back

One-Person Exhibitions

New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, October 8, 1998-January 3, 1999

Goethe-Institut, Yaoundé, Cameroon, 1997

Goethe-Institut, London, 1997

Three Legged Race, Firehouse, Harlem, New York, 1996

Keep in View, Stichtung De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, 1993

Selected Group Exhibitions

Deutschlandbilder, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 1997

Fremdkörper, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, 1996

Video-Spaces, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995

Cocido y crudo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1994

Old Glory, the American Flag in Contemporary Art, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, 1994

Allégorie de la richesse, Humboldt Universität, Berlin, 1993

Selected Books and Exhibition Catalogs

Cameron, Dan. Deutschlandbilder: Kunst aus einem geteilten Land. Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1997.

Fukui International Video Biennale. Fourth Fukui International Video Biennale. Fukui, Japan: Fukui International Video Biennale, 1991.

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Deutschsein? Eine Ausstellung gegen Fremdenhaas und Gewalt. Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1993.

Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. Blickpunkte. Montreal: Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, 1990.

Virilio, Paul. Passage de l'Image. Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990.

Marcel Odenbach

In the 1990s, video installation has become the paradigm of choice for neoconceptual art. Given the many uses of video installation-telling stories (Sam Taylor-Wood, Ilya Kabakov), documentation (Gillian Wearing, Willie Doherty), metacommentary on the experience of film and television (Stan Douglas, Pippilotti Rist, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen), or simply as one element in an overall environment (Tony Oursler, Diana Thater, Keith Piper)-it can be said that video-based neoconceptualism is the lingua franca of today's international art world. It is a kind of audiovisual pidgin in the age of globalization.

Marcel Odenbach occupies a distinct place in this milieu in that he is not embarrassed by his interest in the "big issues" of the day. Found footage depicting the break-up of the Berlin Wall appears across his works. Images of the wall along with images of anonymous immigrants, exiles, and refugees flow in a cascade of received quotations from twentieth-century history, flickering up and fading away over actuality material depicting quotidian banality, e.g., a train journey on the Mediterranean coast, children playing in a public park, boats sailing on the Hudson River, exhausted stragglers at the end of a marathon. These juxtapositions imply that for Odenbach art and politics are not as incompatible as the existence of the category of "issue-based" art would lead one to believe. Along with the cuts and flows of heterogeneous sound and image, the spatial, sculptural, and even architectural dimensions of Odenbach's installations function to disrupt the viewer's position and decenter the ideological fixity whereby representations taken to signify the "big issues"-racism, nationalism, history itself-are construed as self-evident truths. Odenbach's work makes for an altered response.

As a manifestation of contemporary witnessing, Odenbach's body of work offers an open-ended encounter with the potentially traumatic realm of historical reality as an experience of uncertainty ordinarily covered over and warded away from consciousness by the "work" of representation. Moreover, by emptying the image of its obviousness, Odenbach's art is neither media critique nor counter-information, since it rejects the false security of an "alternative" position whose goal is to reach a judgment which would nonetheless return the judging gaze (whether of the left, right, or whatever) to a fixed or centered place of moral self-certainty. For Odenbach art is not only about undoing the effects of representation, but also about approaching history itself as something that cannot (yet) be fully known. It is precisely history's resistance to representation that incites his art as a conceptualist practice, for as he has said [in 1993], "After almost forty years, Germany is one country again, a country I do not know yet. With the unification, I lost my identity as a West German and became an exile in my own land."

--Kobena Mercer, professor of Africana Studies, New York University*

* From Kobena Mercer, "Knowing Me, Knowing You: Video Art as a Practice of Hybridization," in New Museum of Contemporary Art, Marcel Odenbach (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), p. 25. Reprinted by permission of Kobena Mercer.