Mannheimer Morgen
Saturday, 28 April 2007
Culture
Photography: The London based artist Liane Lang asks questions about different
forms of aliveness
By our correspondent
Bernadett Gross
Antiques with Extras
It is night time in a Sculpture Cast Collection. A woman’s arms embrace
chest and loin of an antique ‘Germanicus’, a second child, a teenager,
leans on Michelangelo’s ‘Madonna and Child’ and in the arms
of the Greek God Theseus lies acquiescent (or maybe dead?) a young woman in
a summer dress.
Liane Lang has arranged and photographed these scenes in after hour sessions
at the collection of the Royal Academy in London, where the German artist
lives and works.
The result is technically as well as artistically of high quality and very
complex.
The Heidelberger Kunstverein exhibits five large-format photographs and two
smaller objects. The latter reveal that the 33-year old artist is dealing
with animation, the effort to manipulate inanimate objects to make them appear
alive. Through a stereoscopic viewer a woman’s naked legs next to Cupid’s
stone ones, regain their three-dimensionality. And looking at the mirrored
centre of a rotating cylinder, it appears as though a woman’s arms are
stroking a man’s chest. It is a pleasure that this transition from image
to film, from flat surface to spatial illusion can still be retraced. But
these are just secondary considerations.
Essentially Lang shows the interlacing of death and life, of solidity and
decay. On closer inspection the supplementary woman’s hands appear unreal,
the limbs, at first ascribed to a living person, don’t fit together,
here and there are some legs missing, some anatomical incongruities, what
at first appeared so lively suddenly capsizes – and now speaks of decay
and decomposition.
Lang’s figures, with which she supplements and artistically
re-designs casts of young and antique sculptures, are made of wax, latex,
silicon and hair; a hand stretches out in rigour mortis from the Laocoon Group,
others have gnawed finger nails, as though rotted off or nibbled. Out of this
contrast the classical figures emerge young, fresh and full of life. They
are themselves now pushed into the realm of the living, in spite of their
complete artifice, being made of stone, plaster, latex and wax, transformed
further by being presented as a photograph. Nonetheless, as with all good
art, this speaks of life and of death.
Our collective memory of images tells us: Laocoon, Madonna etc are Art. The
levels of perception are so nested, that deception and revelation intertwine,
real and fictional bodies emerge and disappear, spinning a continuous web.
This is artistic self-reflection, posing the question of ones own space within
history. The desire for the old, the beautiful, the everlasting, gains new
strength through the classical aesthetic of the sculptures, the precisely
composed ‘additions’, through the capable use of the materials and
the sharp and exacting realisation into two-dimensionality.
i Heidelberger Kunstverein, Hauptstrasse 97, until 17 June. Tue – Fri 12.00 –19.00, Sat-Sun 11.00-19.00