Moveless Movies
Glance through the final chapter of the general catalog which the Museum of Modern Art in New York publishes; there the reader is informed about the museum’s film collection, and looking at the reproductions we recognize many famous “spots” – from Charlie Chaplin to Stanley Kubrick – which are indelibly preserved in our memories.
Motionless images from films, aptly called “stills”, contradict the illusion of continuous motions normally conveyed by the medium film (with the astute exception of Andy Warhol’s film “Empire” from the year 1964). For just as dimensions can only be depicted adequately in their own terms, and, say, two-dimensional graphic presentations of three-dimensional data may always remain – as Marcel Duchamp once noted – “shadowy” and require a dimensional translation in the viewer’s mind, so also it would seem there is a comparable difference between the multiplicative medium film and the claim to depict it in reproduced, printed form.
This obvious disparity is one of the stumbling blocks, which lead us directly into the complicated relationship of Peter Bradtke’s paintings to reality. To Bertolt Brecht is attributed the allegedly paradoxical utterance: “To be better understood, I prefer to express myself somewhat circumstantially.” As if to emulate Brecht, Bradtke complicates the problematical situation just underscored by dealing with the medium film not at the level of reproductions but in the form of “handmade” singleton exemplars or unica. One may ask whether this “circumstantiality” constitutes a radicalization, which facilitates understanding.
When Bradtke returned to West Germany in 1975 from a trip through the United States and began painting an extensive series of- in part, large dimensional – landscapes, he used as a kind of sketchbook a film he had recorded for purposes of private documentation during his stay in the cities as well as in the thinly populated semiarid regions of the United States. A distinctive feature of our cosmopolitan existence, namely the fact that large segments of the film were shot from out of a moving car, had visual perceptual consequences, which didn’t elude the artist’s keen eyes. He has brought them to bear in a way, which makes his paintings both “true to nature” and “true to civilization”: Whereas what is termed “foreground” in the classical illusionism of post medieval art up through academicism is blurred by Bradtke to the point of unrecognizability. Further upward in his paintings, towards the “background” a progressive clarification takes place, which allows conclusions to be drawn concerning the subject matter of that part of the representation, which would otherwise remain thematically enigmatic or even unidentifiable. The phenomenon thus described is of course easily explained; it corresponds exactly to perceiving a landscape from inside a rapidly moving vehicle. This implies however that the evoking of distance, seemingly derived from classical illusionism, which occurs in Bradtke’s painting effects a reversal of academic traditions; normally we would expect the foreground to be represented as sharply defined, the background as progressively blurred. In this case then: the further the distance, the sharper the (image-)focus.
This impression also arises when one looks at more recent paintings by Peter Bradtke – not relative to the illusion of depth which is present in the images, but relative to the distance between the viewer and the painting. The perception is elicited by the use of the previously depicted blurring process affecting a wider area, albeit with tempered radicalness; the entire motif is apparently so blurred that it’s difficult to recognize anything from close up.
The motifs themselves have a logical connection with this reception, insofar as generally metropolitan scenes are involved. The torrent of traffic on a bustling street – since 1986 Peter Bradtke has been living in New York – moves on so close to the passerby that only by not standing there with unmoving eyes can he identify many things simultaneously.
Roughly stated, Bradtke’s entire artistic production from the last fifteen years can be grouped under three headings according to motifs: landscapes, city scenes, and, most recently in particular, more or less discrete interior scenes. This sparingness of motifs might appear to be a flaw, if it weren’t for a completely different motif, which comes to the fore with unsurpassably sparing singularity and radically dominates all representational variations, making them a function of itself. “The unmoving look” is this motif, the motive, is the film, which runs in Bradtke’s paintings, in motion-or which Bradtke’s paintings project onto or into the heads of their viewers.
That the interpretive scope of this motif is wider and runs deeper than the – to put it frankly – banality of the visually registrable picture-stories is corroborated not only by the perceptual conditions which obtain in each particular case, but also by the fact that in Bradtke’s most recent works the “unmoving look” has acquired a supplementary dimension which one could be inclined to categorize as “psychological”.
