursive. It exposes a split in a system of reference. A paradox is a phenomenon that reverses and opens up the boundaries of the system in which it occurs. »When you say 'hill'«, the Queen interrupted, »I could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley.« Anna Oppermann quotes the Red Queen from Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass in this ensemble. To Alice's objection that this would be nonsense, the Red Queen retorted: »You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary.« While discussing the truth of these paradoxes, Alice looks down on a landscape with squared fields. The Red Queen takes her there and into the next paradox. No matter how fast Alice tries to run, she cannot mange to cross the squared fields in a straight line.
The square formats of the pictures on the walls and floor of Anna Oppermann's ensemble resemble this chess-like landscape. The viewer will have problems similar to those of Alice in seeking to traverse their seemingly geometric order. Dispersed on the floor between them, there are blue and red pieces of broken glass. These echo the red and blue glass of the three-cornered shrine, which was a foundational piece of this ensemble. At the same time they refer to the depicted diagram of a kaleidoscope, presented here as a large tableau. Through comparisons between the kaleidoscope and her work, the artist has reflected structures of her aesthetic practice. Similar elements are used in the kaleidoscope and the ensemble - for example, coloured glass, mirrors, and (most importantly) refraction itself as a structure of decomposition and repetition.
Reflecting on the idea of the kaleidoscope in her work at large has intervened here and enriched the complexity of the ensemble. This is a characteristic tendency in Anna Oppermann's aesthetic practice: she integrates the reflection on a process with its present result. Through this means, new levels of perception are engendered. They enrich the ensemble in an indefinite process, since every exhibition is a station of the work-in-progress. Like the kaleidoscope's pictures, Oppermann's ensembles are not fixed but open to new constellations. The artist reacts, through changes in arrangement and the addition of new pieces, not only to differentiations of concept; in addition, different circumstances and surroundings are taken into account in a new situation.
The ever-changing pictures of the kaleidoscope are produced by movements, which change the constellation of the enclosed objects. They rotate through angled mirrors, and opaque, but translucent glass. The construction prismatically refracts the enclosed objects. For the observer, the objects and their fragmenting mirror-images build up a symmetrical pattern: the »beautiful picture« (kaleidoscope refers to showing a beautiful picture). The basic elements of the kaleidoscope are to be found in the construction of the three-cornered shrine. Reflections - among them, those of its stained glass - are refracted and multiplied according to the law of mirrors. Photographs, drawings and paintings repeat close-ups of the shrine throughout the ensemble. This draws the shrine itself into the process of refraction and multiplication, which is characteristic of Anna Oppermann's ensembles as a whole. As the kaleidoscope picks up not only a motif but a reflexive structure, I will try to elaborate on it a little further. Earlier, this took us from the stained-glass pieces on the floor to the shrine. Its blue and red glass windows, as well as the photographs and drawings arranged inside, are refracted and multiplied through small mirrors that are integrated within its structure. At the same time objects and movements in front of the ensemble are mirrored, without penetrating the enclosed symmetry of the kaleidoscopic effect. Anna Oppermann has sought in notes to sum up the comparison between the kaleidoscope and her aesthetic practice, while she has also stressed this comparison as a point of difference: »The opening up of the system through the interaction of others (chance) is both permitted and sought.«
(1)Other thoughts noted in this context also do not equalize so much as mark differences. Most important: »Symmetry is prohibited«. Symmetry is an authoritative ordering figure, which always implies a moment of stasis. It arrests the view, perhaps granting the spectator a stable viewpoint, with the hidden promise to stabilize his or her self-awareness, the (illusory) feeling of unity of the self. »Disintegrated parts, their repetition and altered reconstruction, are united in a pattern, and are therefore subjected to a geometric unity«, Anna Oppermann notes critically on the principle of the kaleidoscope. She is interested in its ability to deconstruct surfaces in a process of refracting, repeating and multiplying them. However she stresses the conceptual mode of application on her part: »It is not the mirror that decides the cut, enlargement, diminution or alteration of proportions; it is my eye«.
