KAROE GOLDT
Photofilms
Photos are the basis of all films – analogue as well as digital. These were processed at the computer and animated. All films shown in the exhibition have been set to music by rashim. The films do not show a possibility of virtuality, but a fact of reality.
on ILOX:
“Hardly noticeably, the vertical and dominantly red colour surfaces change intermittently to the rhythmically crackling soundtrack of rashim (Yasmina Haddad, Gina Hell). Sometimes, behind the coloured screen the shadow of a twig appears dimly. Precisely through this radical reduction the work creates an enormous stress field. Kar? Goldt animated for this purpose over two thousand digitally manipulated photographs, which she had made from a plant with red berries without green folio called “Ilox”. One can also clearly recognise the influence of the “colour-field“-painters, such as Mark Rothko or Ad Reinhardt – on the author, who found her way to the motion picture film through painting and photography. Although sound and image were produced separately from one another, but in permanent dispute over statement and form, the three artists succeeded in reaching a harmonic conformity through a form of lyrical minimalism in the respective medium. Thus Kar? Goldt and rashim provide proof with this work, that consistently structured abstraction can be more gripping, than any thriller.”
NORBERT PFAFFENBICHLER
“…Likewise very much reduced and yet completely different in approach, Kar? Goldts’ work “ILOX” presents itself to the music of rashim. Determined by influences from the American abstract painting – most of all one is reminded of Rothko – one sees a succession of coloured surfaces, rhythmic through sound. Not only is the picture language within the framework of the digital production very unusual, the approach, too, differs from the other teams. The two artists discussed ideas, then worked separately. The resulting synthesis thereof reminds absolutely of experimental film classics like Oskar Fischinger, one can call them – to also use a term from the field of experimental films – “visual music”… ”
BARBARA PICHLER
CLAUDIA PILSL
Cutting out the Detail: Claudia Pilsl’s Museum Transformations
Since 1994 Claudia Pilsl has undertaken a serial consummation of her love affair with museum interiors. Across Europe, through her anarchic interventions with these spaces, she has forged new relationships with their distinctive mien. By stripping away their contents, removing the detail – through a deconstructive dissection of her photographs of these spaces – she reductively reveals their perforated and indented remains as the skeletal evidence of their architectural genesis. This is not a cathartic process, one of merely tidying-up, but a transformative one. Unlike the structural anarchy which has been wreaked upon buildings by such sculptors as Gordon Matta-Clarke or Richard Wilson, in their endeavours to transform and reconfigure, Pilsl’s deconstructive acts leave no mess to be cleared up afterwards, as they are perpetrated at a distance.
The tabulae rasa, whose lacunae are created here by her removal of wall-mounted exhibits from these walls, and doors from their mountings, offer a rich hunting ground for the viewer’s imagination, voids ripe for the creation of new meanings and new contexts. In Pilsl’s interactive installations, in which we can handle and juxtapose these altered images, the viewer is empowered to reconfigure and re-invent these spaces over and over again, thus elevating Hans Robert Jauss’ Reception Theory [1] – whereby the viewer completes the work through his or her unique perception of it – to new levels.
The formal volumes of these spaces are radically transmuted here. Their very identities shifted, their demeanours revert back to those of their conceptual origins, they are no longer expedient containers for artistic or historic exhibits but once again flout those raw dynamics of form, ripe with possibility, which the architect manipulated in order to arrive at his or her solutions. These stripped-down spaces become imbued with a sculptural resonance, their volumes, made up from juxtaposed solids and voids are given a compositional tension that serves to obscure the reality of what we are looking at here. Pilsl’s pictorial objectification of these institutional shrines to art, somehow energises them, infuses their spatial dynamic with a fresh momentum. An incongruity of purpose is exposed here. In the absence of the art, these spaces are propelled into a new ontological mode – instead of being the back-drop, the vehicle for the exhibits, their now imposing presence is invested with a new found significance.
The liberties that Pilsl takes with these architectural creations – rendered sacrosanct by their institutional status – at first come as a bit of a shock, but subsequently we feel a sense of release as we realise that she has given these spaces sanction to breathe again, to revert, once more to that spirit of creativity and invention out of which they originally sprang. We become active participants in these spaces instead of their passive observers; Pilsl’s transformative acts ultimately empower the viewer, perpetuating the creative processes which pervade the being of these spaces – an affirmation that process must be a continuum otherwise ossification is inevitable.
Roy Exley