Video, sound
Duration: 5' 3''
Ed.: 39/100
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
Marcel Odenbach has been working with video since 1976, a pioneer who continues to set the pace of video art today. Characteristic of his oeuvre are collage and montage, techniques that he deploys in a variety of media, from works on paper to film.
What to do on a winter's evening? This is the time of silence and darkness. A close-up shows an ashtray filled with cigarette ends and a hand repeatedly tapping a cigarette into it. On top of this scene Odenbach superimposed a variety of historical footage, including images of the November pogroms of 1938. The only soundtrack is the crackling of flames. The sound forges a link between past and present: is this the fire destroying buildings, furniture and books or is this a cosy fire in a hearth?
We see blurred images of protests spiralling out of control, violent clashes and explosions through the filter of the smoker. The seemingly random shot is deliberately evocative of a home video, the aim being to create a sense of closeness that traditional media channels such as television often lack. Whether or not the person can see the superimposed footage and whether he is contemplative or completely unmoved as he smokes the cigarettes remains unknown. However, the question is how we ourselves consume news and media, via which channels and through which filters.
On the one hand, Odenbach's work can be interpreted not only as an exhortation not to allow the specific events of the Nazi era and other historic events to fall into oblivion but also not to deny the presence of anti-Semitism and racism in our society. On the other, it can also express the powerlessness, distress or emotional blunting and detachment felt by people faced with war and violence, that feature on a daily basis in the media.
Leslie Ospelt
"In my work I want to change the way we see things and thus perhaps to give images back their original meaning."
Marcel Odenbach
Marcel Odenbach – Ach, wie gut, dass niemand weiss, published by Udo Kittelmann, Cologne: König, 1999, p. 66f.
