ROMANA SCHEFFKNECHT 1982 2013 - romana scheffknecht videos

PG: In your early works, you seem to be interested in
what forms of expression can be extracted from video
using its own intrinsic characteristics. The work Luft-
schutzkeller (Arbeiten über den Krieg, 1991), for example,
is produced from just such a reduction of means,
where you contrast a horizontal with a vertical white bar.
RS: I made the work Luftschutzkeller because at the
time there were still a lot of air-raid bunkers in cellars
around Vienna. I wanted to recreate the air-raid
bunker’s atmosphere on video, with the sound, too,
of course. Here I wanted the feeling that overcomes
you in one of those spaces, to make it understandable
by slowly making it more oppressive, where you start
to ask yourself whether you’ll ever leave again, or not.
Another story relates to the work Das Konzert, com-
pleted in 1982. I was living with a dog in a shared flat
at the time, and played saxophone in a band called
Die Gelbe Zone. The dog always started howling when
I practised at home. So I made that video as a duet
with a howling dog.
Luftschutzkeller, 1991
PG: One of your key early works is Die Börse, die Zeit,
das Geld (1994).
RS: I was in Paris on a grant when the Film Wall Street
by Oliver Stone was in the cinemas in 1987, and the
climate there was different as the really Yuppie years
of squandering had already arrived. I like the film very
much, in particular the idea of tying Eros to the money.
Once people only needed money to buy something to
eat or whatever, and suddenly it‘s redefined as a new
‘medium’. I thought that was interesting. With the prevailing
mood being much the same on the stock market
and for share prices. And the last parentheses here
was time: mortality, things taking their course. And the
work was intended to comprise these elements.
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PG: This work, in particular, has a very reduced
concept.
RS: At that time the first calculators which could be
used to make digital images emerged and with them
the digital aesthetic, also as a metaphor for the
mechanical images of the time. I wanted an idea of
‘cooling down’ here, while charging the whole thing
like a kind of church spectacle. On the soundtrack
the trinity of Stock Market, Time and Money is accompanied
by praying monks from Sri Lanka.
PG: You often also use numbers.
RS: I love numbers. They are worms that never stop
wriggling — I love that image of numbers. The work
Count Down (1998 / 99) was made for the new
millennium, which was anticipated with such hysteria.
I had a random generator run through combinations
for four rows of numbers so different numbers were
created each time.
PG: You have used the title Philosophische Untersuchungen
to cover several works, it’s a recurring motif.
RS: I’m interested in the people who were active and
influential in the 20 th century. So I hung twelve
portraits of philosophers behind one another, looped
and digitally coloured so each one had its own mood.
This series of philosophers runs on a monitor in front
of which there is a small woman with a handbag
who is standing and watching the men flying past her.
I was pursuing the question: How do we recognise
these philosophers and how have they impacted on
the century?
PG: Those philosophers might look like pop stars, but
hardly anyone has ever heard of them, let alone recognises
them. To this extent the question of recognisability
is more a question of a particular kind of knowledge.
From a feminist standpoint I see the statement ‘woman
with handbag looks at the intellectual giants of this
world, to whom she has no access’ as rather too resigned.
She is damned to be a passive observer and not
to adopt any kind of an active role. I don’t know whether
I should read that as a criticism or as a conclusion.
RS: It is not a testimonial but a mood. The 20 th century
was fatal for feminism. Feminism was only able to
spread because there was the Second World War, and
all the men were away from 1938 to 1945. Women then
were granted access to jobs that they had never been
given before.
Sils Maria (Philosophische Untersuchungen), 1994
PG: But how do you play the philosophers into that?
They weren’t exactly the people directly responsible for
the war.
RS: I wanted to produce a thought-preserve with faces
that stood for an idea or a position in the world of the
20 th century, one of the most devastating centuries ever.
In this context I wanted to downgrade the history of
ideas in the 20 th century to superficial TV images. And
the woman is an unknown guest there.
PG: I think it’s interesting that you view the history of
philosophical ideas in a context of the war with such
vehemence.
RS: They are parallel worlds. The ideas on the one side
and war on the other. I don’t have a feminist view of
the world. As feminism doesn’t exist for me. I’ve always
been interested in this strange world of being handicapped
and excluded.
PG: I think that there’s quite a different discourse to
be seen in your work. In contrast to so many wellknown
female artists of this time, like Valie Export or
Birgit Jürgenssen, your work engages with different constellations
of issues: war, trauma, political symbolism —
primeval myths of humanity, so to speak. And, meekly
fulfilling her role as a traditional entity, the woman
apparently belongs there. But beyond the victim status
of the female individual, you take the obsession with
philosophers to extremes, too: when you make a work
about Sils Maria, the place where Friedrich Nietzsche
lived for many years, you show an unspoiled landscape.
Which is suspicious, though.
RS: Sils Maria is presented as an intellectual idyll. I took
the mountain idyll and dissolved it in video colours:
one time it’s pure red, another time it’s poisonous green,
then yellow. I dissolve the idyll and make it toxic with
each image. It’s highly a charged place.
PG: It is striking that you’ve also engaged with a specific
generation of male artists who almost represent
a generation of father figures. There are not only the
philosophers but also a character like Aby Warburg, the
German cultural theorist who became famous for his
idiosyncratic art history collages and to whom you have
devoted an extensive series of works.
RS: I grew up without a father. Not only Aby Warburg,
Marcel Duchamp, too, were not just reference points for
me but for a number of other artists as well, they are
often re-assimilated.
PG: One aspect that we haven’t talked about yet is
theatre, which you still have ties to. As an art form, how
does it flow into your work now?
RS: My favourite idea in the theatre is: everything that
you conceal is doubly visible. And: you really do see
everything. The stage is a space where you can’t hide
anything. The theatre is a parallel universe because it is
a time-preserve. Insofar as you always have a new perspective
on the plays, theatre can be compared to art,
where according to the principle of re-performing plays,
the re-enactment can be seen as a kind of re-performing
of art events. The deep feelings, though, are produced in
the theatre, and that is the danger and probably also the
weak point in my work, that it’s often permeated with
pathos — something that‘s completely forbidden in art.
PG: Pathos is making a comeback in art again through
the backdoor.
RS: Because it’s a No-Go. The viewer should really
have their own thoughts, but you lay the mood-carpet.
That is the perfidious aspect of my works: they limit the
viewer. You don’t only captivate him with images but
also acoustically, with sound. Images form quiet space.
But as soon as there is sound too, you‘re more deeply
involved.
PG: There is a sense of pathos in a number of individual
works, like the Count Down, also with a monumentalisation
of the form over numbers and symbols.
RS: A work like Luftschutzkeller can arouse associations
with death or with music. While in Die Börse, die
Zeit, das Geld it is prayers that constitute the sound,
and that is, of course, manipulative.
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