Annette Urban
Shadows and Other Twins: Drawings, Installations, and Videos by Ulrike Möschel
Dangerously dark birds, which could take off at any second from the window sash; mysteriously concealed or slightly open doors that won’t let you in-the works of art by Ulrike Möschel are richly perturbing, especially through direct experience. In one of her new videos, an unexpectedly dramatic light from the sky erupts into the exhibition space. It is an effective setting for the monstrous, yet lyrical Spider Dance, performed to the subtle sounds of a harp, which break off before the singing begins, only to start all over again from the beginning. The projection area fills an entire corner or one end of a room, and is set up so that the image can expand beyond its boundaries and the adjoining walls, while apparent dead ends open up suggestive vistas. On the other hand, the simple, gabled roof, upon which the oversized creature performs its graceful dance, looks as flat as a stenciled image; at the same time, it evokes a sense of uncertainty, and the viewer wonders if perhaps an object in the room might indeed be interrupting the projector beam. Actually, lights and shadows from transom windows and permanently installed spotlights ought to mar the installation at the Kunstverein Bochum. Yet the artist manages to combine them into a lighting design for the space, so that both take on a deeper, more ambivalent meaning. Instead of filling a hermetically sealed black box with illusionary, illuminated images, the artist has removed one of the window shades, and pointed one of the spots toward the open segment of the window. This emphasizes the material quality of the glass; it becomes a membrane between the inside and the outside, creating a juxtaposition of natural and artificial light, so that, during the day, an invisible signal is transmitted to the outside world. Möschel transforms the otherwise disturbing presence of the lights, creating a deliberate confusion of Scheinschattenwerfern, or Spotlight Shadows: with a pencil, she adds ghostly looking doppelgangers, which do not seem to originate from anywhere in particular, and are divorced from any sort of logic that might be behind the shadowy projections.
In this way, Möschel continues her work with artificial light sources on a variety of levels, using dismantled neon tubes, or else speeding up the flash of parking lights, so that they look like warning lights, converting them on site into sculptural objects or drawings with subtle light and dark contrasts. The window might also be regarded as yet another key motif here. She instrumentalizes it in both her architectural interventions and images, not only as a source of light, but also to open up the wall, as well, so that, at night, building façades transform into countless projection screens or fields of light, which seem to hover in the darkness. At other times, the architecture becomes a mere backdrop, when the blue of the sky continues, paradoxically and without interruption, into the windows. Correspondingly, many of the drawings are limited to simple outlines. These kinds of silhouettes translate easily into reality, as do the Schattenvögel (Shadow Birds) in the window of the Künstlerverein Malkasten in Düsseldorf. These birds have apparently taken up a place among the budding plants, while, at the same time, they transform the actual view of the wintry garden into a picture.
It is not simply a shadow that makes this snowy landscape and its birds look like a derivation, especially because remarkably similar birds appear again and again in many of the artist’s other drawings. Although, generally, Möschel takes her drawings from life, this particular one is of a bird on a thin branch. It is a modest, marginal motif from one of Pieter Brueghel’s famous winter landscapes, and it makes the other birds look like shadowy doubles and revenants. In this particular image, the motif is not simply robbed of its narrative context, but is literally uprooted. This kind of perspective-a view from above the ground, looking upward-takes in treetops, streetlights, or roofs, and is also characteristic for the Storchenfilm (Stork Film) and the Spinnentanz (Spider Dance), in which the insect seems to rhythmically strum the strings of a heavenly harp. This is more than just a connection between a picturesque detail from a landscape and a secondary urban nature, where animals make their homes high up above the houses, on antennas, electric poles, or streetlights. As soon as branches, antennas, streetlamps, and tree trunks are eccentrically shifted to the periphery, so that they are face to face-mirroring each other, either in the newer drawings as a whole, or in just a single drawing-then all of these things are connected by an occasionally one-legged sense of instability. This is the theme Möschel works on in her sculptures, in her unsteady slides, see-saws, ladders, or crutches.
