| This is a conversation between Marcel Odenbach and Anna Ostoya that took place over email between May 10 and May 15 in conjunction with Marcel Odenbach’s Break Apart exhibition at Rubin & Chapelle (R&C Projects):
Anna: Great to meet, Marcel. Sonja said she believes our work has a few things in common. We both appropriate found images, often from the news or the books. It seems we both aim at critical reflection. One of the works I showed at Rubin & Chapelle in the fall was a composition on canvas, with a collaged Lee Miller eye and portraits of various avant-garde groups. Parts were painted and had gold leaf. Your The Auseinanderbrechen (break apart) (2022) silkscreens are all based on the same image, which seems to be a photomontage composed of photos from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in 2021. Am I right that the image used for the silkscreen is a photomontage? How did it come about?
Marcel: The basis for almost all paper works are the so-called “cutting templates." These are the sheets that I collaged. Some are sorted thematically, but many are created more randomly, like a diary. I collect a wide variety of images and have a large archive. I photocopy these in turn to the same size and in black and white. This is important to me in order to get a uniform interface and not create any difference between the photos. They are then torn apart to connect them together. The composition of the motifs, i.e., which image is next to another, is then done very intuitively. Only then are the collages colored or printed. For the series of „break apart“ I did two different collages, based on the same issue.
A: I've been making a series of pairings of photographs, mostly from the news, since 2021, and in it I have a few pairings from the Capital riot. Your work underlines the wild crowd and multiplicity of characters in action. It makes me think about the photomontages and posters of the first half of the 20th century and of a belief in the power of the masses. It also makes one think of a rock concert. What do you think drew you to these images, if you don't mind saying?
M: I was literally shocked when I saw the first images of the storm. This riot has questioned my basic democratic values. As a German, they perhaps affected me even more than the start of the Ukraine war. For almost 50 years, I have been reflecting on German history and also the phenomenon of fascism. At a certain point, the incited masses can no longer be contained. Truth and lies become interchangeable. Religion and sport are just side effects of this hysteria. At the moment, we are experiencing a time in which respect is demanded through disrespect. To be honest, I've avoided major events all my life. Maybe that's why I didn't become a politician but rather an artist.
A: The red and blue shapes, like filters superimposed over the photomontage, partly obscure the images of people. That brings me to Rodchenko's 1921 monochrome paintings, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color, which were about the end of representation. It seems I’m more grounded in these early avant-gardes than you are. I was born later and felt I had to dig into the earlier histories as there seemed to be no way forward but cynicism and repetition. Your work playfully engages with different postmodern tropes to address the conditions that shape us, even the most painful ones. In The Auseinanderbrechen (break apart) (2022) silkscreens the representation lurks below translucent red and blue. There's no yellow but the white of the margins – apart from completing the American flag – to me stands for neutrality, innocence and tabula rasa. What were your reasons for the choice of the colors?
M: Of course I used the blue and red from the American flag and the white came naturally. Pop Art, here of course Jasper Johns, played a big role for me as a Cologne artist. These icons hang in the Ludwig Museum and greatly influenced my idea of contemporary art as a teenager. But actually the form of the work has more to do with minimal art. Here in particular Donald Judd and Richard Serra. I have silkscreens from both artists hanging at home. In terms of content, I rely more on Warhol in this work.
A: Many of your works have referenced the trauma of the Second World War, as well as poverty, persecution, genocides, AIDS, migration, and the media. I see your work as caught in a dialectic between beauty and evil; your collages are visually seductive, the darker side at times can be easy to miss. The same goes for the videos. It's as if you operate between art which is about decor and aesthetics (which nowadays includes so-called ugly painting) and political art, which traditionally has a straightforward message and often shocks. I’m very fond of this way of making art and looking at it. But why have you chosen to work this way and how did it evolve?
M: This has always been very important to me, and my works probably have something in common in this regard too. The appearance and the incineration fascinated me aesthetically from a very early age. I like the dialogue between the two points of view, doesn't it reflect our reality? Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock had a strong influence on me in this regard. In every ideal world, evil also lurks.
A: I like the reference to Hitchcock as it appears you also use a sort of dramatic effect in your videos, montaging footage so that a feeling of danger and fear arises. How do you decide on the way the different scenes come together when you edit them? Is there a script you follow or is the process more intuitive as in your collages?
M: There is always a concept, or rather a so-called script. But this is often thrown out the window during assembly. After collecting the materials, I work with index cards, which I then move around. During the editing itself, things are changed again that don't work for me. This often results in combinations that I could not have foreseen beforehand. This applies to the image as well as to the sound. Basically, the way I work with video is very similar to paper work.
A: I can relate to this. For me, the right choices and new ideas reveal themselves while working. Some of my series were even purposely staged as a game between the planned and the spontaneous in order to arrive at an unexpected result. Even when working on a canvas based on a found image I will sometimes continue to repaint it over months in order to get all the parts to come together in a way that feels right. One of the big decisions determining a work is the medium. Since the 1970s you've made experimental video works, you’ve done performances, and you have also created collages. How do you see your multimedia practice, and how do you draw distinctions among different mediums? Or are the different mediums part of the same project?
M: When I look at the different media of video as well as works on paper, they have a lot in common in my work. They are always based on found footage material and reflect how the mass media deals with images and information in my culture. I remove them from their context and put them into my own autobiographical interpretation. This method is very familiar to me, both from the Dada/Merz movements and from Pop Art. At the same time, as you already mentioned, both the moving and static images use a kind of seduction in order to expose things. Maybe that has something to do with my Christian iconography. The Matthew Passion from Bach or the Genter Altar from van Eyck come to my mind.
