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Text from the catalogue: “Reservate der Sehnsucht”, Dortmund 1998. Videowork: “Nóóó, you don’t understand”
A transparent
male body stretches across three video projections, moving minimally
as though floating in an aquarium. Similarly phantom-like fragments
of sounds and sentences emerge from off-screen. Isolated from their
original context in diverse television series, they form cryptic dialogues
that are repeatedly broken by short pauses; short moments of silence.
Neither plots nor actions come into effect, but rather a sterile substitute,
made of little fragments that are, and could make one, emotional.
The snatches of language as well as the expressions of emotion, like
laughter; sobbing, groaning, shrieking, giggling are, in addition
to their acoustic presence, simultaneously transmitted in text and
projected onto the floating body, like subtitles. The appearance and
disappearance of voices in turn, direct his movements in the ‘vacuum’.
"This is your father speaking" is said at one point. It is well known that
film and television are surfaces for the projection and mirroring
of our confessed and hidden longings and passions. Voices, sounds
and film music play an important yet subtle role in this. In Nóóó,
you don't understand Bogers compresses the effects of intonation
parameters, both outside and inside speech -parameters that even
babies are able to decipher and certainly understand. With this he
creates space for certain dramatics that as a spectator; one can hardly
escape from. The lethargy of the passively floating body, reacting
only to 'His Master's Voice', is passed on to the position of the
viewer. The subtle suggestive power of mass media, capable of manipulating
our moods considerably (this is of course how advertising operates),
seems both isolated and isolating alike; it appears as a powerful
discourse that we enter willingly. (I.D.) |