|
XXXIX Rabea Eipperle
06.02.04 – 21.02.04
Redest du mit mir? Are you talking to ME?
She is an artist, so she is entitled to do this. We
may stand by and watch her, without her being really
able to look back at us. Still, she stares at us directly
and we have to meet her eyes all the while we have to
let her a swear at us. We are lucky, though, not to
attend a live performance, none of those painful events
with the audience utterly terrified; all we have to
do here is watch some tv.
Nevertheless, Rabea Eipperle's video installation has
an aspect of cruelty. At the beginning, on the three
monitors we see stills of deserted rooms in a private
flat. Then the silence is disrupted by the appearance
of a woman who suddenly bursts out into aggressive abuse.
These verbal attacks are quotes from a couple of films
(Trainspotting, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs), in which
violence is a predominant feature; in their plots violence
seems to be the only available, thus almost natural
way of behaviour. The attraction of this genre is known
to derive from the conflict it exposes the audience
to: We must and we do wish to love the arsehole and
yes, we are ready to feel compassion for the evil guy,
although we do not really mean it, of course not. The
temptation to identify, however, is hard to resist.
Rabea Eipperle is carrying on this identification to
the point of typifying the villain herself. Yet similar
to a karaoke show her play is not aiming to evoke the
illusion of the real, nor is it assuming a parody. An
illusionistic imitation would have to fail within the
genre anyway, because the audience would certainly lack
the readyness to sympathize with an immoral killer bitch.
As their cinematic alter ego, they would reject a truely
bad girl. It just has to be a guy. One more reason why
we hate to watch this artist on the monitor while she's
going off her trolley or even worse, is cooly enjoying
herself when humiliating an invivisible victim.
In different ways, all three parts of Redest du mit
mir? break up the cinematic conventions that regulate
the gaze between subjects and objects. At first, Rabea
Eipperle uses and re-affirms the plain stereotypes informing
her quotes. With simple means, she brings these mechanisms
to a standstill: This generates grotesque effects; the
tragical, however, is not all dissolved in the ridicule.
This ambivalence is rather hard to put up with.
(BC)
|
