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The Examinator "From today,
painting is dead," is what the French painter Paul Delaroche is supposed
to have exclaimed when he saw a daguerreotype in 1839. The discovery of
Daguerre (and some contemporaries), that a camera obscura and some chemical
ingredients could be used to record a precise mirror image of reality, appears
to have severely shaken the self-confidence of the artist, at least for a
moment. But despite the shock which Delaroche felt during his encounter with
the new medium of photography, he soon continued his highly successful career
as a painter of portraits and historical scenes. Ever since, the
history of painting has been further shaped by the existence of other processes
for creating images, though these have not had a lethal effect on painting. Even
before it was possible to chemically fix a photographic images, artists such as
Vermeer and Canaletto used the camera obscura as an aid for composing their
paintings.Painting has proven itself to be capable of adapting the actions of
more recent media to its own purposes, to make them visible and comment on
them. In the Sixties, Marshall McLuhan went so far as to state that the content
of every medium was a different medium. His provocative thesis can be plausibly
illustrated in the light of Richard Hamilton's "Just what is it that makes
today's The art of
Matthias Groebel also follows this principle of post-media images, for which
Peter Weibel has coined the term "pittura immedia". It is well-known
that painting conveys an image of reality that is as indirect as cinema and
television images; it is not a transparent window on to the world, but one that
has always been manipulated by subjective filters and technical devices. "Pittura
immedia" stands for an artistic process of formation which runs through
various media and which ends in painting. For Matthias Groebel's pictures
fulfil all the traditional standards of Western panel painting, developed about
700 years ago: a stretcher, canvas, pigments, vertical lines, transportability.
The way in which they differ from classical painting is that they lack the
`hand of the artist`, once the guarantee of the work's authenticity. Rather,
they are the material carriers of several electronic and digital transfers. The
idea of the autonomous artist or scientist whose creativity comes from deep
within has been obsolete ever since the realisation that the new media can
structure and alter our perceptions, thinking and behaviour. Accordingly,
theoreticians such as Luhmann and Levy-Strauss compare themselves with
computers who generate new thoughts using existing data. Television
programmes provide the raw material for Matthias Groebel's works. He chooses
individual images or texts from the film material he has stored and
digitalised, and manipulates these at the computer in various ways that the
viewer may not necessarily recognise. When choosing his pictures, he as far as
possible avoids choosing well-known faces which the viewer might take to be
quotations: there are no stars from TV series in his iconography, nor are there
historical figures. These data are printed out via a device which the artist
himself developed for this purpose: a computer-guided airbrush pistol sprays
several layers of acrylic paint onto a canvas. Matthias Groebel does not
conceal that his paintings originated in the media, but rather further emphasises
it by enlarging the motifs drawn from the digitalised TV pictures to
approximately life size. The two-dimensional mosaic of pixels on the computer
screen loses even more clarity in Groebel's pictures, and is remarkable due to
its "low definition". The lack of sharpness caused by the technology
paradoxically createse an artistic, Pointillist quality not unlike early
pictorial photographs. A generation of art photographers at the turn of the
century attempted to show that a lack of clarity, which could be achieved by
various means, heightened the artistic value of the photograph: the less
differentiated the details, the greater the effect on the viewer. In the
history of the media, lack of sharpness appears to be a constant which was used
by artists chiefly in order to conceal the media aspect of their pictures, and
to emphasise the artistic aspect. Matthias Groebel's works, however, use that
very lack of sharpness to indicate the media origins of the images. This heightening
of the visual properties of the television picture is comparable with the
strategy of Warhol and Lichtenstein, who enlarged the half-tone printing of the
newspaper and comic images they based their works on to the extent where
individual dots became clearly visible to the naked eye. Both television
pictures and comics are two-dimensional and lack precise details; "cool
media", according to MacLuhan's analysis, which demand a particularly
close involvement on the part of the viewer for the very reason that they are
not very precise. The recipient attempts to complete the sketchy data. It is
precisely those breaks and discontinuities of information which heighten his
participation. By locking and
enlarging moving television images, Matthias Groebel achieves a qualitative
leap in one's perception of the image. Using a freeze frame, and selecting a
detail from it, enables new structures which would have remained invisible
during the course of the film to become apparent, similar to a slow-motion shot
which enables one to see movements that were not previously visible. It is
possible to see things that were previously seen unconsciously. At the same time,
the dissolution of the motifs into finely sprayed points and transparents
layers of colour keeps the viewer at a certain distance from the figures,
despite their life size; this is a phenomenon of one's perception that can be
described, as Walter Benjamin does, as "a distance, however close it may
appear to be". Even if one gets closer to the canvas, the eye does not
manage to focus, sharpen the image, see it in more detail or obtain a sense of
depth. Of necessity, voyeuristic impulses come up against a physiological
barrier to the viewer's perceptions, "painted walls", as it says on
one of the paintings. The distance from the viewer is further heightened by the
standardised picture formats, which surround those portrayed like a cell. In
most cases, we see a single person who has been isolated from the context of
the action, his spatial and social surroundings. A large number of the pictures
contain what one might call a commentary, written directly into the image. White Trash, which
is the source of the people in the pictures, is described and defined by terms
such as "Date of Crime", "Glass" and "The whole
sky", much like a fabricated anthropology. At the same time, the poetic
associations of the words transform the proceedings, which have been recorded
as a detail, into a nightmarish, claustrophobic unreality which reminds one of
the films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, and in which the difference
between facts and fiction collapses to a point at which it is no longer
recognisable. The recording and
processing of data on the screen is increasingly becoming the predominant human
experience in post-media society. Benjamin has described the viewer of moving
images as being both quick to react and experienced, and absent-minded. Absent-minded
in that he cannot maintain analytical activities at the same time as keeping
abreast with developments. The pressure to conform to the parameters of the
medium is threatening to cancel one's ability to make critical judgements. The
strength of Matthias Groebel's paintings is that they isolate what one has
unconsciously absorbed into one's consciousness, making it possible to analyse
it. Passivity is changed to activity. When confronted with Matthias Groebel's
paintings, absent-minded viewers of TV images become attentive examinatorss of
images and their own behaviour as viewers. Barbara Hess, 1997 |