Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 4/4
The naked female body has been instrumentalized as an advertising medium, robbed of its enchantment, and is ubiquitous in our collective perception; it is an object of art, and similarly the focus of a man’s gaze. In this provocative, but discreet video, it claims back its secrets and holds its ground against any attempts at colonization.
The subsequent work “flow” (1998) continues this type of reconquest. At first we see reflections of water and light, which soon begin to be reflected in fragments of a body. At the beginning the film has the look of ultrasound recordings, which show an embryo in amniotic fluid. However, it is a fully-grown woman’s body shown swimming that an old Super 8 underwater camera has filmed.
Light reflections, movements and scratches on the film get mixed into a digital impressionism all its own, which ultimately reproduces and transports the physical experience of swimming in a lake, warmed by the summer sun (in a nearly palpable experience for the video’s viewers).
Like the body that seems to meld with the water and the natural experience, the means with which the experience is made visible and is reproduced also merge together. Thus, when watching this video, the work bears witness to how strongly this physical effect is owed to the precise observation and reflection of the artistic means employed.
In her video “en plein air” Bettina Rave has paid her respects to one of the discoverers of the dialectic of motif and material, the analyst of light and master of visual effects Claude Monet (while winkingly casting herself in the line of his descendants). Before we even see an image, voices can be heard in her video. Then the title “en plein air” appears, which translates to “in the open air” in English.
However, the sound originates from the closed interior spaces of Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie, which hosted the large Monet exhibition “Effets de Soleil – Felder im Frühling” in 2006.
Focusing on Monet’s painting “Felder im Frühling” (Fields in Spring), acquired by the Staatsgalerie one hundred years before, and based on this artist’s outdoor painting, the show was dedicated to the investigation of Monet’s painting technique – the method behind how a lucid interplay of color and spatial compositions made it possible for a viewer at that time to experience these paintings as an ecstatically-felt natural experience, when in truth it was nothing more than an ecstatic art experience.
In Bettina Rave’s Monet video, voices and recorded sound from the Stuttgart exhibition space are confronted with greenish-yellow, flickering images; digitally-altered film recordings of trees and the sky that appear to be reflected in water. Monet’s technique – applied to paintings made of colors and shapes that first seem to come together in the eye of the beholder – is reproduced here with digital means in a highly suggestive way.
And if on the soundtrack to the absent “real” Monet paintings we can hear the visitors to Stuttgart’s Monet exhibition murmuring and arguing, Bettina Rave’s colorful concert is at some level like the roaring of the art market and Monet’s reception history rolled up into one. It has long since swallowed up the revolutionary aspects of Monet’s visual inventions, while allowing the artist to become a postcard and marketing icon.
Even this sad state of affairs that the work conjures up through time and space becomes clearly perceptible. And thus, Bettina Rave’s paintings and videos are also always comments on the conditions of art itself.
Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 4/4
The naked female body has been instrumentalized as an advertising medium, robbed of its enchantment, and is ubiquitous in our collective perception; it is an object of art, and similarly the focus of a man’s gaze. In this provocative, but discreet video, it claims back its secrets and holds its ground against any attempts at colonization.
The subsequent work “flow” (1998) continues this type of reconquest. At first we see reflections of water and light, which soon begin to be reflected in fragments of a body. At the beginning the film has the look of ultrasound recordings, which show an embryo in amniotic fluid. However, it is a fully-grown woman’s body shown swimming that an old Super 8 underwater camera has filmed.
Light reflections, movements and scratches on the film get mixed into a digital impressionism all its own, which ultimately reproduces and transports the physical experience of swimming in a lake, warmed by the summer sun (in a nearly palpable experience for the video’s viewers).
Like the body that seems to meld with the water and the natural experience, the means with which the experience is made visible and is reproduced also merge together. Thus, when watching this video, the work bears witness to how strongly this physical effect is owed to the precise observation and reflection of the artistic means employed.
In her video “en plein air” Bettina Rave has paid her respects to one of the discoverers of the dialectic of motif and material, the analyst of light and master of visual effects Claude Monet (while winkingly casting herself in the line of his descendants). Before we even see an image, voices can be heard in her video. Then the title “en plein air” appears, which translates to “in the open air” in English.
However, the sound originates from the closed interior spaces of Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie, which hosted the large Monet exhibition “Effets de Soleil – Felder im Frühling” in 2006.
Focusing on Monet’s painting “Felder im Frühling” (Fields in Spring), acquired by the Staatsgalerie one hundred years before, and based on this artist’s outdoor painting, the show was dedicated to the investigation of Monet’s painting technique – the method behind how a lucid interplay of color and spatial compositions made it possible for a viewer at that time to experience these paintings as an ecstatically-felt natural experience, when in truth it was nothing more than an ecstatic art experience.
In Bettina Rave’s Monet video, voices and recorded sound from the Stuttgart exhibition space are confronted with greenish-yellow, flickering images; digitally-altered film recordings of trees and the sky that appear to be reflected in water. Monet’s technique – applied to paintings made of colors and shapes that first seem to come together in the eye of the beholder – is reproduced here with digital means in a highly suggestive way.
And if on the soundtrack to the absent “real” Monet paintings we can hear the visitors to Stuttgart’s Monet exhibition murmuring and arguing, Bettina Rave’s colorful concert is at some level like the roaring of the art market and Monet’s reception history rolled up into one. It has long since swallowed up the revolutionary aspects of Monet’s visual inventions, while allowing the artist to become a postcard and marketing icon.
Even this sad state of affairs that the work conjures up through time and space becomes clearly perceptible. And thus, Bettina Rave’s paintings and videos are also always comments on the conditions of art itself.