To live and to die in light of speed Johannes Lothar Schršder at the occasion of the exhibition EREIGNISHORIZONT (event horizon) by Adriane Steckhan 10
exhibitions with installations, photographs, videos, drawings and
conceptual approaches as well as four performances with one talk and
one reading this year showed that breaking is a subject in art; and
maybe even the characteristic traits of the listed presentations do not
lay only in hurrying ahead but also in delaying of deve- lopments. When
about 100 years ago the Futurists announced the cult of speed in art
they in fact reacted to the acceleration of daily life by motorization
but in the preface for the founding manifest of Futurism* Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
already lets the first- person narrator brake so awkwardly because
of two cyclists that he ended up in "...mi scaraventai colle ruote all'aria in un fossato...."(a ditch with the wheels upwards)* where he found himself with his erotic fantasies in the black mud of
a an industrial area. Some of the here exhibited photographed objects
by Adriane Steckhan could originate from such a landscape with their
dark shadow zones and lines that the lights of vehicles leave behind
with long exposures.
Movements are brought to a halt with the literary images of the poet and the photographic images of the artist. And when one looks back to the history of presentation of movement it stands out that artists actually always have shut down the speed already to represent something moving with methods that change with time. This is valid up to today even when dealing with fast technology that provide us electronic images the moment of their creation. But as fast as the possibilities of image production may be the time needed for finishing of an image is always too long compared to the moment that was regarded as picture-worth. To put it bluntly artists have always had to come up with means to make complex operations presentable fast if possible. In short: time pressure |
and
delays are the factors that come into effect when artists have to deal
with the duration between an event and its image fixation. First it is
about slowing down the expectations of the clients because already
hundreds of years ago it could take somewhat longer to finish a history
painting whilst the clients couldn't wait to see their glory
eternalized. Even the Futurists needed a few years before one of them succeeded to avert a passing car on a canvas. The verb already raises this act of painting and it sounds as if artists had to spend magical abilities to give continuity to a moment. This challenge goes back to older struggles in art that could consists of capture a moment that influenced the senses. Depending on if it was about smells or moments of enhanced sensibility the clients as well as painters, poets or composers wished to confer continuance of these to their works or to assure the repeatability of such moments. Momentarilies The adequate forms and efforts in audiovisual art-making should actually have become obsolet after
the emergence of magnetic and electronic recording methods for
image and sound because processes of time are possible to be pictured
any time by pressing on the activator of an adequate gadget.That this
alone doesn't have to lead to a meaningful result has to do with
pre-conditions for sensual perception that need more than a mere
technical pro- cess. Not only has the activation to happen in the
fitting moment
but also view point, composition, contrast and many other pre-
conditions
of aesthetic properties have to be fulfilled - amongst those also
public relation - so that the respective moment is recognizable also
from uninvolved people.
Such factors also explain that after the futuristic manifest the first adequate works were presented only with some years delay. To begin with not even cars are picture-worth because 1911 street |
* F. T. Marinetti, in the preface for the 1st Futuristic Manifesto, 1909, Le Figaro, Paris. |
Vernissage |
Supported by the cultural department of Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg and district office Wandsbek | |
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