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6/5/2004

Eva Schlegel

Galerie Fortlaan 17, Gent

THE RETURN OF THE IMAGE SNATCHERS
Eva Schlegel and the Art of Disappearence

The windows of the main post office in Munich were all lit up. In the diffuse light you could see the shadows of a party crowd engrossed in animated conversations.
You could see them drinking their cocktails and laughing. Even in the building containers on the other side of the square there were mobs of people partying. The two young Munich women who were running up the steps to the first container level to join the fray were disappointed. On the inside there was no trace of a party, only a few construction workers sitting there, drinking their beer.
The scenario was created as part of an art in public space project. Eva Schlegel had projected video images onto windows covered with transparent plastic sheet. The piece, which was titled 'After Dark', introduced a new series to an oeuvre that could never really be pinned down in the realm between image, sculpture and space. For an artist who until now had focused on capturing and freezing motifs the newly conquered moving images seemed doubly volatile. It was if someone's
eardrum were being punctured by a blow of the fist.
These are works that only come to life once night falls. They integrate themselves in the cities they are set in and draw their urban feeling from a dialogue between architecture and a social game. The artist's conquest of the new medium was triggered off by a special life situation: since 1997 Eva Schlegel has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Along with her colleagues Franz Graf, Renée Green, Peter Kogler, Hubert Schmalix and Sue Williams who had been appointed as professors at the same time she was, Schlegel has set about anchoring the medial diversity of current art production, cross-genre projects and transformations in the curriculum of art training. The new openness and curiosity spurred the training of the young artists, but also had a boomerang effect on the output of their their teachers. According to Eva Schlegel, the work with her students reactivated her interest in video and film. In 1985, Schlegel presented a much-acclaimed diploma project in which she presented a film projection on a rotating ventilator. Especially for work in public space, an area that the artist has mastered exquisitely, the new media allowed the artist to not just extend the boundaries of space and time but to also explore new possibilities for interacting with a building. For the opening exhibition at the Landesgalerie im Taxipalais Innsbruck the Tyrolean artist recently presented a second example of a moving projection. From the onset of dusk to the early hours of the morning the large shot of a mattress is projected onto a concrete wall in the inner courtyard of the Galerie – a wall that the
architect Hanno Schlögl erected to refer to the exhibition space lying below it. Very slowly the image begins to oscillate and pulsate like a heart beat. The gentle, hardly noticeable movement undermines the function of the architectural element and simultaneously establishes the indecipherable enigma of a massive disk that quietly flutters in the wind.

Eva Schlegel has also always been fond of mobilizing the onlooker 's potential for associations. In particular her works depicting a blurred photographed text which she began doing in 1993 deal with the structure of perception. What makes a text recognizable as such, even when it has been freed of its primary information? Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concept of perception between knowledge and experience, linked to language and 'body awareness', was one of the decisive motives for those works in which she has also been exploring space-defining possibilities. Pure pictorial information rehearses the silencing of text.

Its representation on silk-screened, large sheets of glass can assume various configurations. As pages of a book it can be leaned or stacked against the wall, as in the inauguration of the work at the Galerie Krinzinger in 1993 and later against windows as at Soshana Wayne in Los Angeles, serving as a membrane between inside and outside. Or it can be placed in front of a city, as at the 'Prospect 9T' at the Frankfurter Kunstverein or against the backdrop of a landscape as at Schloß Salzau in Kiel in 1995. They can also appear as a luminous wall in the staircase of a Vienna school, as a space within a space of a bank in Innsbruck or as façade design at the fire station in Probstdorf, Lower Austria. These pieces can also become transformed into architecture, like the 'cloud pavilion', an annex for a city villa in Vienna where the people living there use the airy glass house as a living room.
Schlegel sees her break with word semantics and contents as something liberating. The text as both structure and scheme, along the perceptual boundaries to the image. Instead of clearly coded image texts such as logos, diagrams or computer icons we are confronted with explicitly nameless text images whose illegibility account for the meaning of the piece. Thus the artist's intention becomes clear, namely to deal with the question how the visible, how perception can be decoded, how much space interpretations occupy and what associations are triggered by imagery. From more recent art history, one could, for instance, cite Marcel
Broodthaers who in 1969 covered over some verses from Mallarmé's 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard' with black lines, making them illegible and presenting the text as a calligraphic pattern. The text was printed on paper. When the pages were turned, new overlappings emerged – a consequence that can also be noted in Schlegel's large-format glass-screen installations. The artist herself has commented that the onlooker finds him/herself within the book.
The 46th Biennale de Venezia in 1995 addressed space as something universal and with mental space. The Austrian pavilion stood under the sway of architecture and media art which came to the fore once again after being marginalized for years. This other identity of international art was to become transmogrified into a gesamtkunstwerk through interdisciplinary interplay. The architectural intervention of Coop Himmelb(l)au, in collaboration with Eva Schlegel, aimed at nothing less than the perforation of the Josef Hoffmann Pavilion and its classic-conservative aesthetics. Schegel mounted a glass façade that slanted down to the front of the building, in front of the architectural manifesto of Austrofascism. She mounted her blurred texts on this glass façade. Commenting on this intervention, she stated, 'I was interested in the confrontation of the reality of a descriptive, analytic text with reality and in the conflation of both in an exemplary way. This is also a critique of pre-fascist architecture and the mounting of filters, a spatial and temporal networking between old and new substance, inside and outside.'
Coop Himmelb(l)au and Eva Schlegel once again joined forces as architects and artist in an architectural competition for designing the national library in Tokyo.The architects planned a conglomeration of 'brain blocks' in the middle of which the reading hall was suspended. Eva Schlegel had designed a glass ceiling replete with Japanese texts for the intelligent storehouse of manuscripts. The sun would have scattered the shadows of the letters over the readers and the books and typographic schemes would have been more or less clearly recognizable, depending on the weather.
Polarities, appearance and disappearance, transparency and materiality, picture and object, abstraction and reality are Eva Schlegel's themes that are recurrent throughout all her work. Even the vibrant color spaces of the early pigment paintings, the graphite and lacquer pieces with their subtly modulated surfaces allowed one to assume a sort of corporeality below the pictorial membranes. These membranes could be velvety smooth but they could also reveal the traces of scraping.

