|
Ulrike Ottinger
Image Archive
Photographs 1970-2005
|
Introduction |
Ulrike Ottinger came to filmmaking in the early seventies via a career
in the visual arts (painting, works on paper, photography, performance).
But she took her first photograph at the age of nine, on a canal boat
in Amsterdam (two Indian gentlemen, one in a trench coat, the other
one wearing a turban with a well-tailored suit, smile for the camera).
Afterwards would come thousands of images (photographs of course,
but also collections of postcards, cut-outs, illustrations and various
iconographic documents), constituting the open archive of
a life and an œuvre based on a principle of the collage of images
and events. Each image "refers to something beyond itself: to
the reality that precedes it; to countless images from the repositories
of the arts, of everyday culture and of myth; and to the visual cosmos
of her own increasingly dense œuvre. These photographs are encounters
between things found and things invented. They are arenas in which
reality and fiction, past and future, wish and fulfilment, transform
each other."1
This artist book invites you on an accompanied stroll among a selection
of images introducing the complex relation that the work of Ulrike
Ottinger maintains with the world, with history and culture. A long,
beautiful voyage, at once grave and enchanted, which from nearest
to furthest, from the urban landscapes of Berlin to the steppes of
Mongolia, from yesterday's tales to today's decors, has nothing exotic
or egotist about it. Rather it involves a concern for the other and
an "aesthetics of diversity,"2 worthy
of another age.
This allegorical, Benjaminian aspect of her work is what Eva Meyer
has so marvellously underscored: "Her films are ethnographic
films, even on her own turf. But without the claim to represent another
or even one's own culture. Ottinger knows very well that that's just
not possible. What fascinates her she ritualizes in ephemera, without
symbolic value, an artefact in other words, one that can be as confusing
as it is precise. With this distinction we are where the experience
of the other becomes visible, where it can appear. In a film that
is about the fundamental impossibility of appropriating this experience
as the subject's self-realization.
The balancing act between Ottinger's despair and enthusiasm is prompted
by the impossibility and realizes the artifact ... That's what I keep
on talking about, this allegorical moment of distinction, which can
be neither romantically felt out nor replaced though a critical intention,
but which can be seen in the films of Ulrike Ottinger."3
Catherine David
|
1 Katharina Sykora, Stills and Sessions,
in: Ulrike Ottinger, Berlin: Contemporary
Fine Arts, 2001.
2 Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of
Diversity,
translation Yael Rachel Schlick, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002
3 Eva Meyer, Ottingers Artefakt, in: Ulrike Ottinger:
Texte und Dokumente,
Kinemathek 86, Berlin, Oktober 1995.
|
|