For all his enjoyment in soap opera
trash, Rosefeldt's criticism doesn't seem all that far from the cultural
pessimism of a
Theodor W. Adorno or
Max Horkheimer, who, in a tone of general suspicion, wrote in their
Dialectics of Enlightenment of 1947: "Today, culture beats everything
with similarity." Based on his experiences, however, it's precisely this
verdict that Rosefeldt would emphatically contradict. It was only through
television that he learned how much fascination the material can exude,
how many subtleties and nuances can appear in the allegedly identical
stream of banality. At the same time, the variety of form in Rosefeldt's
work is not a mere technical decoration, but a message - entirely in the
sense of McLuhan. This is
why it's not the emptiness of the images that he freezes in
loops and video stills, but rather their concentration: TV in the form of
a pill.
Deej ays work the same way when they
sample magic moments out of otherwise unspectacular songs and, by way of
repetition, make them into entirely new, independent compositions.
>>View of Julian Rosenfeldt: Global Soap from "Juice"
With photographic works such as Juice, Rosefeldt traces this enthusiasm
for the moment even in the most boring and banal activities that hardly
anybody else would watch on TV and that take on unbelievable urgency in
the reworking. He creates pictorial spaces in which the television image
becomes an icon.
Despite this, he doesn't consider himself to be a media artist who uses
television as his working arena: "
Media art, video art, to me that sounds a little like 'ballpoint-pen
writer' - it's a far too restrictive label. I'm not that interested in the
medium I use, but in the system of image production that I seek to
understand." In this sense, the transition from found footage to his own
photographs was organic. The series
Oktoberfest, for instance, which was taken in 1999 (and part of which
was acquired by the Deutsche
Bank Collection), seems at first glance to break with the logic of
television. Instead, the chaotic scenes in beer tents recall the
large-scale photographic works of
Andreas Gursky.
Julian Rosefeldt: Oktoberfest 1999, Sammlung Deutsche Bank
©Julian Rosefeldt
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At the same time, the images take stock of situations in
which everyday life and
ritual become inseparable; in their mixture of
hysteria and uneventfulness, they follow the same structure as News
and Global Soap. "It's a matter of altering what's already known -
the Oktoberfest creates a space for the everyday and for local
folklore, a ritual that repeats itself - and is covered in the news -
each year." In contrast, Rosefeldt was interested in the images' archaic
context: "I had to think of paintings like
Albrecht Altendorfer's
Alexander schlacht; but the photographs Andreas Gursky made at techno
raves always remind me of
battle scenes, too." Where Gursky, however, lets the dancers shine
sublimely as an ecstatic mass in the floodlights of large-scale discos,
Rosefeldt's Oktoberfest remains analytical. The space is dominated
by the architecture of the festival tent; the series doesn't function
through the individual image, but rather through the details, which differ
from photograph to photograph and evince varying degrees of everyday
stylization in spite of all their similarity.
Julian Rosefeldt: from the serie „Asylum“, 2003
©Julian Rosefeldt
After concentrating on the
analysis of images Rosefeldt began making films over the past two years.
In the process,
Asylum came about, a video projection for nine screens that had its
premiere in 2002 in the
Rieck Hall next to the Hamburger
Bahnhof in Berlin and which can be seen this summer at the
Avignon theater festival and the
Biennale in Sao Paulo. This time, Rosefeldt's uneasiness concerning the
news coverage of foreigners provided the project's point of departure.
When it's a matter of representing migration, the images seem the same in
media as fundamentally different as german newspaper
Bild or arte:
foreignness as one big anonymous mass.
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