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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