Claudia Schmacke Speaks at SLAM
Claudia Schmacke’s lecture took place at the Saint Louis Art Museum on April 3rd, directly preceding the opening of her solo exhibition Currents 103. The beginning of the lecture was more poetry than introduction. Schmacke spoke in a darkened room with her film Umbilicus (2006) playing quietly in the background, and the sound of her clear, German voice mingled with the soft sounds of flowing water in the film. The gurgle and drip of the water was a constant undertone to Schmacke’s voice, as she discussed her fascination with liquids, particularly water, and the multitude of ways in which water is important is life. Her language itself was much like water, flowing from once sentence to another in an ethereal, sensuous manner. She described our life experiences as “seeing the world through water spheres”, and made a connection between the fluidity of water and the constant changes that take place in art. Schmacke’s lecture went on to describe several of her previous artworks, in order to provide the audience with the context for her current exhibition, which opened immediately following the lecture.
Umbilicus itself was more than just a backdrop.
It introduced the audience to Schmacke’s obsession with the forms that water makes when it is taken away from, or introduced to, a certain setting. The piece was created by filming an extreme close-up of the drainage pipe of a fountain over a period of several days. Schmacke later showed a picture of the drainage pipe that also included the whole fountain and showed the pipe to be very small in person, even though almost the entire frame of film was filled by the mouth of the pipe. It was amazing that something so simple could be so varied, both in form and in sound. The water swelled, slid, bulged, gurgled, and almost seemed to crackle at certain moments. Schmacke’s extreme close-up of the tiny pipe showed that the largest, and most interesting, variations can happen in even the smallest places.
Most of her work seemed ephemerally still, and some pieces showed a definite sense of humor. Her piece Billow (2005), in particular, betrayed a sense of humor and seemed to directly reference Marcel Duchamp’s Dada work Fountain (1917). Billow consisted of a urinal filled with yellowish liquid and affixed to a wall that periodically has a small circle on a stick rise out of the liquid and blow bubbles at the viewer. Naturally, when a short video of the installation was show, the audience began to laugh at the absurdity of the image. Schmacke manages to explore the relationship between the artwork and the viewer in manner that is both interesting and amusing.
Schmacke’s work can also seem eerie and otherworldly. Her piece Undine (2004-5) is situated in the middle of the river Lippe, and occurs during the night, when the water is dark. Slowly, florescent green lights appear in the middle of the dark river underneath the water, and a small whirlpool, a “vortex”, as Schmacke termed it, appears in the center of the lights. After a short period of time, the whirlpool disappears, and the lights fade to black once again. The process repeats itself during the course of the night. Schmacke has taken something serene and familiar, a river at night, and turned it into a strange and fantastic experience. Schmacke’s lecture illustrated the way her work takes something familiar- a drain pipe, a urinal, or a river- and turned it into something distinctly different. Her work takes the viewer outside of the realm of their normal, everyday experiences, and invites them to view simple objects in an altogether new light. Her works challenge the viewer to look closer at seemingly mundane objects to try to find the poetry in them. Schmakce’s new installation Time Reel (2009), and her two films Umbilicus (2006) and Dark Matter (2009) are currently on view at the St. Louis Art Museum.
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