Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 1/4
It’s dark. We’re watching a functional screen in expectation of a video. The title of the video has already been shown. So where’s the picture?
The monitor lights up briefly with a twitching flash. And goes black again, before we can orient ourselves to what has just been seen. Was anything there at all? It flashes again. This time it looks as if the picture tube is broken or has short-circuited, and that the picture is drowning in a technical defect.
But the device on which the DVD runs doesn’t use a cathode-ray tube, because it is the screen of a computer. The effect is part of the video, the short-circuiting effect of a technical defect in the medium caused by the natural phenomenon of a thunderstorm in which a flash of lightning in a nocturnal landscape is briefly illuminated and only then becomes visible.
And thus are the methods with which Bettina Rave opened her reflections about the conditions of seeing in her early video “Cheimon” (Thunderstorm, 1991) have been briefly outlined. They This briefly outlines the methods Bettina Rave used in her early video “Cheimon” (Thunderstorm, 1991) to address her reflections on the conditions of seeing, which can simultaneously be read as a reflection about on the conditions of art.
What do we see? How do we see? How do we illustrate things? What do we see when we look at an image? What constitutes an image? It is a theme that continues to run like a main thread through the works of this artist, but is perhaps most clearly formulated in her video work.
The (film) material is also an essential subject in “Cheimon,” in which the images are exposed increasingly longer and as a result also become more clearly recognizable – including shock-provoking nocturnal impressions of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, whose white houses made of loam are briefly illuminated in the flash of lightning.
Scratches and dropouts, which develop an effect of fleeting shooting stars on the dark details, but in reality are only material defects, mark the darkness as a kind of image distortion. The images of the film and their absence in the darkness are in continuous alternation, in flux, and are questioned by the demonstrative reference to their being made.
At the same time, the archaic natural experience being represented is associated to nothing less than creation itself: It becomes light. In keeping, the conditions of seeing are not tied to the conditions of art alone, but quite instinctively to the conditions of being.
Irritation and a game with the levels of nature and technology, and image and material, are also the focal points in the video “Bruit Blanc” (1992). It might show grasses swaying in the wind. But we can’t be quite certain, because the moving (film) image, which opens our view onto the phenomenon portrayed (and thereby makes it possible), restricts it at the same time.
It is a distorted picture; blurred, as if shown on an old black-and-white television set that became obsolete long ago. Are we simply dealing with the flickering of a defective screen? Is the impression of swaying grasses or a field of reeds ultimately only subject to one’s own seeing habits, which would immediately associate something objective and real in order to sublimate the purely technical that was determined by perception, however, in the case at hand?
Bettina Rave’s work repeatedly comes up against questions like this, and not just in her video work.
Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 1/4
It’s dark. We’re watching a functional screen in expectation of a video. The title of the video has already been shown. So where’s the picture?
The monitor lights up briefly with a twitching flash. And goes black again, before we can orient ourselves to what has just been seen. Was anything there at all? It flashes again. This time it looks as if the picture tube is broken or has short-circuited, and that the picture is drowning in a technical defect.
But the device on which the DVD runs doesn’t use a cathode-ray tube, because it is the screen of a computer. The effect is part of the video, the short-circuiting effect of a technical defect in the medium caused by the natural phenomenon of a thunderstorm in which a flash of lightning in a nocturnal landscape is briefly illuminated and only then becomes visible.
And thus are the methods with which Bettina Rave opened her reflections about the conditions of seeing in her early video “Cheimon” (Thunderstorm, 1991) have been briefly outlined. They This briefly outlines the methods Bettina Rave used in her early video “Cheimon” (Thunderstorm, 1991) to address her reflections on the conditions of seeing, which can simultaneously be read as a reflection about on the conditions of art.
What do we see? How do we see? How do we illustrate things? What do we see when we look at an image? What constitutes an image? It is a theme that continues to run like a main thread through the works of this artist, but is perhaps most clearly formulated in her video work.
The (film) material is also an essential subject in “Cheimon,” in which the images are exposed increasingly longer and as a result also become more clearly recognizable – including shock-provoking nocturnal impressions of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, whose white houses made of loam are briefly illuminated in the flash of lightning.
Scratches and dropouts, which develop an effect of fleeting shooting stars on the dark details, but in reality are only material defects, mark the darkness as a kind of image distortion. The images of the film and their absence in the darkness are in continuous alternation, in flux, and are questioned by the demonstrative reference to their being made.
At the same time, the archaic natural experience being represented is associated to nothing less than creation itself: It becomes light. In keeping, the conditions of seeing are not tied to the conditions of art alone, but quite instinctively to the conditions of being.
Irritation and a game with the levels of nature and technology, and image and material, are also the focal points in the video “Bruit Blanc” (1992). It might show grasses swaying in the wind. But we can’t be quite certain, because the moving (film) image, which opens our view onto the phenomenon portrayed (and thereby makes it possible), restricts it at the same time.
It is a distorted picture; blurred, as if shown on an old black-and-white television set that became obsolete long ago. Are we simply dealing with the flickering of a defective screen? Is the impression of swaying grasses or a field of reeds ultimately only subject to one’s own seeing habits, which would immediately associate something objective and real in order to sublimate the purely technical that was determined by perception, however, in the case at hand?
Bettina Rave’s work repeatedly comes up against questions like this, and not just in her video work.