Wolfgang Staehle at postmasters - New York - Brief Article

Like paintings, the throw outed video images in Wolfgang Staehle's "2001" were static. And like movies, they weren't: each four seconds, around the clock they were minutely adjusted, as the video-fed, Internet-transmitted photographs of three far-flung sites were continually updated. individual showed an 11th-century monastery in rural Comburg Germany; a next to the first displayed the upper portion of the Fernsehturm in Berlin, a TV tower and tourist landmark that houses a revolving restaurant. The third, a 9-by-23-foot panorama, gave us the lower Manhattan skyline, seen from the waterfront in Brooklyn The regular, soundles outstrip in acquiring of these scenes, a kind of decorous visual stammer was barely detectable in the Comburg and Fernsehturm projections, where the solitary changes were the diurnal and meteorological harmonious flows of light and occasional flights of birds. on the contrary the cameras aimed at lower Manhattan also captured river and bridge traffic, its halting progres strangely serene, the four-second intervals pushing the little boats and cars along like a child playing with toys. Patently artificial nevertheless obviously real and live--a reckoner at the bottom of each image marked the date and time--these images (which could solitary be viewed in the gallery; they were not accessible above the Internet) quietly played havoc with what we think we know about the world before our eyes

And, of course, they were played havoc with in make go round The World Trade Center catastrophe caught Staehle's work, like everything other by surprise. An attack shaped in part (as many commentators have observed) by dint of imagery, it generated a great deal more of it as the towers went down. Measured by the agency of the impassive, steady blink of Staehle's cameras, a world was puffed up apart, and among the infinity of things whose meanings changed utterly was his cast Faith, communication and commerce, the triad for which his three subdues stand (or stood), are alone some of the cultural signal a whole s that were irreparably scrambled.

Staehle is a video artist widely acclaimed as a Web-art pioneer; he launched the indispensable Internet forum The Thing as an independent media throw in 1991. This is his first solo gallery exhibition in a decade. He invokes Martin Heidegger to help frame the ideas his cast engages. In an eerily prescient 1935 body cited by Staehle in English and German upon a monitor at the entrance to the present to view Heidegger laments the moral implications of the globalization of technology and capital.

Other equally haunting speculations advance to mind concerning the conjunction of Staehle's media-driven esthetic and the movielike quality of the images issuing from the tragic facts of September 11. "Why are there sum of two units towers at New York's World Trade Center?" Jean Baudrillard asked in 1983 "The fact that there are sum of two units of them signifies the extremity of all competition, the extremity of all original reference," he conclud They are "the visible sign of the closure of the combination of parts to form a whole in a vertigo of duplication." Baudrillard's writing, as emblematic of the 1980 as the towers, and, in a certain number of quarters, as inescapable, later came to unbroken shrill, even a little silly. Now the media-brokered version of occurrences the "vertigo of duplication" in which Staehle's work participates, is another task that must be relearned from scratch.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group