peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
Wiebke Maria Wachmann (English Version).
W(h)itness.
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White
light felt as an emanation - not only as illuminated by external means. Like
Monet’s ‘Grainstacks’ series where (a red) light
appears as an internal glow. As if leaking from a store of
some kind of energy, releasing its own light. The uncanny glow of Monet’s
‘Grainstacks’ are illustrating their function as a
bulwark against social entropy (as a storage of the sun’s light for the
survival of the human, leaking out as a red glow). Wachmann’s
white spaces also serve as a survival, as a reminder of the ideal in our sense
of space; space with awe, or ‘place’ with its sense of value over and above the
everyday – or perhaps as part of the everyday, now forgotten, in an entropy not
of society but of the mind (as a storage of the ideal or transfigured value
that may be embedded in them, leaking out as a white aura). If the latter case
reminds us the viewer of this value, it should further prompt the thought that
we ourselves (as humans) are the source of such bestowals of value in the world
– and that maybe we need to confer it more often. More often to transfigure the
actuality around us…
Within
the ambit of what has just been said we may further distinguish two kinds of
sacred, or, to use another angle of approach, two aspects of the call to the
sublime (two manners of appeal to other times, other spaces). The first group
of Wachmann’s installations invokes the sacred
proper, creating a quasi-religious space, or place (if we take ‘place’ as not
only a special space, but one with a correspondingly special time, or as a
reference to the outside of time). In the whiteness of the room, the wood, the
birch trunks (and here we are reminded of the sacred spaces of Tarkovsky’s films) we bear witness to the invocation of a
Sacred Grove. Nature as place. As
room. Whose room? Another’s. Both of an-Other
and ours… Personification; projection of ourselves as
supernatural inhabitant. Our Other within (not the unconscious, but the
sense of self as sublime), always mysterious, other-worldly, apart of others,
made out of otherness (a prior language and culture) – abstracted, personified
spirit. Our home. As it could be… in
an ideal sense.
The
second group of installations evince a more
technological form of the sacred. Objects are put into question by technology;
as, for example, in case of the table and mirror installation, “fall”.
Infinity, of course, is an aspect of the mathematical sublime. A quantitative
inspired vertigo challenges assumptions about reality. A sense of putting into
question is also found in the replication of the self in the infinite sequence
that results from participation in the artwork (a kind of ritual which ‘shakes’
the self – in the manner of all kinds of sublime-type rituality). Both freezing
and multiplying the self in a visual gesture both suggestive of the mass
reproductions of consumer society and yet also using the uncanny aspect of
repetition to highlight the visual and fragmentary nature of the self (the
repetition denies the confirmatory form of recognition conveyed by a single
still image…). Nevertheless, like all ritual, an experience we return from
re-confirmed, if (or because) slightly shaken.
White nights. Luminous Globe. Artificial Moon. A ‘Transfigured Night’ courtesy of the technological sublime.
All is transformed by the new ‘moon’; a new space (a new time); all is
transformed by, what is after all, a human construction. A utopian or cleansed,
sacred or transfigured space (time) is suggested by Wachmann’s
art. Reunification, if only on the level of the ideal or
illusory, of the severed halves of our sense of wonder. And the promise
held out by their rediscovery as a permanent patina in the realm of the
everyday.
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Click here to see more of Wachmann’s installations.
Copyright
Peter Nesteruk, 2008