Cornelia Renz

One problem with the research on dreams is that one cannot observe a dream directly. To learn how or what a sleeper dreams, he has to be awaken from his sleep and questioned about it. Cornelia Renz’ large dimension acrylic paintings may just be giving us an insight into that question of the representability of dreams.

In her works, Renz has been addressing those very subjects which Surrealism and cinema are also obsessed with, namely the unconscious, the pleasure principle, the expressive power of the symbol and of dreams, castration, anxiety, and the death drive. All this Renz conjures up in her depiction of fantastic worlds, fairy-tales, and masquerades―and not without humour. In these prolific worlds nothing is as it seems, the general order of things has been suspended and the conventional social and moral principles are disturbingly broken. Her images give us an odd feeling, making us think how castrating the structures of our real world actually are. Thus, Cornelia Renz’ fantastic worlds seem to hold a promise of liberation. By linking the grotesque and the divine, death and humor, violence and eroticism she shows the mechanisms of desire in action.
It all seems to move around dreams and the unconscious, puberty, identity, gender roles, subliminal violence and power games. Renz’ young women actively negotiate and consciously manipulate power to their advantage if they get a chance to. However, to interpret Renz’ works as transgression per se would be to fail the real subject matter of her work, namely how the joy of life and the mystery of death coexist altogether.

In Cornelia Renz’ compositions line and colour are the supreme elements. Each composition is made of thousands of lines. Her figures no longer hold to the ground. All former rules, like perspective and logical shadowing, have been abolished. Instead, these have been replaced by vectors of directions. The composition is commanded mostly by ideas of top and bottom or left and right in some cases.
In many of her works Cornelia Renz adopts an aerial viewpoint in order to give us the feeling that we are optically and aerially moving around the work. This is enhanced in two ways. First of all through the transparency of the acrylic glass she uses for her pieces and secondly due to the fact that in many of her compositions a moral debate or some kind of struggle between top and bottom is taking place. Once linear perspective and traditional notions of space are abolished, things like the distinction between figure and ground, superposition, dramatic colour contrast and flatness become extremely important for the kind of work being done here.
Cornelia Renz is exploring an essential set of conventions―line, figure, scale―which not only directly derives from the technique she employs but represents a conscious positioning within the tradition of painting. Her rejection of Renaissance Italian perspective in favour of older modes of representation which takes us as far as the Middle Ages, results in a graphic immediacy which at first glance might not seem so natural and spontaneous but instead brings forth a certain quality of the gesture. Her choice means the replacement of the visual for the tactile, the abandonment of the optics for the haptics.

Based on the principle of the collage, Cornelia Renz shamelessly samples and mixes references which range from pop culture to historical engraving, mythology, and comics re-interpreting them in a very personal way. Each painting offers itself for decodification. There is a very particular Renz’ iconography which includes, among others, Lolitas, horses, nurses and skeletons. Childhood and puberty for instance represent interesting moments for the artist because the first is almost pre-societal, and the latter is a brief moment just before the loss of innocence. Both escape, even if briefly, society’s control and customization.

Cornelia Renz’ specific interest in these moments of ”out of control“―the same way a dream represents a moment which escapes control, and the same way an image is as deceitful as a dream―influences intrinsically the way things are represented. In most compositions there is a horror vacui which could be said to derive directly from the wish to tell a story. Since Renz’ stories are full of tension and include unpredictable elements which could suddenly intervene and change the sequence of events at any time, her scenes are often organized in a spiral manner. This can be seen in such works as ”Skyrider“, ”Subrosa“, ”Wendy“, and ”Forever”.

In Renz’ images different tension points and situations compete for our attention. Sometimes the image is organized as a kind of poster or a medieval illumination, with space being organized by the use of banners or medallions as in ”Love“, ”Forever“, and ”Love Rules”.
Cornelia Renz seems to be thinking in terms of physicality, for her paintings are very dense considering imagery, tactility, and terms of representation but deceitfully fragile through her choice of material. The material mainly used by Cornelia Renz ―acrylic glass―has the specific and remarkable quality of transparency. This condition necessarily brings forth issues like the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral, the metaphor of the mirror and self-reflection. Not lacking in paradox it also holds the painting in a contradictory situation in which opposite poles meet: between being a massive, extremely heavy object, and at the same time possessing an evanescent body, from solid object to vaporous air.