All of the most recent examples of her work allude to the ways that Möschel goes beyond superficial deception to blur the differences between three-dimensional installation and drawing, even though it seems at first as if her architectural interventions, groups of objects comprising three-dimensional installations, and small, figurative drawings have little in common. The examples outlined, however, make us think that these groups of works not only parallel each other in terms of motifs and themes, but that they also deal with the uncertain status of reality. Shadow plays, double entities, and inversions of space tip the installations in the direction of drawing, and move the drawings toward installation. Accordingly, the floor plan for an apartment is concealed behind what seems, at first glance, to be an abstract drawing. A recent chalk drawing on furniture enamel features a house that consists of little more than a shell made of four adjoining façades, as if it were just one of the cardboard models Möschel has used in her installations. Windows are inky blue, or, in the black series, white, and therefore strangely opaque, while things dissolve into mere contours, as if they were straightforward spatial coordinates. They do not expand the space so much as they cage it in-something that is reflected in the motifs of barbed wire, play pens, or the window struts of a cloister cell.
Besides windows, whose bars or blinds block the gaze, doors are another important connection between spaces. Instead of providing access, though, they explore possible ways of escaping, or else they capitulate in the face of situations from which there is no escape. An installation from 2007 featured a Schwarze Tür, or Black Door. From out behind this door,the shimmer of shattered, greenish glass magically drew attention to itself, contrasting with the clean atmosphere of the show, until the viewer realized that the door was not promising entry into a world beyond the white cube, but was merely a deceptive blind, against which the dangerous glass had splintered and exploded. Even though it was tangible, it was not an element in the space, just as the scarified twin door-which Möschel turned into a second, simulated, inverted emergency exit-was not, either. By outdoing the inconspicuousness of the original door, it became an ironic commentary, and not only on the presence of this kind of ordinary infrastructure in an auratic exhibition space. The carved door equated the required emergency exit with the urgent desire to break out of the hermetic, subterranean art space, yet it only misled anyone who might have been alarmed, by negating any thought of some sort of space outside.
Ulrike Möschel´s drawings are contrastingly solid, almost objects themselves. This is due to their mostly monochromatic, unified grounding, which is either completely opaque, or else a wash; this kind of grounding works in favor of the inversion of figure/ground and positive/negative. For her installations, Möschel uses the same colors to coat the things or objects in a room that we normally do not notice much. Generally, she does not use art supplies, as much as she uses house-painting supplies or the palette of the cosmetics industry. She prefers furniture enamel and fingernail polish, as well as metallic mixtures that create a protective, defensive skin, especially encapsulating previously deformed objects. Analogous to the drawings, the artist also employs drawing instruments on black enameled walls, chalking in another door next to the real one, as if drawing on a blackboard. In turn, these lines can deepen into sculptural carvings that almost seem to inflict physical injury on the smoothly polished surface of the wall. Like a palimpsest, the layers of the wall-plaster, insulation, etc.-are exposed, while, conversely, wallpaper serves as drawing paper.
Ultimately, the works on paper-texts, as well as drawings-are hung, without frames, in direct relation to the wall, or to niches and angles in the space. They have been completely disassociated from the contrasting intimacy of the sketchbook. The textual works, densely packed together, like a second wall, are not simply created by writing. Rather, the words on sheets resembling shields or panels do not cover a neutral white ground, but a resistant one. Thus, Möschel’s drawing and writing-often done with chalk, charcoal, or ink-can rapidly blur, or else seem as if they can be easily erased or wiped away again. In many cases, they are words that stick in one’s mind, or else repetitions of hearsay that might be better left unsaid. The strange and the familiar have settled as sediments inside internal voices, which then push outward again in awkward, sometimes crowded letters, though they only take on a tentative form: latent images of latent voice. Just as indirectly expressed is the Minnesang, which we are not quite allowed to hear in the Spinnentanz video: The Ungehörten Worte, or “unheard words,” sung to the unattainable lover are engraved in the wall of the exhibition space, in back of the projection. The futility of speech, and of love, is thus solidified in text. As art, this inscription-because it preserves the memory of love-can claim durability and validity for itself, even if the ruined monument, with the plaster from the injured wall lying there, bears witness to the pain of eating one’s heart out.
