Herbert Wentscher Light Games
»Kunst im Doppelpack« is art without any glamour - art for anybody and everybody. This is, however, not a six pack from MoneySave and yet it acts as a rejection of anyone who wants to rise above the taste of the general population. »Double pack art« is art without a pedestal. This is exactly what Herbert Wentscher is doing and has been doing for some time. It could be something to do with northern understatement. It is no coincidence that he was born in Oldenburg even though circumstances then brought him to Freiburg and from there to Weimar where he teaches at the Bauhaus University. There can be no doubt that his first stays in London and New York in the mid-seventies had a profound influence on his art. These were the centres where Pop Art embraced the aesthetics of mass culture and where new media such as video were making their first tentative steps into the art market. His work has since then exercised a gentle mockery towards the pretensions of those who worship at the high altar of »High Art«. This approach certainly applies to the new media as far as Wentscher is concerned, despite a tenured New Media Art-Discourse proclaiming a total revolution simply because the familiar pixels can now be manipulated to flicker across the screen. Without any fuss or bother, Wentscher prefers to keep his notebook up-to-date to the state of the art, and if he looks up, he will see outside a picture postcard sunset or the video altar inside: a black monitor on a black capital as a pedestal. This pedestal is, of course, meant in sheer irony. This artist does not venerate the new media; he simply uses them and reflects them. The same applies to other media; Wentscher does not just know about pixels but he also knows his colours and simply paints away. This is the cool gesture that makes him a real media artist, because his gaze penetrates beyond what is trendy. He knows about the pre-history of the new media and has, in fact, written a superb, still unpublished book on this theme: Vor dem Schirm (Before / in front of the screen). In this book he writes in his own inimitable, readable fashion about how images go for the screen. There is a primeval yearning which is fulfilled in the television screen, and the first steps the author discovers for us in an orgy of analogical vision are fascinating. He places the altar at the beginning of the picture boxes. Here it is, the cultic use of the medium, as we practised it ourselves when we gathered around the first TV sets in devotion. It did not take long, however, before this medium fell to the everyday routinizing as a background medium of our fun society. The last leaf of de-mystification is about to fall with the introduction of tele-shopping. Media art »yo-yoes« between cult and kitch. »Video – I see« has many meanings. Wentscher's »video« straddles the gulf between real vision and glue-eyed goggle-box vision: a bastard belonging to our times.
His works of the last few years are exhibited at the Erfurt Kunsthalle. There is no better place for them: a former cinema for electronic games with light! From his Video Candelabrum (Videoleuchter) to the Lunarium, all Wentscher's invented gadgets are at the same time an optical toy in the tradition of modern illusionist machines such as the Camera obscura and Laterna magica. Just as with photography and later its kinetic offspring in the movies, wonderment at successful illusion is a never-ending source of aesthetic joy. Just like the candle flames in the video lantern burning with a downwards flame – wow! However, unlike Hollywood, the special effects are not the major spectacle. Here, wonderment is the beginning of philosophy.
More Light?
The light metaphor within the Enlightenment can be deceptive. Media art eschews light – the electronic flickerings are only fully effective in darkness. The video lantern summarizes the history of light technology as if in time-lapse photography. The torch bearer as a candelabrum is carrying video »flames«. Electrification has thus come full circle in the simulation of fire. Gravity seems to be conquered, but the final irony is that the display of flames still fascinates just as they did at the dawn of humanity. The chain of magic is unbroken. In this picture the screen has in reality become the medial camp fire of the present day and »enlightens« us, or on the other hand, lulls us to sleep: like minimal music, the ornamental flames do not only have a meditative effect. That is what the Rotating Lamps (Drehleuchten) are about. They remind of the sedative that sends the children to sleep. At the same time, they are optical tranquillizers for over-stimulated adults – like the television. Switching on and dozing off are one and the same – thanks to the endless cycle of relentless »sameness«. Here, auto-suggestive formulae, warning arrows and temperature charts of the balance sheet all sedate. How true: even disaster warnings lose their effect with time. Telekom, the people's share has taught us that! The Lunarium is completely different. The world's first moon studio, or more precisely, its advert promises us regeneration by being bathed in simulated lunar light. The treatment makes feelings more real, balances the effects of too much sunlight by being gentle on the skin and awakens the sensibilities to better appreciate art. All this is done in a spirit of gentle irony just because it does not leave out any slogan and perfectly captures the tone used in marketing – and thereby shamelessly hits the point. In the dark, a simple »moon bed« bathed in pale light awaits the customer. There is not the slightest hint of moonlight romance, our world is demystified. The cult of the sun and of the moon in the 21st century knows no God other than the Self. This god is