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, music 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 video 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 performances, 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. Joseph Beuys, 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/Ulay, Klaus vom Bruch, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Bernhard Leitner, Marcel Odenbach, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Bill Viola and Robert Wilson; Herzogenrath also laid the foundation for a collection of sound art by acquiring works by Christina Kubisch, Rolf Julius, Wolf Vostell 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 videos 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 Germany, 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. Diana Thater 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 Keiichi Tanaami’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, Pipilotti Rist, 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.