Around 1987/88 the graphite works yielded to pieces on lead that showed a similar surface texture. Then there was one of those brilliant chance discoveries that gave her work a new direction, initiating a new game and expanding the field.
At that time Eva Schlegel was working in a collection center for harzardous waste. There old photo negatives were deposited to try to recover their low silver content. There were all these snapshots, mountain peaks and cyclists, trees and swans, bridges, airplanes and rowing boats in the water. A repository of collective everyday culture, a pictorial reservoir of everyday life. Trophies of banality for the average woman. But most importantly, there was collection of private pornographic images from the twenties, pictures that had been taken in bourgeois settings, trivial Philistine fantasies revisited. Since they were negatives, reality seemed to be steeped in the contre jour of bright flashes, quickly illuminating a motif before it vanished once and for all.
Eva Schlegel transferred these photos trouvées onto lead or glass using a silkscreen method. According to the artist, the motif should only be recognized on second sight, and since she printed black on lead and white on glass, background and motif became blurred in a non-contrast field for possible associations, as atmospheric, emotionally highly charged test images of perception. For a series that she created later, so-called 'kitchen porn', based on postcards depicting scenes from Viennese brothels of the sixties, she rubbed the xeroxed pictures using trichloroethylene on a chalk ground and painted up to 20 layers of transparent varnish over them. As a result of the added oil paint, high-gloss color spaces emerged that seemed to be dripping wet and whose sensual presence literally invited one to touch them.

Pornography is generally understood as a universal category for naming the male gaze and the patriarchal mechanism of suppression. Eva Schlegel succeeds in finding the necessary ironical distance vis-à-vis the trivial stimulating material for the elegant gent who, incidentally, camouflages himself in the photographs with wigs and mustaches. And through recycling, transforming and alienating the images she also creates the artistic framework for the actual message: the instrumentalization of clichés only to let them sink in an ocean of paint. The porno puzzles that appeared in the Edition Artelier are proof that there are also contemporaries who neither shy the time nor the effort to let themselves be lured into the promising traps. The master of disappearance has addressed the issue of appearance: 432 pieces, no model, just the hope of finding the erotic kick. Truly fanatic persons, working together in a group of three, have been claimed to have put together the puzzle in two and a half days. And, one might add in passing, there was actually a porno on it.

At the moment the artist is interested in cloud landscapes, and instead of found footage she now works with material she has photographed herself. She always carries a small-image camera with her and whenever an interesting cloud formation becomes visible, Eva Schlegel holds the camera out of the car and presses the trigger. The quickly made photographs are the fax models for carefully constructed images. Segments of them are photographed, enlarged and transferred, sheet for sheet, onto gesso and then covered with layers of reflecting layers of varnish. The color of the picture objects results from the paint mixed with the varnish that is used to seal the black-and-white photographs under a surface that is both wet and shiny and thus serves to reflect the surroundings. Formatting them as single images or as diptychs, Schlegel tries to create new rules of the game and manipulates reality on her jaunts through various surfaces until it is only surrogate of itself. A sort of 'return of the image snatchers' that has become exemplary of the easel painting.
BRIGITTE HUCK

Opening 7 may from 7pm to 9.30pm

Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent
Belgium

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