Bochum, 2010
Shadows and Other Twins: Drawings, Installations, and Videos by Ulrike Möschel
Dangerously dark birds, which could take off at any second from the window sash; mysteriously concealed or slightly open doors that won’t let you in-the works of art by Ulrike Möschel are richly perturbing, especially through direct experience. In one of her new videos, an unexpectedly dramatic light from the sky erupts into the exhibition space. It is an effective setting for the monstrous, yet lyrical Spider Dance, performed to the subtle sounds of a harp, which break off before the singing begins, only to start all over again from the beginning. The projection area fills an entire corner or one end of a room, and is set up so that the image can expand beyond its boundaries and the adjoining walls, while apparent dead ends open up suggestive vistas. On the other hand, the simple, gabled roof, upon which the oversized creature performs its graceful dance, looks as flat as a stenciled image; at the same time, it evokes a sense of uncertainty, and the viewer wonders if perhaps an object in the room might indeed be interrupting the projector beam. Actually, lights and shadows from transom windows and permanently installed spotlights ought to mar the installation at the Kunstverein Bochum. Yet the artist manages to combine them into a lighting design for the space, so that both take on a deeper, more ambivalent meaning. Instead of filling a hermetically sealed black box with illusionary, illuminated images, the artist has removed one of the window shades, and pointed one of the spots toward the open segment of the window. This emphasizes the material quality of the glass; it becomes a membrane between the inside and the outside, creating a juxtaposition of natural and artificial light, so that, during the day, an invisible signal is transmitted to the outside world. Möschel transforms the otherwise disturbing presence of the lights, creating a deliberate confusion of Scheinschattenwerfern, or Spotlight Shadows: with a pencil, she adds ghostly looking doppelgangers, which do not seem to originate from anywhere in particular, and are divorced from any sort of logic that might be behind the shadowy projections.
In this way, Möschel continues her work with artificial light sources on a variety of levels, using dismantled neon tubes, or else speeding up the flash of parking lights, so that they look like warning lights, converting them on site into sculptural objects or drawings with subtle light and dark contrasts. The window might also be regarded as yet another key motif here. She instrumentalizes it in both her architectural interventions and images, not only as a source of light, but also to open up the wall, as well, so that, at night, building façades transform into countless projection screens or fields of light, which seem to hover in the darkness. At other times, the architecture becomes a mere backdrop, when the blue of the sky continues, paradoxically and without interruption, into the windows. Correspondingly, many of the drawings are limited to simple outlines. These kinds of silhouettes translate easily into reality, as do the Schattenvögel (Shadow Birds) in the window of the Künstlerverein Malkasten in Düsseldorf. These birds have apparently taken up a place among the budding plants, while, at the same time, they transform the actual view of the wintry garden into a picture.
It is not simply a shadow that makes this snowy landscape and its birds look like a derivation, especially because remarkably similar birds appear again and again in many of the artist’s other drawings. Although, generally, Möschel takes her drawings from life, this particular one is of a bird on a thin branch. It is a modest, marginal motif from one of Pieter Brueghel’s famous winter landscapes, and it makes the other birds look like shadowy doubles and revenants. In this particular image, the motif is not simply robbed of its narrative context, but is literally uprooted. This kind of perspective-a view from above the ground, looking upward-takes in treetops, streetlights, or roofs, and is also characteristic for the Storchenfilm (Stork Film) and the Spinnentanz (Spider Dance), in which the insect seems to rhythmically strum the strings of a heavenly harp. This is more than just a connection between a picturesque detail from a landscape and a secondary urban nature, where animals make their homes high up above the houses, on antennas, electric poles, or streetlights. As soon as branches, antennas, streetlamps, and tree trunks are eccentrically shifted to the periphery, so that they are face to face-mirroring each other, either in the newer drawings as a whole, or in just a single drawing-then all of these things are connected by an occasionally one-legged sense of instability. This is the theme Möschel works on in her sculptures, in her unsteady slides, see-saws, ladders, or crutches.