Since the articulation between materiality, representation and imagery is extremely sophisticated and loaded, Cornelia Renz’ paintings with their physical properties, their gesture’s authenticity and literary density show great emotional power. More important than to ask what they are about, is the understanding of how these different vectors engage in a psychic and energetic build-up, and which construct a universe of their own.

Cornelia Renz’ rich imagery represents thus a second order of reality, which in a way gives us a blink into reality itself, for it is full of painful, dark and strange things, which we must deal with all the time. Here pure horror is always represented in an aesthetic way, contributing for a sense of estrangement as we are left alone with what to do with the image. These paintings might just as well represent a liberating break or a catharsis with all things strange in our daily lives. Liliana Rodrigues

Born in 1966 in Kaufbeuren/Bavaria (DE), Cornelia Renz studied at the Academy of Visual Arts at Leipzig (“Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst“). Currently living and working in Berlin, she has been awarded with the “Marion Ermer Prize” (2001) and the “Förderpreis Bildende Kunst” of the Schering Foundation (2005). Recent shows have included a solo presentation at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt (2007), Goff + Rosenthal in New York in 2006 and the group exhibition XV. Rohkunstbau “Drei Farben – Rot” at Villa Kellermann in Berlin in 2008. Cornelia Renz is represented in many private and public collections in Germany, the United Kingdom, the USA, Brazil and Japan.

William

William

Barcelona – Mercadillo

Chicago Pics

Kota Ezawa

Somewhere in the crossroad between popular culture, political action and art, Kota Ezawa’s vibrantly coloured, stylized and flat images have been compared by many to a Warhol silkscreen or a South Park cartoon.

Addressing a range of subjects from contemporary culture to the history of art and presenting a variety of formal strategies like abstraction and representation, Kota Ezawa patiently builds his works manually, frame by frame, as a sort of digital approximation of paper-cutout animation.
Instead of filtering his source images through software technology making them look like animations, Kota Ezawa reconstructs them using drawing software. The result is a synthetic representation with a restricted number of colours and barely any details, as “Photo Secession” (based on a known photograph from Alfred Stieglitz) testifies.

“Brawl” (2008), a four-minute-animation-film, follows this information reduction strategy which has become Ezawa’s trademark. Based on a You Tube video showing an infamous 2004 brawl which resulted in the suspension of 9 NBA players, the film emphasizes the artist’s subliminal interest on space issues generated by the transposition of images generated in other medium into the specific language of the animation format.
“Lyam 3 D” (2008), a silent animation based on the seminal Resnais’ film “L’Année dernière à Marienbad”, takes up the challenge of translating the greatness of cinematography language into a camera less technique like animation. Focusing exclusively on the original shots in which the actors remained almost motionless, “Lyam 3D” ends up achieving an intense and unexpected architectural feeling.

Mostly inspired by news of events which have become memorable to all of us, like the “Riefenstahl” and “Schleyer” works, Ezawa seem to stress how the remembrance of the past has become inseparable from our mediated streaming images – from television, newspapers and cinema. Indeed, Ezawa’s stylistic method underlies how the articulation between memory and media is a relatively new and yet undeniable one, sometimes going so far as revealing how the way we generally remember or interpret events is decisively influenced by the media in which they were recorded.
The artist is thus exploring the way we use History and navigate its constructions. “Rocket Test” (2006) for instance, is based on the slide which Colin Powell presented to the UN Security to prove that Saddam Hussein produced weapons of mass destruction. Interestingly, it just happens to be one of his most abstract works.

Describing his own practice as a form of “video archaeology”, Ezawa’s focus on media imagery has a certain liberation feeling to it. Ultimately, Kota Ezawa`s laboriously technique is questioning how – in a media charged culture – historical images prevail in our collective memory making us wonder about its various levels of recognizability and fictionality.

