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Wolfgang Staehle, 2001
Wolfgang Staehle, «2001», du 6 septembre au 6 octobre 2001(Edit)
installation
Staehle most recent work explores the dynamics, sensations and implications of connectivity. The exhibition at Postmasters will focus on large-scale, real time video projections from locations around the world.
Effectively transcending technology into a somewhat Warholian update of the landscape genre, the first of these pieces presented a live image of the Empire State Building in New York. "Empire 24/7" was included in the "net_condition" show at ZKM Center in Karlsruhe in 2000 and in "loans from the invisible museum" at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco.
In 1996, Staehle began to produce an ongoing series of live online video streams. The first of these works was Empire 24/7, a continuous recording of the top one-third of the Empire State Building that is broadcast live over the Internet. Staehle has followed Empire 24/7 with online streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as Berlin's Fernsehturm, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, lower Manhattan before and after 9/11, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian Amazon.
Staehle's exhibition at Postmasters will consist of three new web-transmissions: the instantly recognizable television tower in Berlin, the medival Comburg monastery, and a spectacular panoramic view of lower Manhattan.
The projections - a visceral experience in synchronicity - offer an instantaneous compression of time and space.
Non-relative terms like "here" and "now" attain a new meaning where the literal and the metaphorical converge.
In today's ever-present, frenetic networking of the the globe as a way of experiencing anything anywhere anytime, Staehle offers the antidote of a reflective slowdown of beautiful images, close and far away, static and changing at the same time.
L'installation de Wolfgang Staehle, 2001, comportait trois webcams, dont l'une filmait en direct le World Trade Center. Ces enregistrements en temps réel ont été projetés du 6 septembre ou 6 octobre 2001 sur les murs de la Postmasters Gallery à New York. En raison des événements du 11 septembre, ces images du centre de New York ont pris une dimension tragique inattendue.
LOWER MANHATTAN
photogrammes: webcam installée à Manhattan
Enregistrement en temps réel du panorama Sud de Manhattan, diffusé en direct sur Internet pendant toute la durée du mois de septembre 2001 et témoin involontaire des événements du 11 septembre.
Durée : 24 heures
COMBURG
photogrammes: webcam installée à Comburg
BERLIN
photogrammes: webcam installée à Berlin
ANNOUNCE EXHIBITION "2001" (by Postmasters Art Gallery, NYC)
September 6, 2001 - October 6, 2001
Wolfgang Staehle
“2001”
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of "2001" - an exhibition of new works by Wolfgang Staehle. The show will open on September 6 and will be on view until October 6, 2001. The reception is scheduled for Thursday, September 6, between 6 and 8 pm. For Wolfgang Staehle, widely recognized as a pioneer of the internet art scene, this will be the first solo exhibition in New York in ten years. Staehle was born in Stuttgart in 1950, grew up in Schwaebisch Hall, and has been living in New York since 1976, where he worked as a video artist. In 1991 he founded THE THING, an independent media project which began as a bulletin board system (BBS) and became one of the seminal online- and offline- forums for net.art. Staehle most recent work explores the dynamics, sensations and implications of connectivity. The exhibition at Postmasters will focus on large-scale, real time video projections from locations around the world. Effectively transcending technology into a somewhat Warholian update of the landscape genre, the first of these pieces presented a live image of the Empire State Building in New York. "Empire 24/7" was included in the "net_condition" show at ZKM Center in Karlsruhe in 2000 and in "loans from the invisible museum" at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco in 2001. Staehle's exhibition at Postmasters will consist of three new web-transmissions: the instantly recognizable television tower in Berlin, the medieval Comburg monastery, and a spectacular panoramic view of lower Manhattan. The projections - a visceral experience in synchronicity - where the net is utilized as data pipeline, offer an instantaneous compression of time and space. Non-relative terms like "here" and "now" attain a new meaning where the literal and the metaphorical converge. In today's ever-present, frenetic networking of the the globe as a way of experiencing anything anywhere anytime, Staehle offers the antidote of a reflective slowdown of beautiful images, close and far away, static and changing at the same time.
