sign in sign up
<<
Home , Nam June Paik, Ulay

Magical Soup Anna-Catharina Gebbers

‘“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.’1

The survey exhibition Magical Soup revolves around the power and magic inherent in images, sound, and language – that magical force which enables them to create new realities, reveal hidden ones and even escape normative ones. The relationship between image and sound is explored here in time-based media artworks dating from the 1970s to the present day, as well as in a number of installations and works on paper. The presentation features forty-nine works drawn from the extensive holdings of and media art in the collection of the Nationalgalerie and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, supplemented by a selection of loans.

A journey through the history of media art Magical Soup also takes viewers on a journey through the history of media art and its technological developments; in nineteenth-century theatre, for example, media technology in the form of a magic lantern enabled the magical appearance of Paris and Helen as spectral figures in the first act of Goethe’s Faust II.2 It was not until the early 1980s that museums and other art institutions began collecting time-based media art on a larger scale. The first video work to enter the Nationalgalerie collection was a piece by Wolfgang Kahlen, which was acquired directly from the artist in 1981. The media art section of the museum collection was systematically expanded by Wulf Herzogenrath, who was chief curator at the Nationalgalerie from 1989 to 1994. Around the same time, Eugen Blume and Eva Beuys began compiling an archive of recorded , talks and interviews with or by

1 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 79. 2 ‘Faust: Do you forgive us, Sir, our tricks with flames?’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part II (1832), trans. David Constantine (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 46. , and this remains a key resource for research into the artist’s work. Between 1992 and 1994, with funds provided by the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie, Herzogenrath acquired works for the museum collection by the pioneering media artists Marina Abramoviç/, Klaus vom Bruch, , , Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Bernhard Leitner, Marcel Odenbach, , Ulrike Rosenbach, and Robert Wilson; Herzogenrath also laid the foundation for a collection of sound art by acquiring works by Christina Kubisch, Rolf Julius, and Edward Kienholz, with financial assistance from the visual arts funding programme of Berlin’s Senatsverwaltung für Kulturelle Angelegenheiten (Senate Department for Cultural Affairs).3 These works alone demonstrate the wide range of media being employed at that time, in addition to video technology. Since then, the Nationalgalerie’s collection has grown to include many other important works of time-based media art. A major group of works was donated by the artist, collector and hotelier Mike Steiner, and a further significant addition were the media artworks from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, which were presented to the Nationalgalerie as donations or long-term loans.

The exhibition Magical Soup opens with two works that were created using analogue media: a slide projection by Stan Douglas from 1982–1983 and a 35mm film projection by Cyprien Gaillard from 2011. The quality of both of these media deteriorates with use, so they must be replaced regularly over the course of the exhibition with copies made from a master. Both artists’ choice of media is deliberate: in Douglas’s slide projection, which uses three carousels, the images are projected at a set speed so that here – in contrast to the filmic illusion, where the relative slowness of the eye means that the lines between the frames are not visible – the single frames used to create the illusion of movement remain discernible (and add a critical undertone to the question posed by the legendary German film-maker Werner Nekes: ‘What really happened between the images?’4). Gaillard deconstructs the filmic dispositif5 by migrating the he originally shot with a phone camera from digital files onto 35mm film, which is screened in the exhibition on an impressive projector with a