taken care of in a worldly manner. We bed down our poor overstimulated bodies onto the bier as if journeying to death. For a brief moment, we are overcome by tiredness. Then follows the great awakening of the senses. We feel the twitching muscle in our back, the beating of our hearts and we become aware of the sounds the outside world wafts towards us in a pure and unadulterated fashion. No toning down away into the land of dreams – this form of dimming purifies the senses and intensifies awareness. Contemporary art has always been doing this by confronting the swamping of the senses with sensual withdrawal. As with Tuttle, the less there is, the more there is for the perception of its artistic comment. With the Lunarium, however, the renewal of perception is the main objective. How we use our enrichment, whether in contemplating pictures in a museum or observing people in the street, is our own affair. Often, simply watching people turns out to be more interesting. Whatever you choose, this Lunarium is fabulous. By means of perfect mimicry, it presents itself as a gimmick product tailor-made for the mass market in a society thirsting for new experiences whilst, at the same time, being subversive on two fronts. This kind of wellness and sensitivity machine does not merely satirize the publicity writers’ clichés of mass culture but also the mantras in the publicity material of high culture, thus hitting the art critics at the same time! Herbert Wentscher keeps his eye on all the trends. This is what enables his work to diagnose our era. He knows how to join in with the relevant discourse. However, a Lunarium cannot be pinned down as easily as this. It offers something more than pompous words.
Screening pictures
Wentscher maintains that televisions have been around for a long time – and hints at the »stage« of a crystal ball. This looks breathtakingly similar to the port-hole-like screen of a 1948 television set. Newspaper kiosks are an even more profane example. Aren't they just picture boxes - mere shop windows for pictures from all over the world? A huge multidirectional split screen for the colourful title pages of magazines – the meticulous screen of the New York kiosk makes a clear point. To all sides the kiosks are houses made of pictures – sheer media huts – Medienhütten. Wentscher has been taking photos of these for years. A new typology of utility buildings emerges and at the same time, they offer a time-machine trip starting from the neo-classical »tempietto« in Berlin to the latest Parisian high-tech look. As a kind of visual anthropology of everyday aesthetics, this œuvre provides us with deep insights into styles belonging to various regions from Cologne's barbaric functionalism to New York's designs that have been taken to the point of hypertrophy. The hut-like shop however, conceals the dialect of the screen. Inside, within the tele-tube avalanche of pictures, there is peace, the box of screened pictures protects, it ‘screens off’ like a paravent. The ambivalent balance of the exhibiting function against the shielding function is relayed even more clearly in the Wappenschirm (Screen of Arms), because in the picture of a coat of arms both a weapon and a protecting shield are present. As early as 1974, Wentscher saw the connection between a coat of arms and the screen. He now projects letters onto the screen of the painting at that time. The letters oscillate between anagrams from the Renaissance and airport signs. Another time-machine emerges which catapults us through the history of the media and of Wentscher's own work. The process of superimposing the layers of paint and pixel varnish takes on the appearance of a metamorphosis and yet, it keeps something substantial.
Morphing
What really fascinates the artist is the metamorphic change of form, in particular its latest and most amazing method: computer-aided image morphing. The Elemental Triptych (Elementares Triptychon), a video beam installation in the shape of a three-piece altar »morphs« nature reminiscent of three elements: cloud, foam and potato. But there is no spectacular morph as from foam to a being born of foam and nothing like Paul Verhoeven's film »Hollow Man« in which the man becomes a mere nothingness. Here, one potato simply becomes another. This has a strangely sinister effect. Any technophobe who is shocked by all the media discourse is bound to regard this as mere fodder from the digital drawing board and to associate all this with CAD-cubed melons or with the food industry's gene-technological rape of nature. But doesn't nature morph itself – just like the innocent bubbles next to this? Isn't history just one gigantic morph? The artist cunningly morphs the clouds, but in a way you would hardly notice when he renders this grandiose epitome of incessant changing shape beneath the screening sky. Is there really any difference? Wentscher counters mental clichés with an elementary visual way of thinking. The Rousseauist idealization of the supposed natural state is sheer resentment in the same way the aesthetes have excommunicated the photograph - that most revolutionary and plebeian example of the new media. Of course, this ban of excommunication did not manage to stop either the fraught evolution of the media or their co-evolution with human perception. Nowadays, we are riveted by the digital process of image generation. In morphing, however, the electronic medium takes photographic illusion making way beyond what has previously been thought possible. Within the code of detailed photographic realism, things seem to be real even though we know they have never existed. The new medium has now advanced from recording the traces of what has been to the realm of dreams. But who is now controlling the famous »pencil of nature»?