INTERVIEW (NYMAG)
The Accidental Historian
Artist Wolfgang Staehle inadvertently recorded the 9/11 attacks during his last show. His new exhibit: mostly landscapes.
By Karen Rosenberg
Wolfgang Staehle’s last show at Postmasters Gallery, which opened on September 6, 2001, included a panoramic projection of lower Manhattan updated every four seconds via Webcam and dedicated “To the People of New York.” Several days later, it became an unintended portrait of the newly severed skyline. Karen Rosenberg spoke to the veteran Net artist.
What was it like to have your art become a record of 9/11?
People talked about how lucky I was, all this nonsense. The work was set up with completely different intentions—it was against spectacle. Recently, I didn’t get a grant from National Video Resources. The administrator told me the jury was divided. She said, “This 9/11 thing—it’s a blessing and a curse.”
But you can’t blame people, given what happened.
No, of course not. It is remarkable. A lot of people wanted the footage. I gave it out once, to the philosopher Paul Virilio, for a show in Paris. I have it in a safe place.
Did the work’s meaning change for you?
I’m indifferent! I went to the gallery that day, and two of my friends came by, and one said, “Oh, Wolfgang, this is a really important piece now.” I said, “What do you mean—it wasn’t before?” The other friend said, “No, it’s ruined now, its whole meaning is changed.” I said, “You’re both nuts.” I just set up a camera, and of course things can happen.
That’s very Warholian of you.
Yeah, but it’s really more inspired by European Continental philosophy, to perceive things in their authenticity. I’m interested in what happens when nothing happens.
Do people ever perceive your work as surveillance?
The other day, I was in my sports club at Chelsea Piers, and I went out on the deck with my video camera. The manager asked me to shut it off. He was going on about the convention. It’s ridiculous—anyone with a cell phone can take pictures anywhere, but if you have a camera they’ll arrest you.
Your new camera work mostly records landscapes, like the Hudson River Valley.
It’s reminiscent of nineteenth-century Hudson River School painting—playing with the sublime, this wild scenery that people were so fascinated by when they came from Europe.
The show opens Friday, September 10.
Postmasters usually opens on Saturdays. (The director) said, “Maybe we should change it.” I said, “That’s even worse.” But I agreed, in the end. To open on the 11th would have been such a distraction, again. That was a reason I went for the landscape this time. I thought, “What can happen in a landscape?”
EXPOSITION "CE QUI ARRIVE"
Ce qui arrive
Une exposition conçue par Paul Virilio'''
29 novembre 2002 – 30 mars 2003
Fondation Cartier
Reconnu comme l’un des pionniers du net-art, Wolfgang Staehle avait placé une web-cam en face de Manhattan, avec l’intention de créer, avec des moyens d’aujourd’hui, un paysage dans la tradition picturale du XVIIe siècle. En raison des événements du 11 septembre, ses images ont pris un caractère tragique inattendu.
Dossier de presse :
http://fondation.cartier.com/_fichiers/presse_fichier_112.pdf
Like paintings, the projected video images in Wolfgang Staehle's "2001" were static. And like movies, they weren't: every four seconds, around the clock, they were minutely adjusted, as the video-fed, Internet-transmitted photographs of three far-flung sites were continually updated. One showed an 11th-century monastery in rural Comburg, Germany; a second displayed the upper portion of the Fernsehturm in Berlin, a TV tower and tourist landmark that houses a revolving restaurant. The third, a 9-by-23-foot panorama, gave us the lower Manhattan skyline, seen from the waterfront in Brooklyn. The regular, soundless lurch of these scenes, a kind of decorous visual stutter, was barely detectable in the Comburg and Fernsehturm projections, where the only changes were the diurnal and meteorological rhythms of light and occasional flights of birds. But the cameras aimed at lower Manhattan also captured river and bridge traffic, its halting progress oddly, serene, the four-second intervals pushing the little boats and cars along like a child playing with toys. Patently artificial yet obviously real and live—a counter at the bottom of each image marked the date and time—these images (which could only be viewed in the gallery; they were not accessible over the Internet) quietly played havoc with what we think we know about the world before our eyes.
