Intermedial (In)Stabilites in Contemporary Artworks
Intermedial (in)stabilities in contemporary artworks analyzes hybrid forms combining different media and sign systems by confronting them in their diverging materiality and mediality. These pieces are strongly self-reflective, and their (un)stable mode of production gives viewers access to different levels of meanings. What strategies and techniques do artists use to achieve such intermedial effects? How can the experience offered to an audience be described? How do different levels of meaning interact to produce a communicative effect? To answer these questions, we must focus on different layers of the complex configurations. Looking at each layer helps to precisely describe the relationship between the different parts and their effects on the audience. The audience of the fault line (2010), a collaboration between choreographers Meg Stuart and Philipp Gemacher, and the visual artist Vladimir Miller, is confronted with a performance transferred in different medial contexts, settings, and environments. Viewers and listeners reflect on the different contexts by making comparisons among them, an interaction forced by how the artists combine their performative video installation’s different parts: the event’s performance and its projection as constantly trans-formed in a different time and space by Miller and the operations as a form of examination of images produced by the live event. These different spaces, in which presented bodies and their representation occupy the center, visibly diverge throughout the performance.
Intermediale (In)Stabilitäten in zeitgenössischen Kunstwerken
Der Beitrag Intermediale (In)Stabilitäten in zeitgenössischen Kunstwerken untersucht unterschiedliche Formen intermedialer Systemreferenzen in medientheatralen Konfigurationen. Dabei steht die Produktion the fault lines (2010) von Meg Stuart, Philipp Gemacher und Vladimir Miller im Zentrum, ein Hybrid zwischen Performance und VideoInstallation. Das Stück konfrontiert unterschiedliche mediale Formen, Technologien, Kontexte, Darstellungspraktiken, Inszenierungs- und Kulturtechniken miteinander und macht diese über die Ausstellung der Formungsprozesse, denen das Publikum in actu beiwohnt, als Potentiale wie Konventionen erfahrbar. Reflexiv werden die ästhetischen Formen rezeptionsästhetisch vor allem über eine Differenzerfahrung, die sich im Rezeptionsakt ausbildet. Auch Ragnar Kjartansson spielt in seiner Produktion The visitors (2012) mit einer derartigen Differenzerfahrung, wenn diese auch nicht ebenso offensichtlich mitrezipiert wird wie im Falle von the fault lines. Kjartansson komponiert die Videobilder seiner (Musikvideo-)Installation als Tableau Vivants, die wiederum an Ölgemälde erinnern. Das Als ob des Malerischen kreiert der Künstler über verschiedene Mittel, die der Produktion eine metadiskursive Ebene verleihen. Die Spielstrategien, auf die zeitgenössische Künstler_Innen Kunstformen, Produktions- und Rezeptionspraktiken, institutionelle Rahmungen wie visuelle und auditive Wahrnehmungsdispositive befragen und mitunter aufs Spiel setzen, sind so vielseitig wie spannungsreich inszeniert. Um dieselben angemessen analysieren zu können, benötigt man vor allem einen genuin interdisziplinären Ansatz. Hierfür hält der Untersuchungsrahmen der Intermedialität als offenes System der Interdependenzen zwischen medialen Formen produktive Möglichkeiten bereit.
Intermedial (in)stabilities in contemporary artworks analyzes hybrid forms combining different media and sign systems by confronting them in their diverging materiality and mediality. These pieces are strongly self-reflective, and their (un)stable mode of production gives viewers access to different levels of meanings. What strategies and techniques do artists use to achieve such intermedial effects? How can the experience offered to an audience be described? How do different levels of meaning interact to produce a communicative effect? To answer these questions, we must focus on different layers of the complex configurations. Looking at each layer helps to precisely describe the relationship between the different parts and their effects on the audience. The audience of the fault line (2010), a collaboration between choreographers Meg Stuart and Philipp Gemacher, and the visual artist Vladimir Miller, is confronted with a performance transferred in different medial contexts, settings, and environments. Viewers and listeners reflect on the different contexts by making comparisons among them, an interaction forced by how the artists combine their performative video installation’s different parts: the event’s performance and its projection as constantly trans-formed in a different time and space by Miller and the operations as a form of examination of images produced by the live event. These different spaces, in which presented bodies and their representation occupy the center, visibly diverge throughout the performance. As a result, Miller’s operations of measuring open another space on a meta-level – the possibility to reflect on both spaces by thinking about their different qualities and their different materiality and mediality. These operations are also a kind of invitation to the audience to reflect on habits, conventions, and perceptions connected to everyday media usage. Self-reflectivity is the efficacy of dialogical confrontation among these spaces and their qualities as a result of conventions and configurations. The medium from which different spaces and medial surfaces are reflected off in the fault lines is the theater. The theater’s plurimedial structure makes the particular form possible for the artists to choose. Although they did not place the work on a classical stage, they decided to frame the artwork in the way theatrical plays are usually presented – by separating the stage from the auditorium and arranging the two in a frontal relationship. Therefore, the central perspective determines perception of the proceedings onstage. However, at the same time, the artists also irritate the classical regime during the presentation, emphasizing configuration as transfiguration. By combining various frames and perspectives, they cause different sight lines to confront one another. As a result, there are not just medial surfaces in permanent dialogue with each other in a nonhierarchical composition, but the modified formation between the (onstage) present and presented bodies (on different screens) incessantly provokes adjustment in the relationship between the choreography (as a fundamentally different spatial process) and the immaterial presentation of the same bodies in the video. By creating this friction, Stuart, Gehmacher, and Miller provide insight into their configuration’s heterogeneous parts. Moreover, they create knowledge about its mechanism on a meta-level.
To emphasize, that the production is the result of a process, and to sensitize the audience to its different aspects, many artists in contemporary art select thoughts about specific mechanisms in the process of creating and forming their work’s central theme. A link between these productions is their intermedial practices as medial specificities, and media borders are of essential importance.
