Vienna. The word déjà-vu means an experience where it seems to us as if we had previously experienced, had felt, the same situation in exactly the same way – as if we had acted in exactly the same way in this situation before. Now, in the exhibition of this name at Atelier Augarten, the term is explored further in connection with contemporary artistic works, with reference to the analysis of the phenomenon by the philosopher Henri Bergson. Whereas, according to Bergson, déjà-vu takes the guise of a moment of specific temporality in which the doubling of the present in its simultaneous past is experienced, it manifests itself - transferred to the field of art - in connection with concepts like splitting, division, superimposition, repetition.1 In a further step, déjà-vu is associated with concepts such as dream and hallucination, the uncanny and unease.

This network of concepts is now joined by the art works. The way for this convergence is prepared by several large paintings by Martina Steckholzer, in which spatial sequences fragment into black, white and grey; by David Thorpe’s fairytale-like silhouettes, partitions structured by wooden rods with glass elements and brown wrapping paper with a dark pattern printed on it that recalls the ornamental style of non-European cultures; by the confusing, vibrating doubling in Constantin Luser’s wall drawing of a fall; by the linguistic-spatial crossing and reflection in Jan Mancuska’s work, which shows itself as simultaneity of thought and observation, word and image; and by the melancholy, dark scenes in the photographs by Anna Gaskell, in which children are the protagonists.

In Isabell Heimerdinger’s »Waiting, Acting Waiting« (2002), we watch the actor Wolfram Berger for seven minutes, being filmed without his knowledge during the purported preparations for a film shoot. For seven more minutes we can watch him while, now knowing that he is being filmed, he plays a waiting man. As in the four-minute Screen Tests in which Warhol filmed each visitor to the Factory for the duration of a roll of film, Berger is above all simply recorded; there is nothing for him to do in his role. Lighting apparatuses make the whole picture or parts of it brighter or darker, with Berger in the middle, who accepts the fact that he is being filmed and acts a person/himself while time passes. The scene deviates only minimally from the scene before. The two scenes reflect one another; each seems simultaneously to be the echo of the other; they overlap. The difference and similarity between the two film acts raises the question of to what extent the film images, which have simultaneously vanished in the movement, can be remembered, what other memories push their way in between them, but also what duration means in film, for those being filmed in front of the camera, and for the viewers in front of the projected surface.2

The temporality of the film images in Clemens von Wedemeyer’s »Das Bildermuseum brennt« (2004) goes through a different process of splitting. On each of the three screens, one of the figures – visitor, resident and watchman – moves through a closed museum with empty walls. They enter the same rooms at different times, flee one another and pursue one another, without ever meeting up. Because the screens are positioned so that only two of them are visible at any one time, they can never be joined to form a whole film, and there is an element of »missing out« while watching, too. A gap in time makes the viewers, like the actors, always arrive too late. But there are also temporal jumps and spatial uncertainties in the pictures themselves. An unstable space arises, one that seems to be constantly reshaping itself, or that perhaps really is always a different one. So it is impossible to say whether we are seeing the museum closed only for the night or for renovations, shortly before the opening or shortly afterwards, already abandoned or not yet used. In this uncertainty of time and space, the memories of the viewers become fragile, are permanently reinterpreted, doubled, reflected, distorted in the view of that which is still just present.

In theme-based, theory-oriented exhibitions, the question often arises of how art can relate freely to the texts and how the viewers can undergo a personal aesthetic experience between the texts and the works. With the happy combination of works presented here, the contextualising introduction by the curator, Thomas Trummer, would have been sufficient as a loose connective element. A further text linking each work to a specific facet of déjà-vu was not necessary for viewers to be able to experience its proximity to Bergsonian thought. To escape from a world of visual clichés, reflects Gilles Deleuze, with Godard, among others, in mind, it is necessary to see and hear images in a new way. In thinking about film, and following Bergson, he introduces the concept of the time-image, which places the figures in the film, and the viewers as well, in a purely optical/sonorous situation. Deleuze sees this as the potential of art to produce unprecedented images that move us by making the unbearable visible.3 However, it is necessary that reflection of social contexts, even if this means the social structures of the field of art itself, is not lost. Deleuze relates the potential for a renewal of cinema by means of the time-image to a specific form of perception that arose around 1945 and afterwards. This contextualisation enables Deleuze to take Bergson’s understanding of time and déjà-vu and build on it in an appropriately radical way while thinking about film. It is this basically political way of thinking that could be missed when the term is transferred to the field of art.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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