And, of course, they were played havoc with in turn. The World Trade Center catastrophe caught Staehle's work, like everything else, by surprise. An attack shaped in part (as many commentators have observed) by imagery, it generated a great deal more of it as the towers went down. Measured by the impassive, steady blink of Staehle's cameras, a world was blown apart, and among the infinity of things whose meanings changed utterly was his project. Faith, communication and commerce, the triad for which his three subjects stand (or stood), are only some of the cultural signal systems that were irreparably scrambled.
Staehle is a video artist widely acclaimed as a Web-art pioneer; he launched the indispensable Internet forum The Thing as an independent media project in 1991. This is his first solo gallery exhibition in a decade. He invokes Martin Heidegger to help frame the ideas his project engages. In an eerily prescient 1935 text cited by Staehle in English and German on a monitor at the entrance to the show, Heidegger laments the moral implications of the globalization of technology and capital.
Other equally haunting speculations come to mind concerning the conjunction of Staehle's media-driven esthetic and the movielike quality of the images issuing from the tragic events of September 11. "Why are there two towers at New York's World Trade Center?" Jean Baudrillard asked in 1983. "The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference," he concluded. They are "the visible sign of the closure of the system in a vertigo of duplication." Baudrillard's writing, as emblematic of the 1980s as the towers, and, in some quarters, as inescapable, later came to sound shrill, even a little silly. Now the media-brokered version of events, the "vertigo of duplication" in which Staehle's work participates, is another lesson that must be relearned from scratch.
(COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc. — COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group)
Lorsque en septembre 2001, la projection vidéo retransmise en live de Manhattan de Wolfgang Staehle avait capté en direct la destruction du World Trade Center, des critiques d’art s’étaient émerveillés de cette grande victoire de l’art sur les mass media, ses rivaux naturels dans le domaine de l’information.
Mais on peut également se faire la réflexion que l’art aurait tout intérêt à se retirer de la course aux scoops, et accessoirement tout à perdre dans la confusion grandissante entre lui-même et l’événementiel. L’art prétendant informer peut-il espérer mieux que de devenir une forme d’infotainment parmi d’autres.''
(Communiqué de Presse Exposition Op-Ed World - Swetlana Heger, No Picture Available (Stéphane Dafflon), Hugo Pernet, Hugo Schüwer-Boss-Boss, Anne-Sophie Terrillon, Blair Thurman, Kelley Walker - Commissaire : Vincent Pécoil, 10 mars - 7 avril 2007)
http://www.galeriefrankelbaz.com/data/past/OpEdWorld-Dossier.pdf
ART.NET.DORTMUND
http://artnetenglish.dortmund.de/
In September 2001 Wolfgang Staehle set up various live-webcam installations in Postmasters Gallery in New York. Photographs of a monastery by Stuttgart and the television tower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin were relayed to the gallery at 5-second intervals. The central work was a wide-angle view of downtown Manhattan photographed from Brooklyn – an almost static image, although it too was refreshed at 5-second intervals. But on 11 September 2001, Staehle's cameras captured perhaps the most comprehensive footage of the attack on the WorldTradeCenter, from the beginning up to the ultimate collapse of the twin towers.
This temporal congruence means that Staehle's project will forever be associated with the attack on the WTC. His installation was specifically directed against the media's obsession with spectacle and sensation, and yet it happened to record the most spectacular crime of modern times. Staehle has chosen not to provide the mass media with the access that would result in endless showings of his footage; instead, the images remain concealed in his archive.
In Dortmund it was possible to see recordings of the weeks following the attacks. The dates reveal this temporal vicinity, and make tangible the alternation between apocalyptic shudders and insouciance, between sensational reports and disappearance without trace. And what is ultimately transmitted by the apparently calm and permanently regenerated image is also the latent, lethal threat to the western order – a system not universally loved but still believed to be unshakeable. Insecurity and violability has become fundamental.
(Ute Vorkoeper)
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