Introduction

In my Fine Art I focus on a combination of experiences of public space and the connotations of optics. The experience of spaces being alienated by optical illusions as light shadow plays is the central theme in my art and my research. By this the aspects of Space and Optics in terms of physical experiences are getting together. Especially the possibilities of misguiding the viewer during the process of visual perception grab my attention.

Existing architecture and public spaces are always the starting point for in my work. I combine the research about the history of a place with the process of imagination and drafting. This culminates in light installations, short videos and series of photography.

For me art is a place to explore boundaries,  a “frontier for experience”, [1], a place where feelings of freedom, surprise, bewilderment and even alienation are safely embedded in an esthetic experience.

The topic of my graduation thesis for my Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2007 was: ‘The concept of strangeness and recognition in art and philosophy. The artist’s view on migration and alienation’. I feed my soul by crossing national borders especially between Germany and the Czech Republic and between Germany and the Netherlands. During a one-year stay as an exchange student in the Czech Republic in 1992/93 I lived in Stary Plzenec with a host family. Through this intense experience I got a strong affinity with Czech people, the Czech language, and the corporate changes in Europe after 1989.

The street as an Interface of Recognition and Strangeness

Public Spaces constitute an interface for personal perceptions and projections, where imaginations and illusions emerge. Besides being a place where rational restrictions, laws and public interests dominate, public space is  ‘No Man’s Land’ at the same time in the sense that it is not privately owned and accessible for everybody. As such public space has the potential of being reshaped by individuals, over and over again. As an artist I participate in this reshaping of urban space and I observe and admire those who do so too. In this lecture I will present my artistic research on that topic in relation to some art projects realized by myself and others.

First of all, people have to feel the wish to express themselves on the street: This Russian man called Sutyagin, from Arkhangelsk, did so.

Russian Castle in the air

Public Space is also ground where the aim for understanding the other is taking place.

Ground where we recognize behavior of other people or where we feel alienated by something the other does or looks like. The street is the only place where you can meet as strangers without being bound by social relations and their conventions.

Patrick Healy, an Amsterdam based author of art related articles, describes the binary concept of ‘Recognition versus Strangeness’ especially taking place on the street as an interface of meeting and judging. He describes the work of the artist Saliou Traoré as “reversed anthropology”: In the street reality of the city: " ... its people can get to know each other and understand each other... This getting to know each other is the key-notion of man’s need of recognition… and it takes place through re-cognition, not as repetition but through the inhabitants shared experiences of the public domain of the city…  The artist start with ... comparative performance, registering the difference in organization of public space in Burkina Faso and the Netherlands….  His (T’s )“…recognition of the conditional nature of hospitality, of people, places, spaces and things creates not a new boundary, but a frontier for experience.” [1]

I’m very much interested in how the structure and architecture of  public space contributes or even facilitates the human aim for recognition or alienation. Through photography I observe this human behavior in public spaces and the interface between private and public space.

How does my artistic research relate to the topic of postindustrial urban space in European City?

Photos of Charleroi, 2009

To experience recognition or alienation, first of all people have to feel a wish and dare to express themselves in public. And that brings me to the following questions:

How much public or semi-public space is reserved for personal expressions?

How does the structure of architecture contribute and facilitate the human desire for imagination and expression of personal freedom?

How do people use this "Gestaltungsfreiraum" of the interface between private and public domain, e.g. their front windows or front yards?  Do people use their imagination in that domain?

What do people share on the ‘frontier of experience’ of the streets in de-industrialized cities?

The front window of the private house is the interface of public and private space. As such it displays the owner’s identity in the way it is presented to the public eye. It forms an area for projection, similar to a stage in a theatre. The arranged still lives are representing the roles individuals are playing and how they want to be seen. Passers-by become the audience.   

In 2008, my fascination for the philosophical concept of “Panopticism” as used by Michel Foucault came up. The term “Panopticon” was used both for the famous “freak show’s” allover Europe during the last centuries and also for the special kind of architecture of a prison introduced by Bentheim, in which the situation of the ‘seeing - it - all’ was created.

