within the framework of the 'Digitale Düsseldorf'
Gerald Schauder
Mixed Media | Installation
10.11.2017 – 14.01.2018
The content of a medium is another medium – so says a well-known proposition by Marshall McLuhan. Looking at Gerald Schauder’s works on Hans Richter‘s films of the 1920s one feels reminded of this. They open up a remarkable range of transformation. One brings forth the other: film becomes sculpture, oscilloscope and spread sheet, even Lego bricks and sound from which the original image is formed yet again. The media generate and question each other. It is not by chance that Schauder’s Skulptur23 stands on a base which again is in itself a sculpture. This game of transformations depends, for one, on technical accuracy, but it also requires a certain degree of obsession, without which such an endeavour is hardly possible. Gerald Schauder has both on his side. Over years of painstaking work he has developed his ideas without letting up. Over the course of these deliberations he has become a proven expert on the early films of Hans Richter, which he questions artistically. This aspect is equally important. Sure,a lot of theoretical work has gone into this, but at the end, the result is not a book but a new work of art which calls into question the other works. Schauder himself speaks of his work with a sceptical sober-mindedness.One should not be deceived by this, however, for the constellations that have emerged here speak a different language. They have the surrealist excesses that pertain to all metamorphoses. So what might be the next twist?
Text: Prof. Dr Peter Bexte