Her eye takes the place and position of the mirror. It is both the active and reflexive gaze that the ensemble itself requires of her, as of any other spectator. Through the insertion of pictures that represent different arrangements of the ensemble's elements, this active gaze of the artist-as-spectator can be retraced in Oppermann's work. However any attempt to do so has to reckon with their non-temporal simultaneity. Although one is often able to identify the first pieces from which an ensemble originated, because they are specified in a »legend« for the work, there is no point however in decomposing the simultaneity of objects; or in asking: which is the model, and which the repetition? or in trying to decide whether an element is »the original« or a copy.
Is the photograph the original of the drawing, or is the drawing - an object among objects - more original than the overpainted photo-canvas, which is disclosed in a detail of the ensemble? Through the image that the kaleidoscope constructs with its partial views of the enclosed objects, the mirrored objects themselves count as pictures; the object produces a picture in the appropriate mirror-piece. For the mirror on the left, this reflection acts as an object. In this to-and-fro process, the state of object and image, picture and copy cannot be fixed. Is it a deception? But have not pictures, and art in general since the time of Plato, always been suspected of producing mere deceptions?
»In painting one has to negotiate the truth with the help of the false«, according to Degas. This observation, as well as Oscar Wilde's appeal to cultivate the art of lying, are quoted in the ensemble. In the patchwork of quotes, they have equal status among other particles of reflection that question the general claim to truth in systems of representation.
A Lyotard quote, which thematizes the male presumption to constitute sense and to speak the truth, fails into the whirl of truth and deception in Anna Oppermann's work. Before the opening of the exhibition in Kiel,
(2) where this ensemble was exhibited previously, a visitor insisted
that this statement was from Luce Irigaray. The artist then changed
the names. On my intervention, she crossed out the second name
and replaced it with the first. Underneath the obliterations she
has placed a red square, as if to stress both the writing and
overwriting. From this whole operation, during which the artist
actually cut herself, there remain a few drops of blood as traces
on the cardboard containing the quotation. The quotation as an
excerpt, as an insert from a text of which it reproduces a fragment,
stages itself in another context (the space of the ensemble).
In this aspect it dismisses the guarantee of »authorship« and
authentic origin. As the status of image and copy in the ensemble
cannot be fixed - in their constant division and multiplication
- neither can the status of the quotations. In the picture-writing
of the ensemble, the quotations detach themselves from their attribution;
they float and dissolve into other paradoxes and non-discursive
complexities.The writing does not enforce meaning upon the pictures. It engenders dissymmetries at the place where it occurs. Thus it collaborates in the project of the ensemble: to open up the multi-perspectival possibilities of the perceiving eye. Sometimes Anna Oppermann uses writing to distance a painting, even nearly to extinguish the picture through writing across the painted surface. In the case of one tableau, that shows an excerpt of the ensemble with »A.O. - portrait - ugly«, the dedication from the reverse side is layered over the picture. The reverse thus foregrounds the picture. The text - the Other to the image - stratifies, traverses and interrupts it.
Notes
(1) During our collaboration, Anna Oppermann and I exchanged texts and materials. The notes have been part of this exchange.
(2) Stadtgalerie im Sophienhof, Kiel, as part of the exhibition, lch bin nicht ich, wenn ich sehe [I'm not myself when I'm looking], 21 April - 26 May 1991, See also: Ines Lindner, Theresa Georgen et al. »Ich bin nicht ich wenn ich sehe.« Dialoge - ästhetische Praxis in Kunst und Wissenschaft von Frauen, Berlin, 1991. This book reflects on and articulates the »Dialogue« project. Seven artists and seven critics collaborated during a year. The expanded time-frame not only opened up possibilities for work-specific exchange. Its aim was to study the intersections and alignment of different aesthetic practices of artists and art historians from a feminist perspective.