3 Cf. Wulf Herzogenrath, ‘“Es ist gehauen und nicht gestochen…” Erwerbungen von Werken mit neuen Medien für die Nationalgalerie’, Jahrbuch Preußischer Kulturbesitz 30 (1993) (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1994), pp. 313– 342. 4 See Film Before Film (Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern?), written and directed by Werner Nekes, Federal Republic of , 1985. 5 Translator’s note: mechanism; apparatus. looper and an enlarged lamp house, and in this way multiple layers of political and historical meaning are merged. also deconstructs cinema’s illusory mechanism with a self-reflexive production entitled The best outside is the inside (Monitor Edition) (1997), which in Magical Soup simultaneously draws attention to the space outside and inside the Hamburger Bahnhof’s exhibition galleries. The individual images for ’s 16mm film animations were drawn by the artist in 1971 and 1973 respectively (clashing Japanese anime with American superhero culture at the time of the Vietnam War), and then filmed using single-frame animation and subsequently migrated to a Digital Betacam master, from which digital exhibition copies are now made. The original medium of Nam June Paik’s work I never read Wittgenstein (I never understood Wittgenstein) (1997), on the other hand, were LaserDiscs, and Magical Soup also features video installations from different periods. The fundamental scientific issues raised by the preservation and conservation of time-based media art, and some of the innovative approaches being developed to address them, are described by the Hamburger Bahnhof’s conservator, Carolin Bohlmann, in her essay. In the early days of building the collection, Wulf Herzogenrath pointed out that the terms ‘media art’ and ‘new media artworks’ were problematic, as ‘artworks should not only be categorised in terms of their materials […] but according to their content’.6 Claudia Ehgartner’s essay outlines how the presentation and communication of this content at the Hamburger Bahnhof should above all create space for events to occur, thereby opening up and embracing divergent perspectives.

Multiple histories and language-games The works on show by Stan Douglas, Cyprien Gaillard, Dmitry Gutov and Sung Tieu, among others, allow the images seen and the sounds heard to drift apart, revealing realities hidden beneath hegemonic historiography. In 1925, the art critic Franz Roh coined the term ‘magic realism’ for a method of visualising reality by creating realistic images in which different levels of this reality appear. ‘With the word “magic”, as opposed to “mystic”,’ he wrote, he

6 Herzogenrath, ‘“Es ist gehauen und nicht gestochen…’”, p. 314. wished to indicate ‘that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it’.7

The exhibited works by Christine Sun Kim, an artist and activist for sign-language translation, also tell of these various realities, as they show that language is more diverse and its meaning more determined by use than is generally realised. Ludwig Wittgenstein described the inseparable link between speech and action as a ‘language-game’ and a mode of use – a variety of language used in different situations. One learns the rules of a language through action and through speaking to others. The manner in which the meaning of a word is manifested through this usage can be compared to a game of chess.8 Understanding the game means understanding how it is played. Or: understanding a word means knowing how it is used, and how others use it. In this sense, language-games can only be understood if we know and share the life context of the speakers. Every language-game corresponds to a way of life or life reality, and vice versa.

When Nam June Paik claims I never read Wittgenstein (I never understood Wittgenstein) (1997), his humorous conversion of European philosophical debate into East Asian spiritual discourse not only proves that he has already ‘read’ Wittgenstein in the act of writing the name, but also that he has fully understood him. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term ‘performative magic’ to describe linguistic action whereby realities are named and at the same time generated through the performative speech act. He maintained that above all, words uttered by rulers within socially appropriate conventions and institutions have performative magic. According to Bourdieu, this magic corresponds to symbolic power as the (linguistic) ‘indicative is an imperative’, and language is therefore the key medium of symbolic power.9

7 Franz Roh, ‘Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925)’, trans. Wendy B. Faris, in Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 15–31, here p. 16. 8 ‘[T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language.’ Ludwig Wittgeinstein in Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), p. 25e, here § 43 and p. 52e, here § 108. 9 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 84–85, 105. Occupying space The works on show by Dineo Seshee Bopape, Trisha Baga, Nevin Aladağ, Douglas Gordon, Ulrike Rosenbach, Jochen Gerz, Joan La Barbara, Charlemagne Palestine, , David Zink Yi and Anne Imhof likewise revolve around the power of language, sound and music as they move between precise observation, radical self-expression and the deliberate deconstruction of identity. These contributions visualise a reality in flux, a reality that demands the extension of previous certainties. Or, as the novelist and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote about Franz Kafka in 1965: ‘Nothing is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision.’10 As speculative realism, this is expressed, for example, in the techno-animistic video works of Korakrit Arunanondchai, where a drone represents Garuda – a mythological, bird-like creature – and the artist known as ‘boychild’ represents Garuda’s adversary, the water snake Naga.