Born in 1969 in Cologne, Kota Ezawa studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, and lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been hosted in such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum; Hayward Gallery, London; ArtPace, San Antonio; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver.

Re.Act – performancekunst der 1960er und 70er jahre heute

Curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice E. Stammer “Re.Act – performance art from the 60s and 70s today” could be seen from December 13th 2008 through February 8th 2009 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Documenting performative works from 24 artists spanning across two generations, the exhibition intended to document and reflect the diversity and complexity of feminist performative strategies which appeared within a wide range of social and political contexts. Including works by performance movements from Eastern and South Eastern Europe as well as the former GDR, the exhibition documented many artistic and socially critical strategies of the 1960s, 70s through today.
In the intersection between art and life, private and public, performance offered the ideal medium for examining, deconstructing or reinventing female identity back then, in this way forcing a certain reevaluation of the attributions of femininity in mainstream culture.

Among my favourite performers are Yoko Ono (J/USA) whose performance “Cut Piece” both in its historical and re-staged 2003 version could be seen, Valie Export, Ewa Partum and the younger Kate Gilmore (USA) with her strong sometimes mocking performances.

Without intending to be an historical survey but simply present historical positions together with more recent ones, establishing relations between both generations was really the goal. Moreover the exhibition intended to show women artists working today that what they are doing is more related to their predecessor’s achievements than they are ready to admit, sometimes out of blunt ignorance. What the exhibition failed to show however, is why today’s performers seem not to be interested in political strident, ideologically didactic but instead choose to mock certain gestures of the past and mostly transmit a certain sense of an impossibility of change or uneffectiveness of certain actions, thus undermining any possibility for idealism. Today’s disbelieve and sense of impotency or frustration remains to be understood and represents the most urgent question.

Man in the Dark – Paul Auster

»There’s no single reality, Corporal. There are many realities. There’s no single world. There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of mind.«

The medium fabricates realities within of reality, in this way producing a doubling of reality, which Luhmann has described as a “transcendental illusion”. Maintaining the illusion can only be accomplished if its veracity is not questioned. “Man in the Dark” (2009) by Paul Auster takes on an essential questioning. Fearlessly looking into America’s most recent traumas, such as a dim sense of reality after September 11th or, the schizophrenic feeling of being at war without experiencing war in its own territory, “Man in the Dark” proves to be a very interesting book. In it Auster masters a reflection on his own country and country men together with his own individual responsibility as a writer, in a self-reflexive act which joins both social and individual responsibility.

Not undeliberately, his protagonist is a 72 year-old literary critic. Confined to his wheel chair, August Brill lives with his daughter, who was left five years ago by her husband, and his granddaughter, whose boyfriend was brutally murdered in Iraque, in a house full of grief. To cope with life he religiously watches films throughout the night together with his granddaughter, who hopes that new images may replace the infernal ones in her head of her boyfriends’ execution. In other occasions Brill makes up stories of a parallel world in which the Twin Towers still stand, the war on Iraque has never happened but America is plunged into a secession war as different states claim independence. A creation of Brill’s mind, this world will haunt him and someone will be sent out to kill him. In literary terms this enterprise “character seeks to kill author” sets a very interesting self-reflexive mechanism in motion, just the same way the hypothetical worlds rehearsed in “Man in the Dark” constituts a therapeutic mechanism for America to deal with its own recent History and responsibility.

“Political/ Minimal” at the KW Berlin and the road conceptualism has travelled

Recently, while visiting „Political/Minimal“ curated by Klaus Biesenbach at the Kunst Werke in Berlin, I found myself wondering about the possibility of keeping on doing conceptual work today. Afterall hasn’t conceptualism exhauted all its self-reflexive possibilities already?

Done only one or two years ago, some of the works in the exhibition explore a classical reportoire of forms which are usually associated with minimal art from the 60s. Instead of repeating its typical hermetism this revived minimal brings forth all kinds of political issues.

I was specially impressed by Terence Koh´s piece, an unpretencious pink triangle which mimed the real one sewed in Men´s shirts to differentiate them as homosexuals in concentration camps. This fact alone explains and contributed to their small survival rate.

