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.
[Translation: Heidi Lewis]
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