Self-evidence is also addressed in Nicole Wermers’ expansive installation The Violet Revs (2017): leather jackets that apparently belong to members of a women’s motorcycle club are draped over white plastic chairs, and in this way the group has ‘occupied’ public space. The practice of reserving spaces with deposited jackets or towels is so familiar that we simply take it for granted, just as we assume the motorcycle gang to be real. As pop-culture insignia, the sewn-on patches bearing the names of rock bands extend the occupying action into an imagined sonic realm. The somewhat unexpected fact that the jackets belong to a gang of women elicits associations with Donna Haraway’s call to think beyond antagonistic dualisms and to form alliances instead: ‘This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.’11 Pipilotti Rist’s work Extremitäten (weich, weich) (1999) can also be understood as a challenge to normative, culturally defined conceptions of gender.

Ahumm (1999) by David Zink Yi shows that speech itself is already a form of objectification, as Frances Dyson has described it – an objectification in the mouth, because there is an ethos inscribed in any kind of articulation. Speech is a mode of forming, categorising and

10 Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘From Realism to Reality’ (1955; 1963), in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 157–168, here p. 165. 11 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ (1985; 1991), in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181, here p. 181. quantifying; it is a manipulation of sound. And as an action, Dyson points out, citing Geneviève Calame-Griaule,12 this in turn becomes a objectification, in the sense of a transformation of speech into matter. The relationship between the objectification and immateriality of sound is explored not only in Wermers’ The Violet Revs, but also in the works on show by Rodney Graham, Christine Sun Kim, Sandra Mujinga, Nam June Paik and Lawrence Weiner. In addition, Rodney Graham’s algorithm-driven sound installation Parsifal (1882 – 38,969,346,735) (1990–1992) intimates that sound can become a virtual organism with a technology-based – and theoretically unlimited – life span.

Hypervisibility and opacity Allowing, enabling, encouraging or forcing everything and everyone to be (or become) visible – this kind of transparency, with its epistemological implications for how best to perceive, constitute and understand both subject and object, has a complex semantic structure: omnipresent transparency reveals how metaphorical levels and relations of light and shadow, self-presentation and identity, visibility and invisibility, the dark and the monstrous overlap in the realm of perception, in the production of knowledge, and in the construction of reality and the world.

How wonderful it would be if we – like the Cheshire Cat encountered by Alice in Wonderland – could control our visibility in the public domain. Because the hypervisibility that results from, among other things, the omnipresence of surveillance cameras and our own (voluntary) presence on social media, brings with it the violence and control of the gaze.13 As early as 1990, the philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant recognised the basic

12 ‘[A]ction is speech transformed into matter, speech taken to its final limit.’ Cf. Geneviève Calame-Griaule, ‘Voice and the Dogon World’, Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, vol. 3, ed. Norman F. Cantor and Nathalia King (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 15–60, here p. 22; quoted in Frances Dyson, ‘Circuits of the Voice: From Cosmology to Telephony’, https://soundartarchive.net/articles/Dyson-2004- Circuits%20of%20the%20Voice.pdf [accessed 24 July 2020]. 13 From the perspective of critical theory, sociology and psychoanalysis, the gaze – in a philosophical and abstract sense – is an individual’s (or group’s) consciousness and perception of other individuals, other groups or him- or herself. On this topic, see, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant (1943) [English translation: Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 2001)]; or Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975) [English translation: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)]. injustice in the worldwide spread of transparency and its projection of Western thinking, which led him to demand ‘the right to opacity for everyone’.14

The demands of the transparency society and the accompanying illumination, exploitation and operationalisation of social processes were outlined by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in 2012.15 Glissant’s opposing demand for opacity points to irreducible difference as a condition for relations in a world that is not uniform and cannot be systematised; this is also the primary focus in the practice of artists such as Sandra Mujinga, Anne Imhof and Dineo Seshee Bopape.

Sandra Mujinga’s work, along with a number of other pieces on show in Magical Soup, also articulates an inherent tension between the right to opacity and the right to appear and be seen in a society or (online) sphere that restricts and controls how marginalised communities can occupy these social spaces.

