Der Schutzhase oder die Meisterlampe 01, 2001
Der Schutzhase oder die Meisterlampe
project Schuricht-Bau, Bremen
photos: Joachim Fliegner
Bremen artist Isolde Loock has taken on the exciting task of developing an artistic overall concept for a new building.
Isolde Loock moves with most of her works in the field of new media. She works with actions, with video films and video installations, with computers, with text, with typography, with newly developed and found material - these can be objects, x-rays or photographs, but they can also be words and signs.
When she saw this building for the first time, she noticed the transparency of the architecture as an important aspect. The glass lends the building lightness and allows a practically permanent view of nature from the outside. This transparency also attracted her attention inside the building, as an open structure of the spacious offices with their glass views, a structure that is intended to promote communication.
This fact was very helpful to the artist. Isolde Loock's work has to do with communication in the broadest sense. In this case, she developed a dialogical concept based on the tension between the nature that surrounds the house and the technology that is traded in the house.
With her art, she brings natural elements from the exterior into the interior in a very sparing but very poetic and multi-layered way, with the aim of involving these two areas - nature and technology - in a dialogue.
This dialogue, this dialogue, leads from a passive, unreflected view of nature to a closer look and to questions that can creatively break through everyday life in the house, the working routine, and hold a considerable potential of stimulation.
The picture at the entrance is the focal point of the concept. When you stand in front of the light box, you will see a long brown, earth-colored shape above a bright pinkish-green iridescent surface. It extends into the width like a landscape representation and, for example, is reminiscent of an excavated deepening of the earth in a meadow, on a field.
When taking a closer look, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the brown form is a coat. And if you position it correctly (very close to the left edge of the lightbox), you can see that this is actually the image of a rabbit drawn into the width, as the title of the image "Schutzhase" already reveals.
She used one of the most famous hare pictures as a model, namely "The Little Rabbit" by Albrecht Dürer, painted in 1502.
With Dürer's rabbit, Isolde Loock brings a piece of nature into the interior of the house that is rich in symbolic content. The hare has always been regarded as a symbol of fertility and prosperity, of speed, with its extended hind legs, which by the way allow it the paradox of being able to run uphill faster than downhill. "If that's not a good motif for an up-and-coming company," says Isolde Loock.
But also other of its characteristics make the hare a suitable "protection animal" for the company. The rabbit is considered to be clever, he is a very watchful observer of whom it is said that he even sleeps with his eyes open, and with his soft fur he stands for warmth and security. At La Fontaine and in German fables, the rabbit is the clever advisor: Meister Lampe. In recent art history, a dead rabbit has also become famous, to which Joseph Beuys dedicated one of his actions. And Dieter Roth's "Scheisshasen", made of rabbit dung, are also frequently found as multiples.
Albrecht Dürer's painting on the threshold of the modern world, after the Middle Ages, has almost become a parable for the scientific interest in the research object nature because of the incredible precision of his observation and representation of nature.
Isolde Loock also conducts research in other fields, namely in the field of painting itself and that of language. She calls the process according to which she realizes images like the "Schutzhase" stretching. She always uses pictorial motifs from art history as models for her stretchings, mostly motifs that are generally known through reproductions, such as Dürer's Hase here, but also from pictures by other great masters such as Liebermann, Courbet or Cézanne.
In Renaissance painting, the so-called anamorphoses distorted the perspective of the real object in the picture and thus deprived it of immediate recognition. Isolde Loock now distorts the painting itself with today's technique. The motifs are torn apart, almost dissected, by pulling them apart and stretching them on the computer. Isolde Loock analyzes them in their own way and expands them with additional levels of meaning.
In these pictures, she involves the viewer, because the original motif, her model, can only be discovered through movement of one's own, by positioning oneself in the right place.
This involvement of the viewer, the interaction, is an important aspect of communication in Isolde Loock's work. It becomes clear as an artistic process especially in the second part of the concept.
This second part consists of stylised, computer-processed natural elements from the North German flora and fauna being placed in many different places in the house. They run like a mental thread through the whole house. And that is - following the idea of transparency, which was already hinted at with the light box at the entrance - on window panes, on separating panes and on mirrors.
On the ground floor there are motifs from the plant world, on the first floor insects, butterflies and beetles, on the second floor birds.
Isolde Loock's interest in language, in the pictorial quality and ambiguity of language, comes to the fore. In this context, it can be recalled that Isolde Loock came to the visual arts through literature. She has remained true to her love of language. This can be seen wonderfully in her selection of possible plant names. Her list includes the following plants, all with ambiguous names:
Dandelion, crow's foot, forget-me-not, nightshade, speedwell, blood eye, thimble, thousand grain, duck lens, heart harness, frog spoon.
It looks similarly ambiguous with the birds:
Nightjar, Swampfinch, Starling, Wren, Blackcap, Yellow Warbler, Goldencrest, Willow Warbler, etc.
So the names alone already trigger many associations that lead beyond what is depicted or described.
Isolde Loock has often carried out such communication projects, for example in various cities: in Kassel, New York, Frankfurt and Bremen, where she stuck „Eingeschweisste Sätze auf Strassenpflaster“ („Sie wissen ganz genau, dass die Welt heute andere Probleme hat, als Sein oder Nichtsein“),
in the "Communication-Service" 1999, in the project Oreste at the Venice Biennale, with the "Body guard" campaign at Expo 2000, or with the "Herzkammer-Projekt" in the Galerie im Park in Bremen Ost, 2001.
Dr. Katerina Vatsella