And Bradtke’s paintings seem to encourage such an interpretation: There’s the observer who in the darkness of a parked car is looking intently – “which unmoving eyes”- into the rear-view mirror or has in his sight some object beyond the car window which the viewer in front a/the painting cannot perceive; there is the indirectly or only partially illuminated face of a man standing similarly attentively in front of a half-opened door, or behind Venetian blinds looking out through a slit; and sometimes the viewer of Bradtke’s paintings is given a look at one of those conceivable “objects” – a dressing or undressing beauty. As the one-man-pictures tend to suggest: The look is the voyeur’s look, and the unmoving eyes are interpretable as receivers of very moving impressions.
To be sure, that sounds like psychology, but let’s not forget: We are participants in a fictitious film! And what we get to see are “stills” – comparable to those we encountered in the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art. The “spots” we are looking at are partes pro toto, like those sought by the reader of pornographic texts.
In both cases, art documentation and pornography, what one perceives is founded on simulation; and Bradtke is well versed in drawing on the various registers, which make such chords possible! Starting with broached motifs which almost inevitably provide the viewer with roving eyes whose looking askance (literally and figuratively) is buffered by the use lately of slightly nonrectangular formats, the trick repertoire of this painter-director goes on to include all possible tonalities and even illusions which don’t halt at the borders of the medium in which Bradtke operates. Things go so far that even a still life with telephone, in the vicinity of other works by the artist, doesn’t remain a “still life”: Any minute you seem to hear the shrill ringing of the telephone – because you’re waiting for it and expect from it a relaxing of the atmospheric tension you sense. Nevertheless, each one of these paintings is, as already mentioned, a pars pro toto. Construed as a state of existence in which the viewer is a functional part of the social and historical context to which the artist as well as the figures he depicts belong, the concept of simulation cannot be confined to the subjective-psychological domain. The contradiction which arises between the feelings depicted by the artist and experienced relatively uncontrolledly by the viewer of the paintings on the one hand and the thoroughly illusionary nature of the situation thus engendered on the other hand is nearly the same as the one we have come to know as spectators in many films: involuntary empathy versus concentrated effort to maintain rational detachment. That Bradtke mostly gives his own facial features to the figure of the captivated observer is an indication that he doesn’t except himself from the depicted dialectic; and in his most recent works he extends it to include stylistic details when – exercising his artistic sovereignty – he does large parts of the painting in loose brush-strokes, while only the “chief protagonist” appears in customary, ambiguously interpretable sharpness. However, the fact that Bradtke uses the medium of unicum paintings is not explainable simply as voluntary integration of the subjective interventional capacity into the objectifying tendencies present in the mass – medium film. Because under such circumstances it would no longer be appropriate to speak of dialectic; instead one would think one had been transported into an ambience which, by no longer allowing a distinction between objective totalitarian and subjective-compulsive aspects, displays all the attributes of closed and unconscious immanence such as Herbert Marcuse ominously depicted it a quarter century ago in his book The One-dimensional Man.
If we consider it nevertheless appropriate to interpret Bradtke’s paintings as vehicles, creators, and consciousness-raisers of subtly sharpened contradictions, then this could be ascribed to the aforementioned complexity, indeed circumstantiality with which the artist radicalizes the tension between the medium he thematizes: film, and the medium he has chosen for expressing the not merely immanent aspects of that theme: namely by producing unicum paintings -”… to be better understood”.
Walter Benjamin may have falsely appraised the then new medium film, but a formulation of his concerning art production under the conditions of technical reproducibility sheds a strong light on the contradiction spawning factor of motion in Bradtke’s paintings: They figure the “dialectic at a standstill” which passes on to the viewer the potential impulse to act.
That this happens in a way which doesn’t preclude a wealth of pleasurable sensuousness gives the paintings pith to evolve with autonomy alongside the powerful medium to which they refer.
By Uli Bohnen