Walking on my Spaceship
Three film settings and four sculptural interventions furnish the space of the Graf&Zyx tank in a balanced choreography, Neulengbach, NÖ, 2015
Otto Kapfinger: opening speech at Renate Kordon's exhibition. Graf&Zyx Tank, Neulengbach, 2015...
In the spaceship of imagination
This exhibition by Renate Kordon runs under the motto: Walking on My Spaceship. Three film settings of different dimensions and two object-like interventions furnish the hall in a finely balanced choreography. The motto comes from the lineament of dark steel rods lying on the floor here at the front of the room, where it opens completely glazed to the garden. It shows us a stylised female figure with a handbag, walking between stars and planets over a lens-like form, - probably some kind of an spaceship, or a UFO. We can read this steel drawing as a self-portrait of the artist, a self-reflection. What would be that spaceship for her that transports her - and thus us as viewers - through space and time? It is undoubtedly the imagination! And we wander along it and with it freely through space and time, just as in this steel drawing the female figure walks with and on the lines from one world to another - boundlessly.
Renate Kordon began as an artist in the seventies primarily with cartoons, with series of linear drawings and short animated films. These line cartoons, published by a well-known French publishing house, were satires on everyday subjects and objects. With simple black lines they illustrated all kinds of things: funny, absurd metamorphoses, where everyday things turn into the grotesque, where complete nonsense emerges from sensible - from normally sensible figures and objects, and where such non-sense then flashes into a surprising, critical, humorous sense of possibility - and hilarity.
Renate Kordon has always cultivated the potential of the autonomous, the freely acting line. The line is a primary human cultural achievement, an abstraction that can be anything, can mean many things - and this is precisely what manifests itself everywhere in Kordon's work. In diverse media and scales, it comments on the constant movement of our perception and the thoughts that accompany it - and at the same time it irritates their normative patterns of meaning. In animated film, this vibrant movement, the vital and unpredictable urge of the lines to move, finds its ideal metier. This was the theme of her first major animated film in 1980 - Hors d'oeuvre. In Neulengbach she is showing a miniaturised version of it as a digital film brooch, presented in special packaging, floating under plexiglass spheres. You can see one of them, in action, on the lapel of my jacket. Hors d'oeuvre, five minutes long, is the pauseless metamorphosis of a simple line that plays with the most improbable shapes - and with our viewing habits. A waist-high pile of drawings on A-4 paper has become a work of art that is no longer an object as such, but a film - an illusion, "real" to our senses - and at the same time completely intangible in space and time.
Such phenomena have always fascinated Renate Kordon, and she has worked and experimented with them in many analogue techniques. You can see one such spatialisation of film illusion in the rear, hermetically dark area of the hall: Trickptychon, a film sequence projected overlapping onto the concrete walls and floor. It is a digital variant of a spatial work originally shown as an analogue film installation in the Vienna Secession. Kordon has often used the medium of film in such settings in a self-reflexive way, transcending conventional applications. Instead of a single projection, she has, for example, superimposed double or triple projections on the surface or at spatial angles, creating serially combined, spatially and temporally displaced image sequences. At the Secession, Trickptychon was a multimedia choreography with 16mm colour film. A thirty-metre-long, self-contained film loop - deflected via spools on the ceiling of the room - ran through projectors distributed on pedestals, resulting on the one hand in a glittering film-strip sculpture wandering through the room - and on the other hand in a sequence of images "broken" across the corners of the room, superimposed several times and moving endlessly. In the Graf&Zyx Tank here you can see an extended version, now produced with digital beamers from the ceiling, with the special feature that the floor is also included here. Since it has the same grey value as the walls, the suggestively wandering, strongly coloured projections blur the boundaries between horizonal/vertical, and visually equalise the opposing, concrete facts of space.
