liquid existence the image is within me – it’s not in front – I am inside – it is I
liquid existence
the image is within me – it’s not in front – I am inside – it is I
Nora Schöpfer
René Magritte and Heinz von Förster. In Magritte’s famous La trahison des images from the year 1929 – a painting is not the reality of an object (This is not a pipe); and for von Förster’s It’s the listener, not the speaker, who determines the meaning of an utterance – the hermeneutic principle.
In liquid existence Nora Schöpfer was concerned with the perceptual patterns of reality and art. And they are the same. The transitions are fluid. The question of truth was not posed in this context, although the term “perception” seeks, rather disingenuously, to delude us into believing so.
But in liquid existence it was existential experience – the undergoing, remembering, imagining of something – that Nora Schöpfer investigated. Set out as a spatial installation incorporating photography, painting, video and objects, it was not about the question of an object’s reality and its image but, in a universal sense, about an integrated perception of reality in space and time, and the possibilities of visualizing that in the artwork. Here, Schöpfer put faith in her imaginativeness.
What became obvious is that the background to experience is our observation and not the given environment. Reality is the sum of all of our sensory perceptions.
But Nora Schöpfer also had faith in the visitors’ subjective imaginations, and so invited them to reflect upon their experiences in the exhibition, to note them down and put them up for discussion. The viewers were involved; it was only in their perceptions that the exhibition became visible as such (The image is within me – it´s not in front – I am inside – it is I).
The fact that Nora Schöpfer argued her case using images, clearing up this complex question in pictures, is naturally connected on the one hand to her visual competence as a painter. On the other hand, however, it also depends on our everyday experience of the internet’s picture stores and the current media society’s digital flood of images, which have made the image into the central information medium today. What is known in cultural studies as the “iconic turn” – signifying the start of growing attention towards images as opposed to language – becomes a way of thinking with the aid of images in Schöpfer’s work. It is only through images that reality is generated. In the process, she takes into account the broad range of visual practices from seeing, paying attention and remembering to observing and imagining, and combined them as a spatial experience in liquid existence.
The fleeting quality of the moment, and the extension of the moment, were also features of earlier works by Nora Schöpfer. Here, time is understood as the blink of an eye, as the moment at which what we have experienced is just beginning, already, to fade and so turn into the past. Nora Schöpfer operates in this field of tension between experiencing and remembering, using the media – which are mutually defining in her work – of painting, photography, video and object. In a spatial installation she extended this field to create an integrated experience and the sequence of gallery rooms became one image. Here, reality was constituted from the experience of light, narrative, art-historical citation, fluid colors, landscape, social encounters – from the present, memory and imagination.
Günther Moschig
When observing the process of “gazing at the world”, I note that the act of perception and the object perceived oscillate, so that the outside turns inwards while the inside projects itself outwards.
In my experimental investigations of such ideas using different media, I am particularly concerned with possible experiences of the present, which seems to be something permanent within the flow of time and matter. As everything re-forms in every moment, it seems it is only possible to experience a flowing, liquid existence rather than a reliable external reality.
Less obvious than the virtual permanence of presence is its experience, as we are accustomed to defining things just recognized, and so – perhaps precisely because of this recognition –
we move away from the astonishment of the moment.
Nora Schöpfer
Nora Schöpfer *1962 in Innsbruck. Lives and works in Innsbruck.
1984 University of Applied Arts in Vienna at Oswald Oberhuber and Ernst Caramelle 1991 diploma
https://www.noraschoepfer.at/
Opening: March 25, 2015 at 7pm
Welcome: Dr. Karl Gostner, Obmann Innsbruck Tourismus
Introduction: Bernd Oppl, member of the board, Tiroler Künstlerschaft