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.