Another variation on the cinema situation is Kordon's Vogel-Kino - seen here in the centre of the room, in which, thanks to minimal electronics, a beamer in matchbox format internally illuminates a mysterious, poetic peep-box object. Another variation is the aforementioned animated brooch, - a piece of film that can be worn as jewellery on the body.
The movement of the line, the movement of the forms has taken on completely different dimensions in Renate Kordon's work. I am thinking of the largest work she has realised, Windspiel Spielfeld. Anyone who has ever driven on the motorway from Graz across the border to Marburg has seen it. It is a good 76m wide and 17m high - shapes moved by the wind in the airspace above the border station. And even bigger is actually her Sundial of the Seasons in Schottwien. - also a "site-specific work", where a highway bridge functions as the shadow-giver and the sun as the light source, and where the resulting shadow line 130m below the bridge on the main street of the town - in its wandering produced by the rotation of the earth - is recorded and colour-coded on distinctive days of the year.
Movement and metamorphosis are themes that Kordon brings to bear in a wide variety of media. In them, she follows maxims that modernism defined as the new basis of art. One hundred years ago, when the depiction of reality became obsolete, Vasily Kandinsky described it as follows: "Art does not depict. There is no longer an aesthetic object, but the aesthetic state. The spiritual, the spiritual state, that is art and not the beautiful object."
A typical example of such site-specific evocation was Kordon's work a few years ago in KULTUM Graz, where she was invited to play on the walls of the large staircase hall. On the spot, she found: the most beautiful, the most lively thing in the magnificent hall is the wrought-iron railing from the Baroque period - veritable works of art: labyrinthine, intertwined ornaments and arabesques. Her idea was then to draw these into a conversation by juxtaposing them with new, related steel lineaments on the white, high walls all around. Thus was born the series of steel drawings. But that was not enough. For she then documented this hall with photos, stored the photos in the computer as an endless, rotating all-round image. And there, in the virtual, she brought the steel drawings fixed to the walls to life as animated figures, let the lines dance through the room and the railings, out by the windows and in again. This film was shown a few rooms away, in the gallery itself, with a monitor in front of a white wall on which the steel drawing Walking on my Spaceship was fixed, - where the loop of this whole intervention unfolded into another dimension and at the same time referred back to its beginning.
Kordon has also reacted specifically to the completely different space, the flush concrete architecture of the hall here in Neulengbach, as already indicated. This crystal-clear Graf&Zyx Tank is after all a think tank, an experimental station for thinking about what art should or could be today. We remember: classical modernism negated the picture, the statue and the like as aesthetic, object-like commodities and wanted art to intervene directly in life, in expressions and states of life. In this direction, this hall also makes a statement, a guideline. Nothing can be attached to the exposed concrete walls, no nails can be hammered in, nothing can be glued on. There is no illuminated ceiling as in the usual white cube, and the floor is also taboo. It is a coated concrete floor on which you can walk and put things, but where nothing can be fixed mechanically. So it's an art space that denies the conventional art form, and that's why it's really a laboratory to deal with it and show how you can respond to it.
Kordon's answer, complementing the three film interventions outlined above, was on the one hand: what normally hangs on the wall or is fixed somewhere else is here on the floor. The spaceship that is shown, Walking on my Space Ship, lies on the floor and is surrounded by aluminium-metal tubes, which are the only other material in the room and form otherwise functional rods and desks. In mental space, in cosmic space, in outer space, there is no top and bottom anyway; the floor, if there is one at all, is no more important or less important than the ceiling or the wall, everything is equal, gravity has (almost) disappeared …
And on the other hand, on the left-hand wall at the front: the Pack-Escape of the Picture Frames - empty wooden frames, wrapped in white gauze, on thin steel-wire legs, striving towards the exit in a hectic crush, in a slightly chaotic running-pulley. Picture frame art has no place here - the artist has visualised this with this group of objects, made it subtly visible as a condition. Such subtle wit, such self-deprecating lightness, the ambivalence that resolves situations and circumstances - all these are constant features in the oeuvre of this versatile artist.
