English:
Introductory speech held by Jette Rudolph, art historian, in Berlin on October 24th 2000, 19.00 at the opening of the architectural-enhancement-program in the Gallery of the Mathematical Faculty, Technical University, Berlin:
Tablature by Aurore Reinicke
Ladies and Gentlemen!
This evening marks the opening of the architectural-enhancement-program Tablature by the artist Aurore Reinicke at the Gallery of the Math Faculty in Berlin’s Technical University.
Tablature is already the third installation project conceived and executed by the French-born artist, who has been living and working in Berlin for one year now. Fruitful cooperation with the Michael Schneider Gallery in Bonn led to the realization of two architectural-enhancement-programs in Bonn, one of which even found a purchaser. And as we speak, Aurore Reinicke has already received yet another offer to temporarily enhance an attractive glass façade.
The project’s title – Tablature – is a musicological term used to refer to the written transcription of a real-life sound happening. Removed and abstracted from their original context, these notation systems can be rephrased and formed into independent visual domains, so that the differentiation between the experience of music and its notation as well as its interpretation on the part of musicologists can ultimately lead to a new discussion on signs and references, notation and non-notation as set out in the theories on semiotics formulated by Charles S. Peirce and Nelson Goodman.
Within the framework of the project “Tablature,” Aurore Reinicke chose a motif that has become a landmark of the contemporary urban environment: the architecture of the Sony Center on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and its reflections in the surrounding buildings. Based on expressly deconstructivist methods, the limitless experience of architecture is made manifest through the application of variously colored and cut-out foils that uncover and display the hidden structures of the Sony Center’s construction. Their application onto the glass façade of the Technical University’s Math Faculty’s and, by extension, to the panorama in front of it with its seasonally changing garden, hermetic concrete buildings, and decorative Art Nouveau villas, and also to the colorful interior of the library itself brings together what is now popularly referred to the “old” and the “new” center of Berlin: the Potsdamer Platz and the Ernst Retuer Platz, “East and West” in direct communication with one another and in search of points of contact.
Deconstruction provides Aurore Reinicke with a methodology enabling her to develop a creative strategy for a whole variety of images that have taken the form not only of installations but also been visualized as photo-collages, such as the edition of “Twin Images “ (2000), digital C-prints of the series entitled “Red Structured Landscapes” (1998) and “Waves,” (1998) as well as in objects such as the “The Non-livable House” (1994). This exhibition here in the Gallery of the Technical University’s Mathematical Library shows selected works by the artist that combine to provide an overview of her complex oeuvre. The conspicuous experimentation with inter-medial and interdisciplinary approaches imbues the artist with the aura of a peregrinator between realms, unwilling to let herself be tied down to one medium. This abstract approach allows Aurore Reinicke to analyze the general structures of human perception and the way in which we subsume the diversity of visual impressions that shape everyday life in metropolises such as Paris, New York, Tel Aviv or Berlin—all places in which Aurore Reinicke has lived.
Architecture and Decontruction
Aurore Reinicke’s architectural-enhancement-project achieves a remarkably large-scale cross-linkage between painting, concept, and installation, but her point of departure is architecture.
Reflections in the glass façades of the Sony Center at the Potsdamer Platz provided the main motif. Architectural structures in the surrounding buildings, such as the bright red cornices on an office building, or the alternating ribs and tarpaulins of the roof, reflect and repeat themselves in the impressive, facetted glass walls. The wall of windows in the Mathematical Faculty’s library and their panoramic view provided an ideal site to make the elements of architectural construction come alive at a visual level. On the other hand, the variety of window sizes and frames, as well as the highly specific interior and exterior, the inside and outside, imposed their own rhythm and dynamics on the artist’s work.
She decided to deal with the architecture using a deconstructive approach. Architecture can always be observed from a variety of standpoints, is always perceived in differing contexts (an enduring theme in the work of English sculptress Rachel Whiteread). The “father” of deconstructivism, the French philosopher and phenomenologist Jacques Derrida (born 1933 in Algeria) has always been fascinated by the perception of architecture. So when “deconstruction” and “postmodern” began to assert themselves, architecture and philosophy were two of the first disciplines to secede from a hermetically material interpretation and dissolve into conceptual and seemingly limitless structures.
In line with these developments, the artist does not attempt a direct representation of her object, the Potsdamer Platz. She is drawn instead to the visualization of an almost virtual, intangible architecture mirrored in glass. The experience of space is revealed as an illusion. In this manner, Aurore Reinicke succeeds in playing with our perceptions of the world around us and its associative structures: colors, forms, and surfaces.
