Cassandra etc.
Jörg Madlener works in grandiose epic series. He constructs linked variations on leitmotifs and main figures, repeatedly dissects his motifs, constructs visual fugues with the disciplined logic of a Baroque composer. Yet his art is never an end in itself or mere playful experimentation. It is always engaged, it is a response to fundamental issues having to do with human conflicts, with tragedies past and present. This is evident in “Sandstorm,” for example, one of his best-known series. The title of the multifaceted cycle unambiguously recalls the First Gulf War, which came to be better known as “Desert Storm.” As patterns, Madlener used documentary photographs from the war, snapshots of the corpses of fallen soldiers. He veils these views of death in the harsh desert light, pictures the gradual disappearance of the victims of war in panoramas blurred by sfumato. Diffuse, hazy backgrounds in shades of beige become an allegorical sandstorm, one that symbolizes the deadly sway of politics, and illustrates, quite literally, the “disintegration” of the individual in wartime.
Madlener’s second great series on the theme of war is his “Cassandra.” Here, as well, he employs veiled images symbolically, as a way of picturing the death of the individual caught up in a fatal historical moment. According to Greek myth, Cassandra was a war casualty of a special kind. The god Apollo fell in love with the beautiful daughter of Troy’s king Priam, and as an enticement gave her gift of prophecy. But Cassandra would not relent, and rejected the god. He promptly exacted revenge by laying a fateful curse on the seeress: no one would ever give credence to her predictions. Thus it was in vain that Cassandra tried to warn her countrymen of the Greeks’ deception with the famous Trojan Horse. Half mad, she was therefore forced to witness the destruction of her homeland, she was abducted, raped, and finally killed as part of Agamemnon’s war booty.
Jörg Madlener pictures Cassandra as a rudimentary face that appears to be veiled, one that is either embedded in a ponderous black picture space or set against a blurred pastel background. The victim of “higher powers” loses her contours. Cassandra’s story stands for the loss of truth, the arbitrary workings “from above,” and the iron machinery of history that propel wars to the worst possible conclusions.
In his variations on the brutal Cassandra story Madlener uses dissolution and blurring as ambiguous but telling pictorial motifs. The “facelessness” can be directly associated with the well-known Cassandra legend: the veiled visage that eludes the viewer’s gaze suggests the mysteries of the future that only a seer can unravel, and underscores the special role of the visionary who is not restricted to everyday modes of perception. The bleached-out, dissected face also stands for Cassandra’s total isolation. She finds herself in an empty space, she is unrecognized, she is - as expressed in one title - a “woman without a shadow,” no longer capable of communicating even with light. At the same time, the face demonstrates that even - or most especially - exceptional figures are mercilessly ground down by the acts of warlords. Her physiognomy’s distortion and abstraction suggest the deranged mental state of the scorned royal daughter, driven into madness by contemporary circumstances. The impossibility of reconciling the truth as perceived by one individual with the false beliefs of society has virtually torn her apart, pushed her beyond her emotional and physical limits. This is precisely why Madlener first pictures her throwing up, forced to spew forth her despair.
In his staging of the prophetess the artist was inspired in part by Christa Wolf’s famous story “Cassandra” from 1983. Christa Wolf exploited the events of the Trojan War in part as a way of alluding to contemporary political issues, from the division of the country to the feminist movement. Madlener also uses his Cassandra as a reproof to the present day; for example, he pictures her as a “Beslan girl,” a victim of the bloody hostage-taking in Beslan during the Chechnyan conflict in 2004. Madlener’s Cassandra is distinctly topical in a wholly different sense as well: the seeress’s figure is frequently nearly swallowed up by black, her face the only spot of vivid color. As an expression of the vitality of color, this face is also possibly a symbol for art, which has always warned us - with no more success than Cassandra - about the violence of political “Sandstorms”.
Dr. Peter Joch, Director Kunsthalle Darmstadt
“For the facts that make up the world need the non-factual as a vantage point from which to be perceived.“
Ingeborg Bachmann: The Franza Case
“Seeing implies distance, the decision that causes separation, the power not to be in contact and to avoid the confusion of contact. Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an encounter. But what happens when what you see, even from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasping contact, when the manner of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze has been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance?
Fascination is vision that is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing.
Fascination is tied in a fundamental way to the neutral, impersonal presence, the indeterminate One, the immense and faceless Someone.
The Greek myth says one cannot create a work unless the enormous experience of depth – … an experience in which the work is put to the test by that enormousness – is not pursued for its own sake. The depth does not surrender itself face to face. It only reveals itself by concealing itself in the work.“
Maurice Blanchot: The gaze of Orpheus
