Siegen. »Everything in this film is strictly based on the available facts.« At a time when films were still being made in black-and-white, someone obviously thought it necessary to give the viewers this unsettling statement to think about. When Eske Schlüters shows this text insert today, the supposed anachronism seems to us like an ironic commentary on her own method of work. »Available Facts« are films that you find in well-stocked video stores.
Schlüters works with footage from films d’auteur by Antonioni, Rohmer, Hartley, Ozon and others. Always only a few single frames, usually the unimportant things.
»Available Facts« are also text fragments from philosophical works and works on sign theory, which the artist has spoken in various languages and by various voices from off-screen. But perhaps it is not a matter of transforming the various fragments back into educational material by means of hermeneutic readings, but rather to join in the radical transformation to which the artist subjects the material. Anyone who wants to leave his body at home can also stay in the film museum, which is fun too, as Eske Schlüters would be one of the first to claim.
The Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen shows four video installations by the Hamburg artist. As a work in its own right, the catalogue unites three of the videos shown here to form a cycle and picks up the emotional semantics peculiar to them. Each of these three works has one of three »four-letter words« assigned to it: »Love« (»Knowing as much as the Man in the Moon«, 2004), »True« (»True to You«, 2005) und »Dead« (»Vanished into thin Air«, 2006). As the fourth installation, the exhibition features a collaborative work with Axel Gaertner, »Límite Meanwhile « (2005). In this double projection, the beamers hang as a filigree construction on straps from the ceiling. While walking through the rooms, we come across the other projectors unassumingly placed directly on the cartons they came in, as if they have just been unpacked. The title of the exhibition, »Sehen als Denken sehen« (»Seeing Seeing as Thinking«), already indicates the intention of examining the situation of the viewers under a semiotic spotlight. Accordingly, the rooms here are unusually brightly lit in comparison with other projection venues. In many places, the geometrical appearance of the room is changed by individual, freestanding partitions made of polystyrene sheets mounted in raster-like patterns. As a copy of and supplement to the four walls of the »white cube«, they provide resistance as viewers walk through the exhibition.
The way in which the polystyrene partitions create presence is also characteristic of the videos. Their effect derives more from physical presence than from their content and meaning. Visually striking effects in the projections are created by virtue of the fact that the film material is stripped of any pragmatically oriented movie grammar that otherwise organises the reading process. When in Eske Schlüters’ film a hand reaches into the image for a short moment to turn a vase around, the action ends at the edge of the image, and a special kind of visibility is created. However, it is mainly the marginal sequences that are emphasised in this way: diffuse zoomed images, close-ups, surface descriptions; water, wallpaper and clouds. The freedom accorded to the images aims at escaping the big narratives. From off-screen, we hear voices that speak laconically about identity, love, truth and disappearance in various languages. »Amour, truth, desaparecer.«
And then there are these traces. Traces that storage media and repeated showings have left on the images. In the film, lines and spots follow the vertical movement of the film strip; with video, there are horizontal bars. When transferred to the digital medium, these traces are kept. They are signs of a historical and technical difference and lend themselves well to highlighting procedures of translation and quotation. In addition to this characteristic, the traces have another, more specific effect: the parts of the film that they cover have now become invisible; they are replaced by the visibility of the material in its hard concretion, devoid of meaning. This becomes particularly clear when Schlüters uses monochrome or white images to emphasise the pure, criss-crossing and overlapping materiality of the strips and areas. Eske Schlüters also applies the effect of obscuration to the way the film is edited: when a head turns, awakening expectations of a face, she makes a sudden cut to the patterned surface of a public square. Procedures like these imitate the form and effect of the polystyrene partitions and transfer their impenetrable superficiality to the medium of the moving picture. In this way, an intermediate materiality is manifested in these traces and areas that does not resolve in a moment of signification within mediatic processes. But the traces do not only function as such surfaces: at various moments, they themselves become protagonists. Alongside the material traces, there are shots that take up their movement in structure and composition, or that seem to imitate them. Some of the cuts delineate these similarities, for example when a vertical film strip weaving its way restlessly along the left edge of the picture is inserted before a curtain blowing in the wind, which continues the movement in the same place. Elsewhere, the signalless »snow« of the television appears again in an anthill. Figurations of the traces like these also return in the spoken text: »In the small camera, a gecko – who becomes internationally popular.« A personificating or figurative treatment of such traces is not far-fetched, as can already be seen in the banal fact that visitors cannot avoid occasionally walking through the projection. In so doing, they leave behind an ephemeral imprint in the form of a black silhouette. »The small creature in the apparatus is a figuration that each of us has always resembled.« The fact that the trace of the medium can mean more than the dryness of the concretion or pure substantiality is clearly demonstrated in the work »Límite Meanwhile«, which creates a connection to the political struggles of the second half of the 20th century. The potential of the trace to become figurative, and that of the figure to become a trace, takes on a political dimension. Mask and disappearance become decisive themes of identity; the masks is both a representational quote of a face and a material obstruction to the gaze. A partial disappearance can become a condition of existence for political actors.
The most striking example in this context is the way the mask of Subcomandante Marcos appears over and over again in the video. »Keeping one’s face covered means beginning to have a face in the first place.« In the formal context of the exhibition apparatus, the traces represent visual »hard facts« that can resist their readability. From another point of view, however, it is all about the depicted people as »hard facts« of geopolitics. »Available Facts« are the myths of the West – love, truth, death – and Eske Schlüters dissects the big narratives of male filmmakers as their representatives.
Martin Beck is a Berlin-based philosopher and should not be confused with the artist and critic Martin Beck.
Translated by Timothy Jones