Discourse of the Intermediate
The artist’s chief problem was finding a nexus between the various architectures, their configuration, and their cultural significance. The pivotal hub for a solution seemed to lie in the choice of medium.
So the artist began to design a system of signs representing the individual elements prevalent in her motif. The signs were transferred onto transparent, self-adhesive foil that was colored and applied to the windows, creating an autonomous interplay within a contiguous mask. The variously colored, elongated surfaces refer to the tarpaulins on the roof of the Sony Center complex, whilst the light and dark gray lines denote supports, stanchions, or the central cross-over points. However, the on-site installation process itself subjected these elements to yet another transformation. In order to encourage communication between the windows themselves, between the interior and exterior of the spaces involved as well as between the two architectural sites it became necessary to identify possible correspondences. Aurore Reinicke found them in the movement of the tree branches in the garden of the Technical University, to which she replied with parallel movements delineated on a group of highly transparent strips of red and green adhesive foil. At the same time, these strips of color reiterate motifs from the interior of the library building itself, such as the red banisters that ascend from the book stacks to the reading room. The colors blue and yellow, a feature of the library’s radiators and doors, are also repeated on the colored strips of foil – just some of the many constructional elements that also include colored glass bricks and delicate blind cords.
Observers making their way through the installation are confronted with a series of impressions. But the appearance of sequence is temporary, unstable, dependent upon factors such as light and movement. The self-adhesive foils applied to the windows are the central eye-catchers, but these also change their character subject to the time of day and the season – an effect that further influences the observer’s perception of space. Sometimes the light shines through the foil, emphasizing the exchange between window configuration and exterior. In the opaque evening light, on the other hand, the library appears hermetically sealed, underscoring the correspondence with the interior. Using the adhesive strips, the artist has installed a network of fragmented architectural elements in the foreign environment of the library. It is a highly complex system of references between aesthetically configured structures and their significance, formulated within a new “intermediate” context where it functions as a communications medium between the interior and exterior, and also between the architectures of east and west. Such a referential system enables new concatenations and encourages new associations and the development of images-in-space such as those captured in the photo-collages under the title “Twin Images.”
The artist’s path has taken her beyond the customary level of medial self-reflection, allowing her to access inter-medial references between painting, concept, and installation whilst simultaneously impinging upon those interdisciplinary references between art, architecture, and configuration that have become a staple of the younger contemporary art scene (Franz Ackermann, Damien Hirst etc.).
Fragmenting and Disturbing the View
Aurore Reinicke chose this topic, this content, this procedure. She has chosen to deconstruct architecture until it becomes unrecognizable. Why?
My first impression of the project was that of a highly aesthetic entity, an abstract ornament. The artist’s use of color on the foil that ran horizontally around the library’s panorama window felt like an infinite loop. Its division into individual segments on the basis of color concentration and form evoked rhythm and movement in the observer’s eye. However, this rhythm was constantly being disturbed by outer factors typical of everyday habits of urban perception. Instead of looking out over the wide spaces of romantic landscapes, our view is curtailed by bare house walls, blinking advertisements and rotating slogans, or traversed by pedestrians and cars. “Medialized perception” (Wolfgang Welsch) is the product of sampling, cutting, and reproducing images and image details: it’s a term that gives a name to a new way of seeing.
Aurore Reinicke’s aim in “Tablature” is to provoke and manifest such visual irritations as characteristic of contemporary trends in perception. It is, after all, the dynamism of movement that creates the possibility of “organizing and transcending fields of vision” as well as enabling a “global extension of these fields of vision.” Visitors to the exhibition as well as library users are either caught within the changing light conditions and network of colored foils and surfaces or encouraged to pursue the visible traces of architecture and explore their own associative images in space.
There can be no doubt that the artist Aurore Reinicke’s architectural-enhancement-project “Tablature” works at a confrontational level: spatially, visually, and also politically. On the other hand, an active engagement with the installation, scheduled to remain in situ for six months, is a thought-provoking challenge.
Extract from Berlin City Brochure
Open Night at the Museums
January 27th, 2001
Route 3
Gallery of the Math Faculty’s Library
Technical University Berlin
Tablature Architectural-Enhancement-Program
French artist Aurore Reinicke has overlaid the concrete practicality of the Mathemetical Building with transparent, self-adhesive foils, painted with various forms and in various colors and attached to the wide windows of the building’s library where it breaks the view from the inside outwards in multiform refractions. Digital-C-Prints, drawings, photomontages, and objects created by the artist are also on show.