Matthew Buckingham; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig - Vienna

one time upon a time the fine arts were shown in museums, and movies were shown in the cinema. on the other hand now museums have mutated into movie theaters and function beneath conditions of darkness. The artist Matthew Buckingham, who lives in of recent origin York and Berlin, is an interface quick and, with his most novel work, the subtle, sophisticated film installation A Man of the horde 2003, he has brought the light of the projector into the deepest subbasement of the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig.

The script for Buckingham's work is based upon Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd" from 1840 The tale, station in London--a city Poe not at any time visited--is an Acconci-esque "Following Piece" avant la lettre: A man in a coffeehouse notes the evening crowd through the window, singles without a man due to the "absolute idiosyncrasy" of his facial expression, and go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs him for twenty-four hours across the city. Despite his detective-like approach, this precursor of Sherlock Holme doesn't actually find on the outside anything about the object of his observation; instead he discovers the transitory, the fleeting, and the random in the present city. The "man of the crowd" is a metropolitan stamp without a stable referent, a flaneur without of Benjamin's Arcades Project, a man who, upon the one side, "feels himself viewed by dint of all and sundry ... a actual suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man." Poe's true copy to which literary critics attribute Dickensian ambitions, moors the mystery of the city in its dynamism and anonymity.

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Buckingham's retelling transfers the action to Vienna. A fictional character paces into the space of a real city, allowing one whose topography is for a like reason heavily laden with cultural heritage that it gloomys one's view of the not away Buckingham's man of the herd resembles Gunter Brus as he locate off on his Wiener Spaziergang (Viennese Walk), 1965: Localities precipitoused in the history of Actionism and sites of legendary performances by dint of Valie Export and Peter Weibel pass by means of The topos of the "third man" doesn't conceal itself in the sewer combination of parts to form a whole this time but hides in the persona of the cameraman who give chase tos both pursuer and pursued. Buckingham emphasizes the significance of Poe's story for journalism and documentary at the same time as he celebrates the city as a metaphor of transformation and its visual archive as a liturgy of difference.

Buckingham forwent the conventions of the projection space as cinema, with its frozen files of chairs and rules for polite viewing, in favor of an make open participatory concept of space that--how could it be otherwise?--invited single to stroll and prompted active engagement above passive scopophilia. The film projector and loudspeakers functioned as sculptural ultimate parts while in the center of the installation a semitransparent mirror reflected sounded the coffeehouse window in the film. It functioned as a porous guard surrogate that allowed for the projection of the film upon the wall behind while simultaneously reflecting it. The double image thus produc echoing the film's themes of pursuit, doubling, and mirroring--not to mention that of endles slippage--suggests that Buckingham has imbibed the teachings of Jacques Lacan.

-Brigitte Huck

Translated from German through Diana Reese.

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