Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Interview

Solange Farkas: Some of your pieces seem to be images of time, accelerated and linked to other speeds. How do you articulate the notion of time in the construction of the images and installations and how is time related to your work?

Marcel Odenbach: When one works with a moving medium, time and the relation with time naturally play a major role. When I first started to take interest in video as an artistic form of expression in circa 1974, there weren’t many examples in this young medium. Most video works at that time dealt with body language and performances, the artists came from sculpture and installation. I was interested in a narrative structure since the very beginning, I wanted to tell stories, I wanted to cut and connect different materials to one another. Therefore I could only learn from film how one constructs, assembles, and how sound behaves in relation to image. It was the time of the wonderful European cinema with directors such as Godard, Rivette, Pasolini, with Bergman and Antonioni, and above all it was also the time of American experimental films. What all these examples had in common was a very particular relation with time. In many films of the 1960s and 1970s, time plays a differentiated role and takes on a different valuation from how it happens in films today. Sometimes it seems to me that the whole generation back then simply had more time, in comparison with society today. Yes, people were a bit hippie, they smoked grass, and they discovered other cultures and value systems. First of all, every existing thing was questioned, and that involves time as well. When you watch these films today, the relation with time in these films usually feels slow. That’s why many directors are disregarded as boring, and I have students that can hardly stand these films. However, what I learned from these films is to what extent the choice of the picture speed can influence the aesthetics and, through that, also the contents. It’s actually a discovery of slowness. I remember the scene in the movie Once Upon a Time in the West, where the Irish family is shot. The slow motion gives this brutal scene something poetic, almost beautiful. On the other hand the tragic multiplies, and also the hatred for the murderer. Also, it was a neat preparation for me to secretly fall in love with Claudia Cardinale back then. Thus, time naturally plays a role for the whole narrative structure. To me, the rhythm of a work was always very important. Therefore, sound naturally receives a great deal of significance. Also, in my works there are always edit plans, boxed structures, that are quite graphic, almost mathematic, I am definitely a great fan of Bach.

What moved you to work with video in the 1970s, and what makes you choose to continue working with the medium today? Society has changed a lot, how do you feel about the feedback from the public today in comparison with when you started? 

The option for video as a medium immediately seemed logic to me. There I could connect image, movement, text, and sound in a whole. Furthermore, the choice for video was also a cultural, political, and social decision. The other ways of the reception and distribution were important to me. Many ideas have obviously changed with time, through technical, cultural, and social facts, others I have naturally rejected myself. Maybe they were a little too one-sided, too idealistic, perhaps too pubescent. Nonetheless, it was a totally conscious decision to have chosen video as an art medium in the mid-1970s. Among film and among other artistic media. I found the medium free, unbiased, not exhausted, and democratic. My own work principle has remained similar, now I only allow myself the luxury to often reproduce, copy things that I would like to use, and not simply to appropriate them. Naturally the public has changed as well; artistically everything is accepted, art has become pop, contemporary art is consumed worldwide. Actually that is, among other things, what I would like to accomplish through and with video. On the other hand, the large acceptance makes me insecure. It conveys many misunderstandings. 

How do you deal with the notion of representation in your work? 

That is mostly different, surely always very personal and subjective. Sometimes it can be a book, an idiomatic phrase, sometimes only an image, an observation that has interested and inspired me. It always begins with a memory and a reference to myself. That may mean different movement grounds in the beginning, if compared to the end of a work, if the element has almost found its function in the row. There is seldom material, either sound, documentation, image, or text, that seems important to me and then gets lost over time. Before I edit a work, I always have much more material than I can possibly need, the separation from things happens rather emotionally, and it’s really scary, it causes me a great deal of pain. They are purely artistic decisions that I myself often cannot explain. Then again, the good stuff is in video, material doesn’t play any role, I would not like to settle myself beforehand. Sometimes I keep things for years in my memory, they are always ready to be called, it’s a large archive. At some moment, the moment for each material has arrived, it has ripened, so to speak. Almost like a long pregnancy. To once cite a concrete example: For more than twenty years I have not been able to forget the film Yol by Yilmaz Güney. Every day, I witness a new generation of German-Turks in my neighbourhood, and have regularly observed their social problems. When I received the invitation to carry out a new work for the Istanbul Biennial 2003, I immediately connected both things. A symbiosis between content parallels, narrative structures, and naturally also aesthetic decisions has been born. On one side, I have the film quotation from Yol: “Here the Kurd man is the victim of his own conventions and wanders through the snowstorm”; on the other side, I have the young Turk in Germany, who has his vulnerable face shaved with white foam. The snow becomes foam, the foam becomes snow, and naturally the man becomes a boy, the boy becomes a man, etc. But all this goes much beyond the symbolism and Turkey. When I was editing, assembling this sequence I had to constantly think about the movie Fargo, by the Coen brothers, then I am once again on a wholly different decision level. Naturally, I have always been interested in gender-specific codes and rituals. And when one deals with roles and clichés, not only from a historical, social, and sexual point of view, one notices very fast that, so far, the official History, meaning politics, church, power, etc. was always represented by men. That’s why I take interest, reflect, or use more men in my works. Also, they are just more present in materials about war, violence, and oppression. Obviously, in the final output I can indeed identify more with men. Each man in my work is maybe a little of a self-portrait. 

Your oeuvre deals with many questions that if edited in a different manner could be shown in television news or documentaries. Your viewer ends up aware of the fact that any image shown is previously manipulated and that therefore, he/she can question what is received as “information”. Do you believe that video art has this political role of warning the public? 

I don’t see any difference between video art and other artistic media. Naturally, art can make people sensitive, but art should not be didactic, because that kind of art is short lived, mostly it is bad art. I never use materials that can be seen as time-specifically interpretable. They can be so, but it should go much further beyond that. Maybe that is easier for me, as a German, our history is easy to read. It is available to anyone, and it has been interpreted only in thoughtful ways. If I show Hitler as a person, then this can naturally be a warning, but even the face alone brings down a whole avalanche, I must make myself clearer about that… I have, for instance, in my work about the genocide in Rwanda, not actually shown any murderers or hardly any direct victims. I might have been ashamed of that, that I do not want, that would have been too easy for me. Maybe it’s also only self-protection. Everyone expected that I would make interviews at the place. By the way, I have never made an interview myself, I cannot do that, what would I have asked and what would I have done with the answers? I know well enough the result of such interviews as a German from my generation. In opposition to the TV, I am consciously subjective and therefore perhaps also more honest. I wouldn’t like to explain anything, I don’t let anyone come directly to words. I can let the images speak for themselves.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 90 - 93.