Saint Luke painting the Madonna (Der Hl. Lukas malt die Madonna) morphs art itself, i. e. the portrait of Mary nursing the Christ child: one Madonna turns into another. The title refers to an ancient legend about painters. Saint Luke intending to paint the Virgin falls asleep only to wake up and find that the picture has been finished. The Christian myth portrays the artist as a divinely inspired medium. This narcoleptic saint has become the patron saint of painters who are divinely inspired by the Creator in their sleep. Wentscher's staging of this event leaves the painter out, but retains the »morphing« Madonna and a projector together with the anxious question: can the generating of graphics by a digital machine replace the divinely inspired human being? This could actually be the credo within »techno« discourse which is, in fact, more in tune with the Luke legend on account of its depreciation of the creative, human subject. We, however, are convinced that machines like women or gods can be sources of inspiration – but they cannot inspire themselves. What the »morphing« Madonna actually illustrates in a brilliant way, is a basic art historical phenomenon: once an archetype has been discovered, the pictures repeat themselves. Despite all the modern demands for originality in art, this principle still applies today and particularly so, with regard to single-theme artists who find their place in the art market with a distinctive style as trademark. The history of art is the transformation of anything existing; it is, as the self-mocking metaphor indicates, constant morphing. The same applies to the history of the media which Wentscher narrates in »Before the screen« (Vor dem Schirm). The existing is based on rare moments of true inspiration – but then begins a process of transformation which does in fact sometimes seem like machine-based auto-activity. However, this is not to imply that this term should be subjected to a Flusser-like dictatorial ontology concerning the nature of the machine. Here we should rather take our clue from the snoring and gargling of the sound track. Doesn't Wentscher's arrangement confront us with two forms of creativity: one of female Nature, producing new human beings – and one of male Art which in modernity increasingly finds its refuge in the production of theory? Which is the more productive? The breast feeding in the lecture hall can be interpreted as »creaturely« creativity on the rise – isn't academic theory just morphing away in the doldrums? Or will electronic media art become the golden mean – an area in which today women feel just as at home as men – autonomously?
Light
The concept of «inspiration« explains how new things come into being: creativity is based on inspiration. This is a modest claim. But the public loves the artist »immodest« and raises him to a genius: part of the Nietzschean Übermensch dream. Wentscher, the media artist does not deify either the artist or the media. He makes a crown witness out of Goethe, and an amusing video song installation SALVE/SLAVE becomes the medium of his message. Here the prince of poets appears as a rapper and snottily announces the source of his inspiration - a series of mistresses, thus earthly pleasure. Goethe confessed all this in the »Roman Elegies« (Römische Elegien) and did so in such a sensual way that an outraged contemporary fumed about the publishing journal »Die Horen« referring to it as «Whores«.... It would have to be this star of all stars of the genius cult to bring the inspiration model of antiquity back down to earth; whoever nowadays talks about the «feminine muse« means women made of flesh and blood. Wentscher weaves this frivolity into the present time with MTV, Fun and the Love Parade. His Goethe rap is played as light entertainment. He takes the gravity from the rigid classical label «H« for Highbrow belonging to the heavy, Latin-based high culture. Thus he kicks the statue off its art pedestal in the museum, this miserable morgue of art, thrusting it into the frenetic life of pop culture. From the H for Highbrow he makes a P for Pop (culture) – what a resurrection! If it wasn’t for the mediatisation of all entertainment. Can there be anything sensual about a TV remote control, this symbol of passive reception where all difference is exactly the same? Consumers crouch in front of the box and zap away. They themselves become a remotely controlled couch potato in every sense of the phrase – slaves to their whims. However, Herbert Wentscher is well aware of the other side of the coin when bridging that German gulf between art and entertainment. He knows that the logic of distinction on which differences in taste are based cannot be neutralized by the crossing of different aesthetic codes. But, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he is a master at hiding depth – «Where? On the surface!« Therefore, despite the ironic twist in Goethe's last words these have become the secret motto of all works by the media artist: «More than anything else, I would like more light« («Mehr Licht«). It can also happen that the visual joke will contain more than a little sadness. Of course, we all tensely wait for the moment in Kick when the artist scores a bull's eye in the «eye« of the camera and thereby covers the whole screen. But doesn't this test borrowed from the world of sporting entertainment also reveal the autism in video players and artists? Don't we all remain captive in the cage framed by our office-file-based daily routine? How petty are the escapes allowed to us by the entertainment industry and how like a treadmill they are! The kick which this toy gives us has a resigned tone as if pleasure has become a duty.
