#torsten lauschmann

Torsten Lauschmann’s film installation, Dead Man’s Switch was commissioned for the ICA’s Nought to Sixty series and depicts a single candle burning on the kitchen table in the artist’s home: the film image appears and disappears at timed intervals. This work alludes both to votive offerings and to Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze (1983) which appeared on the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1988 Daydream Nation album – but like Lauschmann’s earlier films of ‘almost still’ subjects it also reveals the tension between the absent contingency of the real and the static, endless quality of representation.

COME AND HAVE FUN!

After Opel Bastards had played their gig at Optimo, The Sub Club.

Critical Review of an Exhibition by Torsten Lauschmann at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. Recently I visited the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and whilst I was there they had a special exhibition on that was part of the AV festival (International Festival of Art, Technology, Music and Film). The theme this year was ‘As Slow As Possible’. The work on show was by artist Torsten Lauschmann. Immediately, the exhibition captures your attention as you enter into a dark room, which gave off a completely different feeling compared to other exhibition spaces in the gallery and other exhibitions I have been to before. The pieces of art themselves were a combination of film, photography, music and installation art. It appeared to me that they all integrated with one another using a sequence and I feel his work was about being in the moment and watching how they interact with one another. As an example, when the piano played, each key was timed perfectly for the old projectors to switch and the image on screen would change. It was in a way a theatrical performance, the room would be quiet whilst you took in each piece and questioned what its use was then suddenly there would be music and the pieces would come to life interacting with one another. It was almost quite surreal to be there and watch. However, I feel although these parts of his work were interesting and unusual, once you had seen them they became more of a distraction when looking at the rest of the exhibition. Father’s Monacle shown above in the video, was my particular favourite of the whole series of work at the exhibition. The piece is about the behaviour of animal flocking and is projected through a monacle lens. The moving image is made up of numbers and the effect you can see of sharpness and blur is created from the way the monacle would turn. The piece was really quite enchanting to watch because it was slow paced and moved about and without realising you were following the piece. Overall, it was a really engaging exhibition and worked so much better because the artist had made connections between the pieces and his use of sound allowed parts to be really calm and still and for other parts to take you by surprise. I feel particularly it was his creative use of objects such as the monacle and old projectors set up, that I really enjoyed, mostly because of his use of combining old and new technologies as I really enjoy seeing how old projectors and cameras etc work and the aesthetic this gives to an image is something that is hard to recreate even in Photoshop. I still find his work a bewildering as it was difficult to understand any connection between his pieces, other than the timed sequence they were in, but I guess I liked that aspect to his work that you did not necessarily have to understand his ideas behind the pieces just so long as you could experience them as a whole.