In Derek Jarman´s film „Blue“ (1993), an empty blue surface is projected together with a soundtrack revealing quotations from the artist´s diary as he went blind because of AIDS. The film, his final work, accompanies the disease process on an almost daily basis. Speaking of quotation, Tino Sehgal performed “Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things”, a dance piece based on some of Dan Graham´s and Bruce Nauman´s historical performances.
All works pointing to the fact that contemporary conceptual works seem to have abandoned the self-reflexivity and hermetic level which characterized conceptualism in the late 60s and early 70s to embrace aesthetic, personal or political experiences foreign to historical conceptualism.

In itself, this use of former formal structures and strategies to convey a whole new meanings represents an openness. No doubt, did self-reflexivity correspond to a specific moment in Modernism, in which different disciplines took themselves and their own field of research as their own prime subject matter, be it as a reaction to the threat of new disciplines popping up or, the trend of interdisciplinary methods or, a specific socio-political context.

Self-reflexive new media artworks conceptualize their own technical specificity, like Paik exploring things like the effects of magnets in electronic images or, pioneering live broadcasting or, Vito Acconci developing work which played with the possibilities opened up by closed-circuit, etc. in some sort of parallel to Greenberg’s ideas on self-specificity on painting.

Instead of representing a certain decay or a dead end, self-reflexivity has come to include a broader sense. The exhibition “Political/ Minimal” teaches us exactly how historical conceptualism surpassed its own hermeticism to embrace a whole new series of issues outside itself.

Given their specific nature, media art works occasionate an unforeseen and totally different relation with the society they are produced in and which they are produced for. Technology is part of all levels of our life, it is designed to be automatic and acritically assimilated, its is filled up with corporate values and hidden intentions (to force a new need upon us, to makes start a new behaviour, etc) and is distributed through whole different channels. It is in this sense that works reflecting upon the effects and consequences of technology could also be considered self-reflexive.

In this sense, some works no longer conceptualize around their specific technical functions and language but on their impact on us, on society at a larger scale instead.
Moreover, works dealing with self-reference, quotation, referring and reflecting upon icons of the past, should also be thought of as self-reflexive works – Duchamp´s Gioconda with a Moustache when mocking artistic value, cultural tradition, etc.

Self-reflexivity in media art thus includes works dealing strictly with the technical specificities offered by the medium (formalism), works dealing with the consequences for the individuum and society derived from the specific technical possibilities opened by the medium and works referring, quoting other works within a given cultural tradition (linguistics).

“Still Men Out There”, an exhibition by Bjørn Melhus in Istanbul

Until the middle of last April a selection of Bjørn Melhus’ works could be visited at the Amerikan Hastanesi Sanat Galerisi ”Operation Room”. Presenting key works within the artist’s oeuvre, such as “Again & Again “„The Oral Thing“ (2001) or „Still Men Out There“ (2003) – from which the exhibition borrowed its title -, the show also featured more recent pieces like his 2008 multi-channel video installation „Deadly Storms“.

The selection offered the viewer the opportunity to grasp several decisive aspects in Bjørn Melhus’ work. Namely, the artist’s multiple attention to the worlds of American commercial film, television pop music and publicity, the coexistence throughout his oeuvre of pieces in which the artists embodies all the media roles and pieces in which he consciously redraws himself from and which result more abstract. Finally, a certain performative aspect was made available through the documentation published in the catalogue for occasion of this exhibition showing the intense and rich pre-production work in Bjørn Melhus’ films.

Manifold, the exhibition provided the viewer with the opportunity to compare works regarded upon as „classical“ – those in which the artist himself appears and enacts different characters -, with a work like „Still Men Out There“. Less “recognizable” as a Melhus’ piece, “Still Men Out There” is basically a pure synchronized sound and light installation in which the artist consciously redraw his own figure from. Next to pieces which are figurative and in which Melhus embodies different roles, the artist has also created pieces in which images are reduced to abstract fields of color. Both strategies have in fact always coexisted in Bjørn Melhus’ production. His absence in some of his works is not as unusual as one might think and is not without consequences for the overall understanding of his work. Far from being an isolated example, one must only think of „Emotional Fields“(2007), „Murphy“ (2008) or Melhus’ successive tree houses to recognize just that. Significantly all these works have been produced in parallel to the ones in which the artist plays different roles, including that of a woman, and which the public specially identifies the artist for and critics have payed most attention to.