Prototyp
Morphing once more. This metamorphic play puts everything else into the shade. Even the computer-generated actors from »Final Fantasy« pale in the confrontation with Colour Management: no finale, instead a fantastic new dawn from the league between science and art. The Caucasian (a notion used for describing European descent) Herbert Wentscher is transmuted into an Asian. And back again. There are no intervening steps. And then again into a black African whilst remaining all the time – himself! His video is a grandiose self-experiment which is aimed at the very heart of our understanding of the self. We think we belong to a particular race and regard our corresponding racial appearance as an unalterable bequest from nature. But now we experience that this appearance, typical of only a small section of humanity, is a mere costume that can be chosen at will to clothe the self. This loop demonstrates the possibility of a radical Colour Management way beyond the mere acquisition of a tan in a sun lounge. This is by no means a future dream: Michael Jackson's outrageous change in both colour and facial shape shows that plastic surgery has long since been able to effect a racial change just like a sex change. Every picture in Wentscher's video is a plan for a possible trip from body to body, a modern migration of souls, re-incarnation in the age of technology. Colour Management radicalizes Rimbaud's »I is Another« to »I could be Anybody« and visualizes in the preserved similarity belonging to the self the fact that all people are brothers and sisters, that humanity is one family, all apples from the same tree. The particularist logic of exclusive us-ideals usually starts from visible alterity – and now Wentscher starts from the same point into the opposite direction, illustrating most vividly the counter-vision of an all-inclusive us-ideal. Seeing is believing.... But this is only half the story. The second half is no less fascinating. Because Wentscher's video makes artistic use of a remarkable innovation in the world of information technology; a fully automatic programme for interactive 3D facial modelling and face recognition, or, in short, »Computer Aided Face Engineering«. This process developed by Thomas Vetter and Volker Blanz at the University of Freiburg really is at the cutting edge – and even for Hollywood an attractive novelty. It can synthesize 3-D face models either from scratch or based on 2-D pictures, and can transform or morph features such as age, sex, expression, weight, recognizability – either exaggerating to the point of caricature or working in the opposite direction – and finally, this works even for racial features. The crucial trick is to have a morphable head for reference which is the average derived from, at the moment, two hundred male and female Caucasians – and astonishingly enough, the plausibility and thus the naturalness of the programmable heads are guaranteed by this very narrow data base. In this process, each individual is reconstructable as a deviation from the average. Herbert Wentscher as Asian is then the sum of two sets of deviations from the Caucasian average or reference head: on the one hand, the individual deviation and on the other the average racial deviation. This allows for smooth transition from the constructed to the re-constructed individual, from point to corresponding point of the two faces. The trick in all this is that you don't have to have a particularly commonplace head as your base value. It can easily be a rare example - as in the middle values between a male and female appearance. But a list of aspects would seem to imply that this works on the principles of perception psychology: human face recognition is based on prototypes. Also, impressions from early childhood play an important role so that if the prototype is abstracted from, for example, Caucasian faces, there will then be difficulties in distinguishing between non-Caucasian faces – the «other race effect«. Whatever the case may be, the prototype can even be fictitious or hypothetical like the general case in Kant's philosophy, but, within computer simulation, it can have a miraculous effect. Thus, we have here the idea – in itself the idea of human beings as such – becoming in an exemplary way the producer or creator of transient photographic appearances of what is possible within nature.
