SHOWCASE: HERWIG WEISER
IFFI 2022 – 25.05.2022
A work show is dedicated to the artist Herwig Weiser. In one program item 18 of his experimental short films from 1993 to 2022 will be shown. After the award ceremony HAUS DER REGIERUNG (Herwig Weiser, Nik Hummer, Philipp Quehenberger) will set matrix films by Herwig Weiser to music. On 20.5.2022 an Herwig Weiser exhibition were opened in the Johann Widauer Gallery. It runs until 24.6.2022. The talk with Herwig Weiser is conducted by Isabella Reicher.
Text by Stefan Grissemann
RISING PANIC, A TREMBLING WORLD.
THE ENIGMATIC MOVING IMAGE WORK
BY ARTIST HERWIG WEISER.
The darkness in the films of Herwig Weiser is brittle (even his works shot in daylight have something nocturnal, dusky and somnambulistic about them). We owe it to the penetrating artificial light, the very foundation of cinema, that we can see something in them at all. It creates an illusion of bodies and spaces, helps constructing the scenes, the protagonists and the stories. The light that Weiser creates, however, is different from what we are used to in cinema. It appears erratic, rends the darkness apart as if searching for something, as if it were not yet clear what it wants to say; it glares and shines so intensely into the images that the illusions seem like they are about to break.
Weiser sees his films as ‘unstable sculptures’; and indeed, everything in them is in motion – the people, the objects and, in particular, the architecture around which his work permanently revolves. He intersects the incorporeality of the projections by taking his work physically and turning it into radically somatic experiences. At times, his interventions are drastic, designed to evoke fear and dizziness; his scenarios tend to resemble dystopias; Weiser himself calls it a form of ‘apocalypse’ that can be found in his work.
He has been producing moving images for around 30 years; they engage in a productive relationship with his installations and are being used as their expansions in museum spaces. Sometimes his works only last for several seconds; the longest ones are between eight and eleven minutes long. Weiser’s settings reject the idea of a dramaturgic heterogeneity; his films essentially follow one (and only one) vision that he consistently processes, just like in a song with three chords. Even in his earliest works, Weiser has been alternating between photographic film and video material, between abstraction and concreteness, document and fiction. The latent contradiction in these productions can already be found in their titles: almost all of them are called UNTITLED; to be able to distinguish them, every film has a descriptive title in parenthesis: UNTITLED (TESTBILD), UNTITLED (BILDERDIJK) and UNTITLED (BIRDS) marked the beginning of Weiser’s filmography in 1993. The namelessness is deliberate. Untitled also means serial structure, the preliminary, the anonymous. Weiser’s works consist of deconstructed space and manipulated time, often formulated as anxiously jerking sequences of individual images at the frontiers between avantgarde film, performance and installation. The subjects shown do not appear ‘as they are’ but rather indirectly, filtered, blurred, obscured, darkened – ‘de-actualised’ in the coarse grain of cine film images or turned into something ‘graphic’ in electromagnetic blurring – they are products of a specific mediality, clearly marked as ‘mediated’. Herwig Weiser’s films, subcultural no-budget spectacles radiating the spirit of post-punk and Anglo-American indust- rial cultures, set traps of perception. ENTREE (1999) chases images of an entertainment park in France through the film machinery; they are turned into a meta-sci-fi piece that celebrates the kaleidoscopic gaze of an altered consciousness. Weiser’s works have always centred on ritualism and animism. Tyrolean customs and traditions serve as a perfect blueprint, as UNTITLED (SPIEGELTUXER) and UNTITLED (SCHELLERER) show: Weiser perceives folklore mask games, which he turns into something eerie, as pagan cults. The dead eyes of the wooden masks gaze at you insistingly. Weiser’s interest in mutated faces can also be found in UNTITLED (FACE), a series of stylized, animal-human visages that develop like a moving phantom drawing.
HAUS DER REGIERUNG (GOVERNMENT HOUSE) is, technically speaking, Weiser’s most complex film: we could read it as an attempt at eeriness, at “the uncanny” as described by Sigmund Freud: a chain of uncomfortably alienating, repetitive events that have risen from the subconsciousness as inexplicable secrets. Weiser’s GOVERNMENT HOUSE, named after an infamous building complex in Moscow from Stalinist times, turns into a haunted house, a staging scene that leaves us in the dark about where the architectural document ends and the performance begins, what still evokes spook-space atmosphere and what has already become action theatre. Weiser connects the past (of his location, of the genre associations) with the future (of humanity, of cinema); out of the spider webs that sprawl in this haunted house a futuristic terror evolves; doors open on both sides of the shock corridors in this gloomy building, allowing corded shadow people to lean out.
The sheer vibration of the phenomena captured in single frames is not the only technical attraction: there are material leaps, light changes and flashes that redirect the gaze to make us look at entangled phantoms roaming cinemas and theatres. HAUS DER REGIERUNG is an abstraction of a horror thriller, a cinematic allegory of derailing, liberated projection light. And with this, time has come apart at the seams, no longer adheres to former conventions, can be stretched and expanded. A certain suspense of space takes on a specific form: it is not by chance that Weiser (not only in this film) plays with a fear of heights, just like Hitchcock loves steep stairs and unfathomable staircases as a motif; the barely 25-seconds-long action miniature UNTITLED (BIRDS) revolves around an intrusive flock of pigeons, ironically condensing the fifties horror-thriller THE BIRDS into a nutshell. Weiser also wittily inscribes himself into other parts of film history. In UNTITLED (FULL NYLON JACKET) from 2013, he lets a synthetic winter jacket dance and float down a bobsled run as if in a David Lynch fantasy.
Weiser’s works must be understood as acts of performative sabotage – a thesis encapsulated in OLYMPIA, realised in collaboration with Hannes Baumann, a piece documenting a protest in the dead of night: The artists unceremoniously knock the Olympic Rings off the Bergisel ski jump. Art intervenes. Irritation engages.
