Research Guidelines, Jan Van Eyck Academie

 

 

 

Through drawings, films, texts and installations, my practice deals with the mechanisms of memory and history. Found and fictive artefacts such as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, photographs, objects, films, pictures from the Internet, and documents are manifested via artistic revision, translation, quotation or re-enactment. The reproduced objects become new documents, in which fictional and autobiographical narratives are inscribed in parallel to historical realities.

 

Recently, my research centred on the 1963 East-German encyclopaedia Die Frau (The Woman). This book served as pedagogical and political instrument for socialist indoctrination. I reconstructed selected pages of the book into drawings, objects and simulations, focusing on the imagery while omitting the original texts, image subtitles or referential context. Out of my initial examination of Die Frau, a whole series of artistic tangents evolved: one subsequent body of work concentrated on the reconstruction of biographies of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova (a figure inaugurating the 1963 edition of Die Frau); another on the scientist Pavlov and his sketch for the homonymous experiment.

Under the working title History-Making – the Artist’s Use of Historical Reconstruction as a Strategy of Semantic Storage, my existing artistic research will continue in both studio and theoretical pathways. It will develop into a substantive body of work, framed towards an exhibition and, in addition, the parallel development of a publication project will collate documentation of artworks and original research material.

 

The use of gathered and collated narratives, in combination with methodologies used by historians (for instance, the use of the replica or of the archive), proposes this strategy of reconstruction as being a kind of semantic storage. A specific vocabulary is created by the artist, reflecting on the official and the unofficial, on the objective and the subjective, on the communicative and on cultural memory, and what has been lost in the shift between these entities. In this arena, the artwork becomes a container of quotations; author and source, hidden or revealed, can be quoted in non-hierarchical manners, joining disparate pieces of differing memories. It becomes historical reconstruction; an act of transcription that is also an act of generation.

 

Central to my current research is a youtube version of the film Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond, directed by Fritz Lang, 1929). As a result of the low-quality version of the film available on the Internet – itself based upon a partially restored reprint from the 1950s –, many details and narrative elements are lost. Apart from the particular aesthetics of the Internet version of the film, I am interested in looking at two contextual elements – the first relating to popular culture (the first use in the film of the ‘rocket launch countdown’), the second of biographical interest (the film’s title is derived from the tense relations between Lang, his wife and his mistress). I am interested in the sense of romantic and melodramatic within modern technology fantasy, and the sense of historiography behind the fictional materiality of motion.

 

 

Presentation of Research Outcomes, January 13, 2010

Opening Week, Jan Van Eyck Academie,

Maastricht, The Netherlands