Those declared dead live the longest
How often have we had to hear the recurrent refrain: panel painting is dead – a sentence from which both curators and critics could build a career. Fortunately, powerful artists do not let themselves be taken in by half truths. At any rate, Herbert Wentscher, the media artist, paints. His peculiar variant of the pointillist style demands the craft of painting, stroke by stroke and layer by layer, and thus presents a shimmering still frame in contrast to the ephemeral dance of electrons. The photographic code of realistic detail is no longer in place here; the game now concentrates on two-dimensional drawing appearing on the lighted stage and occasionally moving to the third dimension – but without ever creating the illusion of a tangible object, a thing belonging to this world. The themes might have been discovered en route, but, whatever, they are always alienated from one-dimensional reality. They are ideas of things rather than their images; these are merely coarse figures computed from programmes that can only roughly approximate to the pure ideas. »Peinture« is a sensual activity and a promoter of sensuality: sense precedes sensibility. Wentscher offers you a shimmer reminiscent of Gustave Moreau's optical luxury – only that, typically, the symbolism held at fever pitch has now cooled down. Almost with a sense of boyish delight, the painter has trivialized the theory of fractals to a baguette »tree« and offers a counter-caricature of the fashionable slogan from the interface between man and machine by painting a »kitchy« sunrise. At the same time, the simplest sign becomes heightened in his hands, this reduction from the world of senses to a pithy formula, to a ghostly image. A possible vision is peeled off from the twilight of colours. It stands nearer than it may seem to the »tele-« and the video visionary subject: it stands as an image in light.
Image thinking
So much for what the artist offers. But as remarkable is what he withholds: himself. Herbert Wentscher does not talk about Herbert Wentscher. Even if he does appear as in Colour Management, he becomes nothing more than an exchangeable guinea pig; in fact, this project will, in the future, enable the observers to try this out on site for themselves by using a scan. Wentscher works at a considerable distance from the narcissistic aesthetic that Rosalind Krauss attributed to video art. Other artists place themselves in front of the camera and reflect upon themselves. Herbert Wentscher believes that there are more interesting topics. Anyone who has seen more than one video art exhibition will agree – despite some great exceptions. Nor does he oppose the drive to self-reflection in the new media. Instead, he often links this to themes he has discovered lying beyond the ,miniverse' of art and self, out there in the real world. The wanderer's horizon is wide. He thinks globally and acts locally. The Freiburg Coat of Arms (Wappen von Freiburg) crosses the appropriated Christian symbol with constructive reduction and with PONG, the very first video game. Thus, an ambulatory red cross emerges, not breaking away from the screen cage – but springing back into the visual field. This is the church tower horizon which the artist must first consider and then overcome. For example, in Goldhorn: The installation in Sønderjylland's art museum in Tønder, Denmark reflects the story of two golden horns found in Tønder, which became a national legend. Wentscher uses a historical painting, the Guldhorn rap video clip and a website to play on the themes of myth on its march through the media as cultural memory. Or Dance the Schlemmer (Tanz den Schlemmer): In this work, the artist projects video images over an historical mural by Oskar Schlemmer at the very place of his academic work in the Bauhaus building of Weimar. He wonderfully animates the rigid dance of the silhouettes by using a ball of light and nodding gestures. With this media installation in situ, Goethe's last words «More Light« really do come to life in an art history already half confined to the dust of museums. In this œuvre, metamorphosis is a leitmotif. This leads to a healthy distrust towards over-the-top self advertising of the New Media Art Discourse. Wentscher fits more into the tradition of Nestroy's witticism: »Progress has an intrinsic tendency to look far better than it actually is.« Wentscher is describing evolutionary continuities where the master of pithy rhetoric dreams of radical leaps and anthropological revolutions in a media-effective way – as if we had not already experienced a century of catastrophic utopias. One role Wentscher has never played, and probably never will, is the role of the prophet. Nor does he share the credo of many conceptual artists that it is only the beauty of the thought that counts. That's why he is constantly polishing up the outer appearance of his works and that is why the experiences one can have with his work exceed by far the design, the concept. Sensuality is the indispensable spring board for thinking, artistic representation is a tool for exploring the universe, and more: a form of thinking – in pictures.
Ludwig Ammann
Exhibition catalogues »Doppelpack«, Kunsthalle Erfurt, 2001