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Groebel's Ghosts
What do
the following men have in common: Baron Rowton (1838-1903), philanthropist
and private secretary to Benjamin Disraeli, the revolutionary and later dictator
Josef Stalin (1878-1953) and the writers Jack London (1876-1910) and George
Orwell (1903-1950)? Hardly coevals in the strictest sense - an encounter
between them would have been more than improbable, and even if the
self-avowed socialist Orwell condemned "real socialism" of the
Stalinist mould in his novels, there is no record that any of these
protagonists knew of each other's respective spheres of activity.
Nevertheless, their lives do intersect at one point, if one were to imagine a
possible rendezvous in a certain "Tower House" in London's
impoverished east end. Founded by Baron Rowton as a new type of "working
men's hostel" or doss house for homeless workers, Jack London, Stalin
and Orwell, amongst others, each spent a night there. Whereas Stalin,
attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party in
1907, omits the fact of his stay from his memoirs, London and Orwell process
their experiences via literature and journalism; the former in his undercover
reportage The People of the Abyss (1903) about London slums, the latter in
Down and out in Paris and London, published in 1933. Safe from
Demons is the title of Matthias Groebel's latest project, in which he brings
together the various branches of these diverse individuals' lives. And yet
the present hardly seems to be safe from demons, inasmuch as the shadows of
the past - as reported in recent newspaper articles about the building's
future - are repeatedly being invoked. Though like Marx's spectre, they may
serve as a reference to the idea of social justice, which would be thwarted
by the luxury conversion of this long-term derelict building, the naming of
these names from a journalistic point of view is guaranteed to grab people's
attention. Which demons and spectres are conjured up or suppressed is always
notoriously a question of vested interests, the past a permanent invention of
the present. Matthias Groebel likes to trace obscure tales and
handed-down stories in his paintings, videos and artist's books, for example
when he amalgamated photographs from the Golden Chamber of St. Ursula in
Cologne and the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium into
motifs from the dance of death in his exhibition Collective Memories from
2003; or for example in his video Raymond, where he associated freely
available audio material of a professor of child psychology and an interview
with Blackhawk, a colourful, larger-than-life New York figure from the new
media scene, to form a parable about conspiracy theory. Groebel is always
concerned with the question of how stories originate, how fiction and reality
co-mingle and which media and techniques of communication are utilized. In
the case of the Tower House it was a passing reference by a friend whilst out
walking through London that kindled his interest, the initial spark being
delivered in the oldest mode of tradition - oral narration. Groebel resourced
all further material for his artists book Safe from Demons on the net. He
processed all his knowledge about the building and its historical and
contemporary background through this filter, including any possible errors in
tradition and items of dubious veracity. Stories without a money-back
guarantee, so to speak. . In his
book Matthias Groebel transfers only the more recent sources by hand, namely
two newspaper articles in The Guardian and The Observer about the planned conversion
of the house into flats. This seemingly medieval principle of reproducing
texts turns the supposed sequence of old and new media on its head, a
principle that fundamentally characterizes its artistic aim. Thus the
six-part group of pictures, upon which Tower House can be seen, is the
product of numerous medial translations. Captured by a stereo camera, Groebel
chose stills from all the recorded material, processed them on his computer
and transferred them by means of his painting apparatus which he devised
himself, onto the canvas by spraying many transparent layers of acrylic paint
upon one another by means of a computer-guided airbrush gun. The computer
replaces the hand of the artist just as similarly ideas of authenticity and
originality associated with it have long since been abandoned. Of course, it isn't by any means a new
insight that the medium of painting - just like any other medium of pictorial
composition using technical aids - has always been mediated. The process of
distancing, which is associated with the manifestation of the apparatus, is
particularly accentuated in the more recent pictures by Matthias Groebel by
the use of the stereo camera. The stereo camera, which records two almost
identical images in parallel with minor deviations in perspective, does not
organize the pictorial space centrally, but from a number of perspectives. As
Bernd Stiegler commented on stereoscopy, one is "confronted by the
strangeness of another view of the way things are organised. The images do
not seem to be simulacra of reality, but rather backdrops and staffages of a
theatre with depth of field, but without any corporeality, as two-dimensional
figures arranged within the pictorial space".1 They become stages upon
which the individual protagonists, such as two passers by, are able to enact
their performance.
It
is worthy of mention, however, that a coherent image develops at first glance
- despite the double distancing of perception through the use of the stereo
camera and the painting machine, without which such a precise repetition of
the motif would hardly be possible. The almost identical doubling of the
pictorial elements is not immediately apparent, inasmuch as the artist does
not further emphasize the joins. We encounter a familiar pattern here from
the psychology of perception: in spite of all the knowledge about the degree
to which our eye is mediated and there being a permanent distance to reality,
we are nevertheless all too ready to believe the supposed coherence of the
compositions. Matthias
Groebel introduces a further feature to Tower House, namely the element of
time. In this way about one and a half years have passed between the capture
of the images forming the group of pictures on the left and those on the
right. If the left column of pictures shows the desolate and already rundown
building, whose erstwhile function would have remained hidden without
additional information, the right group of pictures evinces further evidence
of decay, such as the bollard leaning in the corner of the entrance. However,
now the building is enclosed in scaffolding, the banner of the property
developer pointing to its future use. Different time levels and perspectives
are superimposed upon one another and it is already possible to discern the
demons of the future. Astrid Wege 1
Bernd Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte der Photographie, (Munich, 2006) 67.
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