Thus missing a trademark – Melhus himself -, “Still Men Out There” (the installation) contains however other characteristics of the artist’s work, such as the exploration of the conventions of film (American war cinema in this case), repetition and multiplication of effects and found sound footage.
Placed on the floor in three concentric circles, the eighteen monitors show their screens facing up. Monochrome color fields alternate rhythmically, pulsing to the sound of machine guns. The soundtrack, composed of snippets from mainstream war movies includes everything a good war film needs, from marching troops, to tragic love, to gunfire, to heroic soliloquies. These sequences of monochrome image, script and sound produce a penetrating effect. At times full of pathos, other times purely kitsch, “Still Men Out There” stresses the highly entertaining and spectacle qualities present in American mainstream war cinema. The work’s sources are well documentated, “Still Men Out There” takes on sound footage from “Platoon” (Oliver Stone, 1986), “The Thin Red Line” (Terrence Malick, 1998), “Black Hawk Down” (Ridley Scott, 2001) and “We Were Soldiers” (Randall Wallace, 2002).
Melhus is interested here how cinema, as the greatest manipulative technical dispositive of all times, has been conditioning our feelings and behavior in respect to what our cultural notions, in this case of war and death, concern.

Regarding this, the artist has said in an interview: “Still Men Out There is not a statement about war or politics (even if the material does refer back to this reality), but is about evoking and exposing cinematic stereotypes”. But this is only partially true, for in the end the work does open into the ideological workings of cinematic war representation.

It is extremely significant that we are being offered the spectacle of war with no images (except for monochromatic images), in this way addressing directly what has been described as “American media’s refusal to show the American dead and injured in the war” in recent times. On the one hand the work pervades the idea that one can no longer trust any image of war to be authentic and that the only solution would be the renunciation of all imagery. This feeling is a direct consequence of the on-going control of images of war scenarios since the Golf War – from which only generic night shots of Bagdad under attack were divulged. And the so-called “embeded journalism” in practice since the Iraq war – when journalists march alongside the troops during their advance – which results in a loss of objectivity, and also contributed to a general sense of crisis due to the conflict of interests it generates.
On the other hand, because we can identify the audio sources of the installation, it is forcing us to deconstruct the cultural references regarding war on cinema, thus awakening all sorts of images of war which lie dormant in our heads and which obviously have been shaped by the mass media.
“Still Men Out There” is not only exploring the impact of American cinema on our collective memory but also forcing us to admit that some of our notions are being actively designed by it, against historical facts and in favour of specific ideologies.

The work is thus not only bringing cinematic stereotypes into light but also forcing us to consider the reception of cinematic war representation critically. The sound and its different moments borrow a narrative structure to a work, which is in itself abstract. As already noted, this “practice of fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of well-known figures, topics, and strategies of the mass media opens up not only a network of new interpretations and critical commentaries, but also defines the relationship of mass media and viewer anew” (Schmidt, Bremen, 2002).
By exposing the mechanisms of mainstream cinema, Melhus rebels against pre-established simplifications and global cultural standardization. Admitting that no images exist today outside of the corporate media, Melhus’ works contest such iconographic hegemony.

Both fascinated and disgusted by the American mainstream media culture, Bjørn Melhus has made his field of research what others would hastily judge as American “trash”. In a meticulous and consequent way he has been thus exposing the manipulative power of modern media by successively paying attention to several genres, including Hollywood films, news TV channels or the talk show format, just to name but a few cases.

With his systematic examination of different mass media frameworks, Bjørn Melhus has been exposing the stereotyped voices, gestures and slogans which are being conveyed on a daily basis and which seem to be dictating our behaviour despite of us. What to do with this awareness, a sort of pledge for responsibility, is the question left open to every single viewer.

(Excerpt of my review published in RES – Art World, Issue #02 May, 2009)