A: With your friends you organized the 1996 show 3 Legged Race in a run-down, 19th-century firehouse in Harlem. At the time, the New York Times called it “an example of the way art ought to go and is increasingly going: out of galleries and museums and into the world." Unfortunately, the opposite has happened, with more market driven professionalization and fewer self-organized shows and artist-run spaces. How did the idea for the Harlem show come about and what was its aim?
M: When I moved to New York in the early 90s, I was amazed at how white and commercial the art scene still was. Why did people only ever go to Soho to see exhibitions? As a video artist from the 1970s, I was very familiar with the idea of finding your own spaces and developing alternative venues. Then I met Nari Ward, who was active in Harlem, and the idea of the Firehouse exhibition was quickly born with Janine Antoni and Dan Cameron. It was also important to us back then, that we were responsible for everything ourselves. Interestingly, the only support we got was from the Goethe Institut. The project, or rather the exhibition, was very successful and on everyone's lips, but unfortunately it didn't set a precedent. Although the scene has opened up in many directions, it has become even more commercial and traditional than before. Many experimental positions have been forgotten.
A: You say “we were responsible for everything ourselves”? How did this collaboration work in practice? Were there any moments of conflict? Did people from the local community show up to the exhibit? Have you and your artist friends thought of continuing this project?
M: It was a wonderful time together, you can see that clearly in the documentary. There was never any conflict with each other or with the neighborhood. The local people were all very supportive, especially the Deacon from the church next door. Many random visitors have come to the firehouse. I believe that our initiative was appreciated. All three artworks were very time-consuming; hard work is always recognized in a different context. Whether the individual works were understood as art is another question. But I don't think it's important in this context. I would have welcomed continuity, but that wasn't feasible at the time. The insurance issue alone was hardly solvable.
A: Can you give a picture of living and working in New York in the 90s? I landed here in 2008, my entry cushioned by the Whitney ISP program. I was curious about the city itself, maybe even more than the art world, as an international and multicultural place. Did you feel that New York was the place to be and to have a career or rather was it more an excursion of an anthropological kind, a pilgrimage to the city where the artists you saw at the Ludwig museum worked? How did you find your way around and within the art world?
M: I had been to New York many times in the 70s and therefore knew the art scene quite well. When I decided to go to New York for a longer period in the 90s, I already had a lot of friends there, I had a young, ambitious gallery, Anton Kern on site and a project with Dan Cameron in the New Museum. It was the time of small clubs and house music, which really influenced me at that time. In New York back then it was still possible to live very simply; there were still many niches for an exciting subculture. Back then I experienced the city as rather unaggressive and, above all, I wasn't afraid to venture into unknown places and new experiences. At the end of the 90s, I felt a change in the city and the art scene and realized that I no longer wanted to expose myself to it.
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Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953, Cologne) lives and works in Cologne. He has studied art history, architecture and semiotics in Aachen, Germany. From 1992-98, he was Professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Recipient of the prestigious First Marler Video Art Award in 1984, Odenbach won the Grand Prize at the Locarno Video Festival in the same year. In 1987 he was commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to produce an installation. Odenbach's videotapes and installations have been exhibited widely at festivals and institutions throughout the world, including group exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documentas 6 and 8, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; and DuMont Kunsthalle, Cologne. His one-person exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; IVAM, Centro Julio Gonzales, Valencia, Spain; Kölnishcher Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; Musee d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; and Reina Sofia, Madrid.
Anna Ostoya (b. 1978, Krakow, ) has lived in New York since 2008. Her work spans multiple aesthetic traditions and includes painting, collage, photomontage; at times text and objects. She is mostly known for her geometrically fractured paintings, textured collages and photomontages of look-alike found images. Ostoya attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, the Städelschule in Frankfurt/M and the Parsons School of Art and Design in Paris. Her book collaborations include Polish Rider (MACK 2018) with Ben Lerner and Politics and Passions (MACK, 2021) with Chantal Mouffe. Her work has been shown, among others, at Kunsthaus Baselland (2019), Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2017, solo), Tate St. Ives (2015), Lyon Biennial (2015), La Kunsthalle Mulhouse (2013, solo), Museum of Modern Art in New York(2013), CCS Kronika, Bytom (2010, solo), The Power Plant Toronto (2011), Lisson Gallery in London (2009) and Manifesta 7 Rovereto (2008).
Partners Sonja Rubin and Kip Chapelle co-founded Rubin & Chapelle in 1997 and were among the first designers to establish retail presence in New York’s then burgeoning Meatpacking arts district in 2002. The designers have both been inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America and have received several awards and nominations from institutions including Fashion Group International, The Smithsonian, A Senatorial Citation, and the City of Vienna, Austria. Their collections have been exhibited in the MAK Museum in Vienna, Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and The Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Their garments can be found in the collections of the Chicago Arts Institute and the Museum FIT.
Rubin & Chapelle’s collaborations with living artists, R&C Projects, have been central to their creative ethos. In addition to staging exhibitions in their showroom and boutiques, R&C Projects invites artists to develop patterns and textile prints ad hoc. Artists who have been collaborators include Gregory Coates, Helga Davis, Berta Fischer, Mia Enell, Angelo Flaccavento, Axel Koschier, Edmundo de Marchena, Joseph Montgomery, Anna Ostoya, Kottie Paloma, Hermes Payrhuber, Steven Rose, Aura Rosenberg, Semjon H.N. Semjon, Wolfgang Stiller, Kara Walker, Atalay Yavuz and more.
* Image:
Marcel Odenbach, Auseinanderbrechen (break apart), 2022
Silkscreen, unique variant from a group of 17
Paper dimensions: 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches (50 x 70 cm), framed dimensions: 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm) |
