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Bode Museum in Hamburger Bahnhof
and Relocated Wall with Reflection
In December 2005, the Bode Museum in Berlin was
opened for just one weekend for the first time in three
years for the public to view the restoration of the building.
Beautifully refurbished, its treasures still absent, the
museum's empty space attracted several thousand curious
Berliners. I queued with them. After nearly an hour waiting
in the rain, we were admitted to join the throng of awestruck
spectators wandering from room to room, gazing at, and occasionally
photographing, walls, floors, ceilings, doors and windows.
The museum itself had become the exhibit. The building a
piece of sculpture.
Hamburger Bahnhof is an equally fascinating space. As its
name implies, the art gallery was once a main railway station
in Berlin. It still feels like a railway station with huge
arched ceilings and platforms intact. It contains a historical
resume of modern and post-modern art with the emphasis on
German artists, Kiefer and Beuys among them.
Robert Irwin talking to Lawrence Weschler
about a proposed public artwork for Oval Mall said:
"To me, it was already a piece of sculpture. It
had all the dimensions and all the properties of a piece
of sculpture: physical divisions, both organic and geometric,
participation of people, the kinetics of movement. It was
already operative in that way." *
Bode Museum in Hamburger Bahnhof makes overt the
idea that the space these works are located in is already
an 'artwork', the architecture of the building a kind of
sculptural installation. The series extends the visual field
from the photograph to the space in which it is seen.
Although the installed artworks have a definite physical
presence, any meanings drawn depend on the relationship
between the pictured space and the work's location. In fact
the subject of Bode Museum in Hamburger Bahnhof
is the site itself, or rather our perception of it, and
arises in the mind of the viewer by the way the image is
juxtaposed with the location rather than the content of
the image.
The image and its location become an inseparable artwork;
an artwork that also causes changes in the visual climate
of the space itself. The work begs the question: what, exactly,
is the nature of the art object? By using reflective surfaces,
the viewer is introduced to a further visual puzzle - does
the photographic image include a shadow or reflection of
roof lights or windows in the actual space or are these
elements in the photograph?
A fundamental quality of photography that interests me is
the representation of something that is not present, something
that acts as an index of things outside, of things - spaces
- time - beyond the frame. This archival function - holding
a record of another space, is further emphasised by putting
the image behind glass where it remains protected and inaccessible.
The work shown here under the working title Relocated
Wall with Reflection – is a series of photographs
some presented under glass, of a Berlin hallway. The hallway
is painted with ancient matt grey paint and a panel of gloss
reflects the light from the window. Presented in a museum
space, this reflection references architectural elements
and surfaces of both locations - pictured and real. It also
captures the viewer, whether consciously or unconsciously,
in a web of different times and spaces. The present where
the viewer sees their own reflection in the artwork, the
reflection of light on the day the photograph was taken
and the history of the hallway evident through the scratches
and bumps on its surface.
Scale, materials and virtual artworks
A group of artworks from both series exists as photographs
mounted behind semi-matt or transparent acrylic glass or
mounted on aluminium. Sizes vary from 2 - 4 metres. However,
the presentations on this website are to be viewed as separate,
virtual works in their own right.
International collaborative project
Field
of Vision is a collaborative serial artwork appearing
as both large-scale site-specific installations at significant
venues around the world and as a continuously developing
website. Field of Vision: Beijing will be held
in China at Beijing New Art Projects in September 2006.
The third in a series of “fields”, the project
questions authorship and location and involves the participation
of Chinese and other international artists.
The aim of Field of Vision is to work beyond the
parameters of the white cube and create an artwork that
has no origins or basis in any one artist or location. Through
a world-wide call for submissions of images via the internet,
the project is open to artists from any geographical or
cultural location. Images are collaged together to construct
a multi-faceted global view of today's New York, China,
Berlin, Delhi etc by collecting a multiplicity of viewpoints
into a single cohesive artwork. The concept of attempting
to create a unifying structure from diverse perceptions
brings into question the role of the artist as sole and
exclusive communicator of our collective vision.
The project is organised by a network of artists working
under the umbrella of Digital
Art Projects and in collaboration with the Institute
for New Media, Frankfurt a.M., Germany.
Artists in the group include: Stephan Hausmeister, Germany/UK
(original concept) together with Alison Dalwood, UK; Malcolm
Ferris, UK; Michael Wright, UK; Sam Jury, UK; Paul Dacey,
USA; Gao Brothers, China; Miao Xiaochun, China; Andrey Vrabchev,
Bulgaria; Gautam Narang, India/UK and Jenny Kao, Taiwan/USA.
Biographical
note
Born in the UK, I graduated from the University of Newcastle
upon Tyne in 1976 and from the postgraduate department of
the University of Reading in 1979. I live in Chipping Norton,
Oxfordshire and from time to time, Berlin. Recent exhibitions
include Field of Vision: New York at the Lab Gallery,
New York in 2004 and Gefährliche Benutzeroberflächen
at the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus, Germany
in 2003.
In 2005 I was artist in residence at the Institute for New
Media (INM) in Frankfurt supported by a grant from the Arts
Council and sabbatical leave from my fine-art lecturing
post at the University of Hertfordshire. I am currently
working for an architectural commission and gathering visual
material and photographs for two Field of Vision
projects - in Bulgaria in October 2006 and Berlin in September
2007.
Berlin, March 2006
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* Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is forgetting
the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of the Contemporary
Artist Robert Irwin (Berkeley: University of California
Press 1982), 198-99
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