All of the most recent examples of her work allude to the ways that Möschel goes beyond superficial deception to blur the differences between three-dimensional installation and drawing, even though it seems at first as if her architectural interventions, groups of objects comprising three-dimensional installations, and small, figurative drawings have little in common. The examples outlined, however, make us think that these groups of works not only parallel each other in terms of motifs and themes, but that they also deal with the uncertain status of reality. Shadow plays, double entities, and inversions of space tip the installations in the direction of drawing, and move the drawings toward installation. Accordingly, the floor plan for an apartment is concealed behind what seems, at first glance, to be an abstract drawing. A recent chalk drawing on furniture enamel features a house that consists of little more than a shell made of four adjoining façades, as if it were just one of the cardboard models Möschel has used in her installations. Windows are inky blue, or, in the black series, white, and therefore strangely opaque, while things dissolve into mere contours, as if they were straightforward spatial coordinates. They do not expand the space so much as they cage it in-something that is reflected in the motifs of barbed wire, play pens, or the window struts of a cloister cell.
Besides windows, whose bars or blinds block the gaze, doors are another important connection between spaces. Instead of providing access, though, they explore possible ways of escaping, or else they capitulate in the face of situations from which there is no escape. An installation from 2007 featured a Schwarze Tür, or Black Door. From out behind this door,the shimmer of shattered, greenish glass magically drew attention to itself, contrasting with the clean atmosphere of the show, until the viewer realized that the door was not promising entry into a world beyond the white cube, but was merely a deceptive blind, against which the dangerous glass had splintered and exploded. Even though it was tangible, it was not an element in the space, just as the scarified twin door-which Möschel turned into a second, simulated, inverted emergency exit-was not, either. By outdoing the inconspicuousness of the original door, it became an ironic commentary, and not only on the presence of this kind of ordinary infrastructure in an auratic exhibition space. The carved door equated the required emergency exit with the urgent desire to break out of the hermetic, subterranean art space, yet it only misled anyone who might have been alarmed, by negating any thought of some sort of space outside.
Ulrike Möschel´s drawings are contrastingly solid, almost objects themselves. This is due to their mostly monochromatic, unified grounding, which is either completely opaque, or else a wash; this kind of grounding works in favor of the inversion of figure/ground and positive/negative. For her installations, Möschel uses the same colors to coat the things or objects in a room that we normally do not notice much. Generally, she does not use art supplies, as much as she uses house-painting supplies or the palette of the cosmetics industry. She prefers furniture enamel and fingernail polish, as well as metallic mixtures that create a protective, defensive skin, especially encapsulating previously deformed objects. Analogous to the drawings, the artist also employs drawing instruments on black enameled walls, chalking in another door next to the real one, as if drawing on a blackboard. In turn, these lines can deepen into sculptural carvings that almost seem to inflict physical injury on the smoothly polished surface of the wall. Like a palimpsest, the layers of the wall-plaster, insulation, etc.-are exposed, while, conversely, wallpaper serves as drawing paper.
Ultimately, the works on paper-texts, as well as drawings-are hung, without frames, in direct relation to the wall, or to niches and angles in the space. They have been completely disassociated from the contrasting intimacy of the sketchbook. The textual works, densely packed together, like a second wall, are not simply created by writing. Rather, the words on sheets resembling shields or panels do not cover a neutral white ground, but a resistant one. Thus, Möschel’s drawing and writing-often done with chalk, charcoal, or ink-can rapidly blur, or else seem as if they can be easily erased or wiped away again. In many cases, they are words that stick in one’s mind, or else repetitions of hearsay that might be better left unsaid. The strange and the familiar have settled as sediments inside internal voices, which then push outward again in awkward, sometimes crowded letters, though they only take on a tentative form: latent images of latent voice. Just as indirectly expressed is the Minnesang, which we are not quite allowed to hear in the Spinnentanz video: The Ungehörten Worte, or “unheard words,” sung to the unattainable lover are engraved in the wall of the exhibition space, in back of the projection. The futility of speech, and of love, is thus solidified in text. As art, this inscription-because it preserves the memory of love-can claim durability and validity for itself, even if the ruined monument, with the plaster from the injured wall lying there, bears witness to the pain of eating one’s heart out.
Bochum, 2010