Gudrun Bott
White Balance
Ulrike Möschel’s works sensitize us to the emotional temperature of spaces and things. Removed from their familiar, everyday surroundings, a common repertoire of simple objects—such as doors, windows, swings, slides, cradles, or electricity poles—bring to mind individual images in each viewer. Although we may imagine that they could be of use, this notion falters when we realize that, as sculptural works, they have lost all of their usefulness in the process of being transformed into art.
The swing, for instance, hangs by a “silver” thread, for the twisted ropes holding it up dissolve at precisely the point where the hands ought to grasp them. Looking like shimmering angel’s hair, frayed white synthetic threads well up out of the ends of the cut cords, revealing what is inside: a fragile silver thread, covered in gold leaf, and we see that everything hangs by this thread. Thus, on one hand, the very harmonious aesthetics of the perfectly white swing and rope give rise to thoughts of possible danger, which shift to thoughts of a child’s naïve impulse to swing as hard as possible, until it reaches the point of forgetting itself. The swing is turned into an intangible image, but the question of how the fatal rope “cuts” occurred is left unanswered.
Compared with this rather careful, subtle intervention, the slide, which has literally been driven to the wall, displays obvious traces of violence. The crushed, bent piece of metal looks as if it has been drilled into the plaster, and its massive mutilation seems to be the result of an inexplicable crash. But where did the energy come from? Who did this? What will happen next? Supported by its fractured ladder, with legs resembling those of an insect, the slide, despite its damaged condition, has the almost graceful elegance of a frail, dancing figure. “And it is still standing”: in line with this notion, the slide gains a new identity as a sculpture, by counteracting the loss of its down-to-earth existence as a plaything, with a delicate beauty that is free of the context of utilization, a beauty that is literally fragile.
Through these sculptural works, all of them dating from 2009, Möschel leads us to focus on the manifestation of the aesthetic, expensive-looking surfaces with delicate, graphic inscriptions and porcelain-like smoothness. At the same time, she contaminates their memory-laden status as objects, using narrative interventions and shifts to mutilate them. Thus, through a dialectic combining beauty, fragility, and promise on one side, and danger, injury, and threat on the other, she creates metaphorically charged, unstable moments, images of precarious balance. Nevertheless, their effect is unemotional, since they retain a sense of immediate, artistic curiosity.
The artist is always finding things and phenomena in her environment that will serve as starting points for new works of art. For example, during a sojourn as an artist-in-residence in the country, she began noticing the electricity poles scattered across the landscape. Antler-like transversals carry insulators made of glazed ceramic, and electric wires run through them. Möschel runs electric wires into the building and through several rooms inside. They are held up by a slightly tilted pole, wedged between the floor and ceiling. Its glowing white paint reminds one of a perfect furniture finish, rather than the weather-beaten, fissured, overland electricity poles. Here, too, the artist’s aesthetic transformation creates the same palpable balance between the prosaic, everyday side of familiar things and their imaginary, fictitious, personal charge. By connecting these two levels, the artist forces the viewer to recognize what is offered in her art, an ambivalence that probably marks our every encounter with an image: the challenge of finding the hidden, dark sides in what is light, promising, and precious, and to relate that to one’s own experiences and memories.
I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth.
(Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London: Nelson & Sons[allpm1] , 1977, p. 7)
Schloss Ringenberg , 2010
White Balance
Ulrike Möschel’s works sensitize us to the emotional temperature of spaces and things. Removed from their familiar, everyday surroundings, a common repertoire of simple objects—such as doors, windows, swings, slides, cradles, or electricity poles—bring to mind individual images in each viewer. Although we may imagine that they could be of use, this notion falters when we realize that, as sculptural works, they have lost all of their usefulness in the process of being transformed into art.
The swing, for instance, hangs by a “silver” thread, for the twisted ropes holding it up dissolve at precisely the point where the hands ought to grasp them. Looking like shimmering angel’s hair, frayed white synthetic threads well up out of the ends of the cut cords, revealing what is inside: a fragile silver thread, covered in gold leaf, and we see that everything hangs by this thread. Thus, on one hand, the very harmonious aesthetics of the perfectly white swing and rope give rise to thoughts of possible danger, which shift to thoughts of a child’s naïve impulse to swing as hard as possible, until it reaches the point of forgetting itself. The swing is turned into an intangible image, but the question of how the fatal rope “cuts” occurred is left unanswered.
Compared with this rather careful, subtle intervention, the slide, which has literally been driven to the wall, displays obvious traces of violence. The crushed, bent piece of metal looks as if it has been drilled into the plaster, and its massive mutilation seems to be the result of an inexplicable crash. But where did the energy come from? Who did this? What will happen next? Supported by its fractured ladder, with legs resembling those of an insect, the slide, despite its damaged condition, has the almost graceful elegance of a frail, dancing figure. “And it is still standing”: in line with this notion, the slide gains a new identity as a sculpture, by counteracting the loss of its down-to-earth existence as a plaything, with a delicate beauty that is free of the context of utilization, a beauty that is literally fragile.
Through these sculptural works, all of them dating from 2009, Möschel leads us to focus on the manifestation of the aesthetic, expensive-looking surfaces with delicate, graphic inscriptions and porcelain-like smoothness. At the same time, she contaminates their memory-laden status as objects, using narrative interventions and shifts to mutilate them. Thus, through a dialectic combining beauty, fragility, and promise on one side, and danger, injury, and threat on the other, she creates metaphorically charged, unstable moments, images of precarious balance. Nevertheless, their effect is unemotional, since they retain a sense of immediate, artistic curiosity.
The artist is always finding things and phenomena in her environment that will serve as starting points for new works of art. For example, during a sojourn as an artist-in-residence in the country, she began noticing the electricity poles scattered across the landscape. Antler-like transversals carry insulators made of glazed ceramic, and electric wires run through them. Möschel runs electric wires into the building and through several rooms inside. They are held up by a slightly tilted pole, wedged between the floor and ceiling. Its glowing white paint reminds one of a perfect furniture finish, rather than the weather-beaten, fissured, overland electricity poles. Here, too, the artist’s aesthetic transformation creates the same palpable balance between the prosaic, everyday side of familiar things and their imaginary, fictitious, personal charge. By connecting these two levels, the artist forces the viewer to recognize what is offered in her art, an ambivalence that probably marks our every encounter with an image: the challenge of finding the hidden, dark sides in what is light, promising, and precious, and to relate that to one’s own experiences and memories.
I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth.
(Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London: Nelson & Sons[allpm1] , 1977, p. 7)
Schloss Ringenberg , 2010