Inspired by Henry James’s famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw as well as by Benjamin Britten’s opera version of the same name, Mariele Neudecker’s new model – entitled Stay Forever and Never Come Back – depicts a houseless, homeless setting abandoned to decay. Ruins with blank window openings, missing roofs and collapsed walls as well as the remains of a tree skeleton stretching barrenly skyward define the dismal scenery.
The main building resembles that of a former, now abandoned, brewery in Aldeburgh, England. The work was executed during Mariele Neudecker’s residency there, an opportunity offered exclusively to artists devoted primarily to the visual realization of classical music. Three videos on monitors are positioned at the edges of the architectural sculpture at table height. Landscape scenes filmed by the artist herself, for example the smooth surface of a lake into which a stone falls now and then, are superimposed with sequences from the English horror film The Innocents of 1961 by Jack Clayton. The latter is a film adaptation of the novella by Henry James, in which two innocent orphans are supposedly possessed by evil spirits. In the video, the two figures hazily appear and disappear again. As in the work Everything is Important and Nothing Really Matters at All, much attention has been devoted here to staging the viewer’s gaze: windows, doors and rooms open up numerous perspectives onto the individual video images. Mariele Neudecker used Benjamin Britten’s composition to create a strongly distorted, fragmented soundtrack generously interspersed with moments of ominous silence.
As was already the case in her multipartite room installation on Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, in which music and image are interwoven to striking effect, Mariele Neudecker once again creates a suggestive visual and acoustic framework for the depiction of landscapes of the soul. Whereas in her depictions of nature, the gradual discolouration of the water in the glass cases serves the purposes of atmospheric condensation, here it is the interplay between the emotional power of the music, the cinematic images and the symbolic setting which evokes an imaginary event. In the manner of a “mind map”, the installation provides various pieces of evidence which join to form a richly associative whole, while at the same time permitting no definitive conclusions. By overlapping fiction and reality, the installation also continually points to its own artificial and constructed quality.
In her artistic practise, Mariele Neudecker is consistently concerned with optical and psychological phenomena, i.e. with the shifting of perspectives – an approach clearly exemplified by her mirrored video installation Only the Past. Here the gaze into a puddle, its contours alluded to on the model of a polled tree trunk, takes on the same meaning as the contemplation of passing clouds and icy landscapes – though, surprisingly, from flight perspective.
A metaphor of vision per se are the two glass balls in the work 4.7km = 3 Miles or 2.5 Nautical Miles. Each containing an upside-down model of a lighthouse towering into the clouds, they are reminiscent of a pair of eyes radiating light and at the same time reflecting it. An antithesis is formed by the replicas of two flight recorders, whose contents – the Final Fantasy – are not revealed by their impermeable black casing.
(Text: Angelika Richter)
