Memory of the Future!
An installation by artist Jost Vobeck
The scanner as a symbolic act.
A passage through time.
In a dark box, movable strips hang from the ceiling. These are cover pictures from decades of the biggest German magazine (the „Stern“), cut to strips. They move, touching us as if they were front and back page wrapped around us. This is a tactile stimulus that could make you feel lost time in a symbolic way by presenting former cover stories. Yet, similar to the horrific scenarios we take in from the daily media, we are not really taken by the time which has passed long since and is captured now in the print media. Rather, we are exploring a dark corridor in our subconscious.
In the interior space, you find a picture hanging on the left side behind the strip. It shows Shiva and Sakti in placatory embrace. On the opposite side, you see Mahakala hanging there as a counterpart. He is the epitome of evil powers, abuse and greed. Both pictures belong to the cycle “Augeniale 2008”. Once again, we are faced with a bipolar arrangement in a narrow corridor that has to be passed. At the exit, Vobeck’s Pictorial Turns greet us, emitting an iridescent glow. Welcome to the Cyberspace! They are prints from the digital world.
We all hope for a ray of eternity, an afterglow from the other side of cosmic space. This glance at the mirror, towards the untouched, unfathomable expanse of sky must remain an illusion. The World Wide Web is nothing but foreplay: a game of deception, an attempt at virtual fixation.
“Moona Man!“ (picture title 1976/2010), with all its surprising simplicity, gives us a feel of the complexity that surrounds us and is so typical of Jost Vobeck’s pictorial world.
What we see here is the extension of his work into the virtual space, which could already be felt in the previous pictures. In the polyclages, light is bundled and broken by the cutting edges. These edges stretch like a network over the entire surface of the picture, lending it a defined structure. Now, in the digital picture, they have become a whirr of shining lines. The universe opens up like an illuminated spider’s web. It feels like reaching into the unknown, a reference to the dark matter that surrounds us all. What at first looks like the white snow of electronic interference on a picture is now unfolding into light particles and distant shining dots that appear and withdraw almost instantaneously.
The digital transfer of his artefacts reveals elements that were embedded already in the conceptual composition of the translucent polyclages.
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The view into the open space behind his pictures indicates spherical eternity from which one question leaps forth:
What will remain?
In a self-ironic turn, this question concerns both art in general and Jost Vobeck’s own work. The transcription of the own pictorial language into the digital realm is tantamount to a self-experiment. It focuses on this existential question with digital-artistic and also experimental means. Hence, it is also an ironic play with disappearing, with death, with ultimate, yet unanswered questions.
It is an intelligent, bipolar arrangement in the contrast-ridden context of our digitized world. With visual means, Jost Vobeck reflects on the way in which the new imaging techniques, such as screening and scanning, change the perception of pictures. Vobeck’s Pictorial Turns give an artistic answer to this issue. The digital translucence of his pictures generates also a new vision of the previous work. It makes you understand with your eyes what could be felt intuitively before. Something becomes visible: the hidden creative power.
In this second generation of his pictures, relations of space and time are shifted. His own work is re-contextualized. Jost Vobeck’s authentic pictorial world shows the interconnectedness of the world we live in. In his Pictorial Turns, Vobeck generates subjective pictorial reality at a digitized level with intuitive means: a counter-world in the cyberspace full of intangible beauty.
And yet: “This is because that is!”, as is written on the door to his studio. Q.E.D.
Doris Blank , Berlin, maj 2010 |
Back to Malmö
After 25 years, artist Jost Vobeck returns to Malmö. Three exhibitions were held in that city, the first in cooperation with the Berlin gallery Rudolf Springer, and another one in Oslo.
The last exhibition’s title “Memory of the future!” spans the entire arch, the artistic development as well as the impetus inherent in Vobeck’s work at all times.
When the artist started digitizing his early drawings and paper artefacts changing them with image editing programs on his first Apple computer (128 K, with the Three Star Paradise system) technical options were limited. As multimedia technology evolved, his artistic-digital experiments became increasingly free. His original concept of unfolding new artistic potential on a digital level, capturing the mass media of the 21st century for creative end, has turned into reality.
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