In and out
C-Prints, 50 x 77 cm, 78 x 120 cm, 2000
Cibachrome prints of hand- and computer-generated drawings. Black negative material scratched with a razor blade was scanned and overlaid with cartoon-like line drawings.
TexteTexts from the Upanishads, from the catalogue in and out, Dofasco Gallery, Dundas, Ohio, Canada, 2000 ...
In the beginning my dear,
this was Being alone,
one only without a second.
Some people say,
in the beginning this was non-being alone,
one only, without a second.
From that non-being,
being was produced.
Chandogya Upanisad VI.2.1.
Food when eaten becomes threefold;
its coarsest part becomes faeces;
its middle part flesh and
its subtlest part mind.
Water when drunk becomes threefold;
its coarsest part becomes urine;
its middle part blood,
its subtlest part breath of life.
Heat when eaten becomes threefold;
its coarsest part becomes bone;
its middle part marrow,
its subtlest part speech.
Thus my dear, mind consists of food,
breath of life consists of water
and speech consists of heat.
Metamorphosis is an inherent part of the line of development and of every individual piece of Renate Kordon’s work. Her art is not limited to a single medium or a narrow range of forms—even her name was subject to change twice. Predictability, product consistency, and a straightforward image are not in her repertoire. On the contrary, her artistic disposition is based on a spontaneously active imagination, on a feeling for things and relationships in which nothing is fixed or one-dimensional. It is her view of the world that each and everything can be something quite different from what it appears to be at a given moment—according to the paradoxical but true saying, “In this world change is the only permanent thing.“
Metamorphosis—as shocking transformation—is a principle in which only the idea, only the imagination, reigns supreme. Here matter is secondary; the fabric of form and the material aspect of the artistic idea is in the end arbitrary and almost irrelevant. However much the material world and the rules of pragmatism may determine our everyday life, the artistic principle of metamorphosis constantly and fundamentally disputes the dominance of materiality. Metamorphosis is the iridescent play of the imagination free of material bonds. In the realm of metamorphosis nothing is fixed. Everything is possible, anything can change into anything. The simplest littlest thing can suddenly bloom into a complex universe, banality can turn into surprise, and an entire cosmos can become a child’s toy. Chaos constantly becomes cosmos and vice versa. The wide open space without form (which is the original meaning of the Greek word ‘chaos’) evolves into ‘cosmos’—which in Greek originally simply meant order, form and structure—synonymous with ornament, the adorned, and the harmony of the universe. But even in the apparently eternal order of the stars and planets, change, continuous movement, and transformation are the only permanent features: galaxies arise out of dust and energy, only to disintegrate into dust again or implode and become invisible. Something similar happens in a more familiar space and dimension when tiny, apparently formless, particles like seeds change shape and grow and evolve into complex forms. This orderly, perfectly shaped matter, animated and differentiated, disintegrates again, becomes amorphous, becomes humus, and takes on a completely different shape from which something different, something entirely different, can arise.
Renate Kordon selected a text passage from the Upanishads to accompany her cosmic, blue-black digital prints: Some people say, in the beginning this was non-being alone, one only; without a second; from that non-being, being was produced. She named one of the pieces, Flat entrance to the universe, another one she called The human mind is infinite, a third she named Memory surpasses space. Still another one is titled Walking on my spaceship. These short sentences allude to a quality that is consistent in Kordon’s work—humour and fine irony—just as metamorphosis as a principle opposes the pathos of the absolute.
Alas, how did these midnight blue digital works come into existence? Kordon used already exposed colour film—actually the beginning and end portions of colour film rolls, meant for disposal. She scratched and scraped into the thin black coating of the film, using a razor blade, coaxing a microcosm of forms and colours out of a formless, colourless exterior, layer by layer: first the deep blue, then light blue, then turquoise, finally the glaring white. These miniatures measuring 24 x 36 mm were then scanned, fed into the computer where they were overlaid with cartoon- like lineation, enlarged to digital prints. Or they were enlarged directly onto photographic paper, and then scratched anew with the razor, bringing new lighter hues and shapes out of the material’s dark depths. Red and yellow was added to blue and turquoise.
Alongside her art work Renate Kordon has been practising meditation which is a path leading to the discovery of the innermost layers of consciousness. It means dipping into and groping the way into apparent blind spots of existence. Meditation opens our inner sensitivity to what we normally cannot perceive with our outward senses—eyes, ears, hands, and the polarising intellect. There is an apparent analogy between the practise of yoga and these works. They are a careful but also playful and unpredictable journey into a microcosm, a journey through the blackness, through the superficial blindness of the exposed (blinded) film material into its finest and most sensitive depth. And in this depth lies hidden an entire chaotic and unstructured universe of glowing colours and shapes—flat entrance to the universe...;
it appears as though an apparent nothingness suddenly included everything and also something more. Renate Kordon’s experiments with animated film as well as her drawings, paintings and sculptures reflect her sensitivity for the inward side of perception, for the energies that, though hidden under a reality that appears fixed, are constantly pushing towards transformation and change.
It is mostly a rather latent, sometimes overtly critical unveiling of the ambivalence of reality by means and phenomena of metamorphosis: by caricature, by the grotesque shaping of materialization by converting it into light data, through partitioning of time, through acceleration of velocity—through exposure of the inner, the entirely different layers under the crusts of real appearance.