In 2007, I concentrated on the gaze of the virtual girl Leyla into the front windows of her neighbor’s house. The starting point was the typical Dutch terrace house, the ‘Doorzonhuis’, which has a transparent front so the sun can shine through directly from the front to the back. And so does the gaze. I made the video “Leyla in Doorzonland”, where the slightly voyeuristic character Leyla gets a look in the house of the neighbors.

It struck me that in the Dutch neighborhood, voyeurism is facilitated through the architecture and structure of the street, that the cliché about the open, transparent Dutch society literally is true…

The experience of being watched and heard in those terrace houses by the “own overseer” (and your neighbors too), dominated my experience of space in the Netherlands. There really seems to be a connection between an open democratic society and the structure of public space…

“For Foucault, the asymmetry of seeing-without-being-seen in the Panopticon is the very essence of power. Jeremy Bentham envisioned the Panopticon … to provide complete observation of every prisoner. The Panopticon serves as a laboratory of humans, with data collected and collated through what Foucault termed "the gaze": an inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.”  [5]

The artistic research process ended with this in-situ light-installation “Secret Room”.  The context and location of that room had a strange character: Passing the shabby attic of ‘Schloss Ringenberg’ the visitors of the exhibition suddenly intruded this renaissance style tower room I shaded all the windows, so the viewer couldn’t define his position in the castle anymore. Then I projected video shots of a staged object against the ceiling.

Doing so, I was aiming to alienate the place and to trigger the physical perception of the visitors: I used the special stimulus and appeal of a round room and tried to change the connotations and expectation about that room. I wanted to unsettle the visitors by a situation inspired by the following quote:

 “The faceless prisoners of this space are held in darkness, illuminated only by roving spotlights that prevent them from observing their observers, reinforcing Foucault's idea of a citizen who "is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication." [5]

Is the symbolic concept of  ‘Panopticism’ by Foucault still useful during post-postmodern times? And how does it work in de-industrialized cities? How do other artists react to that?

Rafael Lozano Hemmer implemented the multi media project ‘under scan’: [6]

Passers-by on a city square interacted with the portraits of other people projected within their own shadows on the ground. This work is a good example of how art is facilitated by town councils during the process of new urban branding. It took place in three towns in Great Britain... every town tried to get the spotlights of the world on it's enlightened city square.

The following work by Krzysztof Wodiesko, which deals with re-branding  a monument in public space I like very much because of the humoristic imagination and the technically easy manner of realization. Spreading a rumor about Lenin being spotted in a shopping mall…   

This postcard from the Hartz mountain region shows the timeless way of spreading a myth about a region with the aim to attract more tourists to come and see. That legend of the “Brockengespenst.” is based on an optical phenomena, the projection of one’s own shadow onto a moving bank of fog. This fog zone can be compared with a big screen, on which the projection of the shadow is blown up and because of the rough surface of the fog 3D-images emerge.

That optical illusion feeds the imagination of the hikers to a tremendous extent. Again it is obvious: The human mind wants to be fooled and be fed by fantasies…

At the following place it happened to me too.

Labská bouda, Krkonoše, CZ

During a mountain trip, the sublime dominance and symbolic relevance of the abandoned public building ‘Labska Bouda’ in the Krkonose mountainside of the German-Czech border region struck me. I have explored its changed function: it served as a mountain hut and hotel. This culminated in a fiction story, a series of collages and a slide installation. This work will be re-animated and hopefully completed during this year.

In the Chemnitz - Chomutov region we should built together another “Luftschloss”, this time for real concrete one.

Bibliography

1. Saliou Traoré… “The Zoo of Space - Let me be your dictionary.”, thesis Jan van Eijk-institution, Maastricht, 2006

2. Frank van de Veire, “Als in een donkere spiegel. De kunst in de moderne filosofie”, SUN, 2002

3. Michel Foucault, “The Power of the Eye”, excerpt from "Power/Knowledge", 1974, http://foucoult.info/documents

4. Michel Foucault, , “Discipline, Toezicht en Straf, de Geboorte van de Gevangenis”, Hist.Uitg, Groningen, 1989

5. Phil Lee, “Eye and Gaze” , article, Department of Art History, Winter 2003

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/eyegaze.htm

6. http://www.threecitiescreate.org.uk/_EMDA_Cultural_Quarters/

7. http://www.meteoros.de/glorie/glorie.htm