Epilogue For Alice, her fall such an event occurred when she fell down the rabbit hole (although a rabbit hole is normally too small for even a hand to fit into). Her fall marks the point of entry into a realm where reality and fantasy – or indeed divergent perspectives – exist simultaneously. What happens next makes Alice ‘almost wish [she] hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole – and yet – and yet – it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!’16 Because the heroine’s journey leads into a netherworld where humans, animals and objects get mixed up or have metamorphosed, the Mock Turtle she meets is a hybrid creature with the body of a turtle and the hooves, head and tail of a calf – ‘the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from’17 – who extols the virtues of this magical, ‘beautiful’ soup in a song he performs.18 The characters’ unpredictable behaviour and Alice’s sense of confusion are matched by the unreliability of language: the rules of grammar no longer seem to apply,

14 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 194. 15 Cf. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 16 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 42 f. 17 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, p. 110. 18 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 126 f. dialogues falter as the protagonists talk past each other, and words and their meanings fall apart. It is time to reflect on Deleuze’s examination of time as a media-dependent language- game,19 on the generation and presentation of divergent or opposing views: it is time for events and multiple perspectives.

Acknowledgements The reality of a museum also consists of many different realities, and time-based media art presents diverse challenges, not only for art educators, conservators and curators, but also for gallery attendants, interns and other colleagues, both in the museum and beyond. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Udo Kittelmann, the director of the Nationalgalerie, on behalf of the entire museum staff; and similarly Gabriele Knapstein, the director of the Hamburger Bahnhof, on behalf of the team at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Sincere thanks to chief electrician Garry Rogge, storage managers Jörg Lange and Thomas Seewald, and also to Susanne Anger and Johanna Lemke, the registrars of the General Directorate of the Staatliche Museen and the Hamburger Bahnhof respectively. Particular thanks go to Claudia Ganzer for navigating this project safely and calmly through all the related budgetary procedures.

Above all, Carolin Bohlmann’s tireless commitment to the conservation of the Nationalgalerie’s media art collection, along with our countless discussions, joint workshops and research trips, are a major part of the DNA of this exhibition, which has been in development since 2016. It was during discussions with Carolin five years ago that the idea of mounting a survey exhibition originated, in combination with further initiatives related to the time-based media artworks.

One of these initiatives was the appointment of a new member of staff at the Hamburger Bahnhof, and I would like to thank Jee-Hae Kim for enthusiastically devoting herself to the structural organisation of the media art collection and conducting important research into the museum holdings.

19 See Mirjam Schaub, Gilles Deleuze im Wunderland: Zeit- als Ereignisphilosophie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003). The ‘magical team’ would not be complete without Charlotte Knaup, our multi-talented, perspicacious and highly focused assistant curator, who has played a crucial role not only in the planning, organisation and presentation of the exhibition, but also in the preparation of the accompanying texts and this publication: truly magical!

The successful realisation of the exhibition is also due to the tireless efforts and expertise of a number of professional teams and individuals. I would therefore like to thank Eidotech for their media technology support; Wolfgang Matzat and his team for the exhibition construction; Lutz Bertram and his team for art handling; and Victor Kegli for all lighting- related matters. Last but not least, many thanks to art/beats for producing the excellent short films on the exhibition.

Sincere thanks also to all those who contributed to this publication: to our authors Sven Beckstette, Carolin Bohlmann, Lisa Bosbach, Will Fredo Furtado, Claudia Ehgartner, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Wulf Herzogenrath, Jee-Hae Kim, Charlotte Knaup, Corinna Kühn, Miriam Lowak, Nika Nardelli, Nina Schallenberg, Kristina Schrei, Chloe Stead and Jessica L. E. Taylor; to Jacqueline Todd for her – as always – reliably excellent translations; to Wienand Verlag for their friendly, supportive and patient cooperation; and to Studio Yukiko, who hurled us down a rabbit hole and animated the magical soup with a striking key visual and matching graphic design concept for the exhibition catalogue, booklet, signage and promotional materials.

And finally, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all those who kindly agreed to lend us their precious works, and to the participating artists who have accompanied us on this eventful journey.