CIRCA 111 review

Dublin: Mariele Neudecker at Temple Bar Gallery

Mariele Neudecker: Winterreise, video still; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Even if Romanticism could have survived its twentieth-century debasement in chocolate-box imagery and cloying muzak, its association with the destructive energies of (specifically German) nationalism dealt it a death blow. Even postmodernism with its hi-lo reconciliation did not seriously try to integrate Romanticism into its cultural practice (except as ironised kitsch). This is all the more remarkable in the era of global warming / dimming, when it might have been expected (the smoke-stacks are the same enemy after two hundred years) that Romantic nature-worship would once more raise its head.

Mariele Neudecker’s work is an exception, in that she combines the notoriously ‘difficult’ (for the viewer, at any rate) practice of video art with the (relative) accessibility of the quintessentially Romantic composer, Schubert. The success of such a simple idea was evident in the recent Temple Bar exhibition Winterreise, which combined the mournful nineteenth-century song-cycle with meditative video pieces shot in winter along the sixtieth degree of latitude, from the Shetland Islands through Oslo, Helsinki and St. Petersburg. The sell-out audience that filled the National Gallery’s Shaw Room for the Opera North performance of the same piece (few of whom looked like Bill Viola aficionados) demonstrated the potential of multi-media maximalism. Music without a visual dimension increasingly seems to lack something – and perhaps vice–versa as well.

Top to bottom above: Mariele Neudecker: Winterreise, video stills; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Neudecker’s work is commendably restrained, using simple imagery of nature and technology to highlight a usually invisible element of profundity in the everyday. There are some flaws: a lot of rather obvious parallelism between sung word and image (e.g. ice, clouds, flowers, a crow). This is, however, redeemed by such wonderful resonances as that between the three suns of the song Die Nebensonnen (Phantom suns) and the three electricity-generating windmills on raised ground, with the echo of crucifixion imagery à la Friedrich. Other memorable images include the downward-escalator as a metaphor for a descent into the underworld of melancholy. (It’s clear at any rate that symbolic imagery is more successful than iconic in relating visual language to text.)

There is a rich mine of music in the repertoire for followers of Neudecker to explore, thereby perhaps overcoming the traditional ennui of the dutiful, though bored, viewer of video art. The work represents a nascent tendency towards collaboration between video-makers on the one hand and musicians (and composers) on the other, which may help to overcome the various forms of marginalisation hitherto endemic in both categories.

Paul O’Brien (obrienp@ncad.ie) teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Mariele Neudecker: Winterreise, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, January – February 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.94–95

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