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Interview Beate Engl – Markus Heinzelmann
December 2006
in: Beate Engl: "-... . .- - . . -. --. .-.." Verlag Silke Schreiber Munich 2007

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A few notes on the work of Beate Engl
Anja Casser, 2001

Creating and defining new spaces through her installations in the surrounding of an art context is a main theme in the work of Beate Engl. The observer has to enter an installation and is forced to a different situation of privacy in a public area. He is directly confronted with an art piece and has to use it instead of being a passive visitor. On a kind of stage or platform he is invited to act, to experience, whereas the outstanding observers see the complete installation containing the user and the sculpture.

The installations usually are created on the borderline between reality and fiction. Related to everyday objects the art pieces influence the user‘s perception by physical irritations such as vibrations, turns, reflections. Sitting on a turning sofa („Merry-go-round“), lying on a massage-bed („Allegro non troppo“), entering a vibrating phone box („Vibration“) changes the relationship to the real surrounding. Illusionary scenes and utopian spaces are created. An art piece can realize everything we desire and imagine based on and influenced by memory, dreams, movies and fiction stories („Vacuum flowers“, „Parasite“ and „Space is the place“).

At the same time this imaginary space offers different forms of communication. Being isolated or together with several users, the observer is part of a non-verbal dialogue with the art piece („Bildbetrachtung“) and/or the other participants („Picknickdecke“).The group project „Galerie Goldankauf / Café Helga“ shares this idea of art as a communication platform. Moreover it deals with the idea of art as a service.

Picnic Blanket, Merry-go-round, Observation of a painting
Stephanie Rosenthal, 2001
(translation of the german original text)

Beate Engls works are not protected by a great sign DO NOT TOUCH - on the contrary: the artist invites to participate. Her sculptures are supposed to be entered, touched, used; they are not supposed to be respectfully regarded from a distance. Only the participation of the spectator completes the work. Leisure and living room culture are areas inspiring her. Her works often seem like places of repose, of pleasure. She puts lightness and play against the bustle and speed of the world, but also against the pathos, with which art can be charged. The sculptures are platform or stage, though not for the artist herself but for the visitor of the exhibition. Engl makes the observer step out of his familiar context and puts him into the limelight. At the same time she offers him privacy, and invites him to relax. Moreover, she also creates room for encounter: there is always an opposite and an exchange - no matter in which form - with this opposite.

The work Merry-go-round, a variant of a very familiar piece of furniture turns like a merry-go-round in the room: art, which can make you sick. Two sofas, whose surfaces are intertwined to the effect that you sit half-lying opposite to each other. For those sitting on them, the perception of the room changes: the opposite comes closer, the surrounding room vanishes in a blurry haze. In the cinema one has already been too often confronted with such filmshots not to feel like having entered one of these movies. Thus, together with another person perhaps even a stranger - you suddenly find yourself in a world of your own, almost dancing a waltz. Then this closeness causes a certain shyness, embarrassment and insecurity. A special kind of communication arises.

A colorful picnic blanket of amazing size conveniently accompanied by a handcart for transport is ready for the visitors use. However, in the framework of this exhibition it can only to be understood as a relic of a previous action in the summer of 2000. Basically, it only turns into a sculpture in Beate Engls understanding - if people sit down on it and communication takes place. It is the symbol for conviviality, summer, sun, etc. It evokes memories of Sunday family excursions to the park, of summer afternoons with wine, cheese, and good friends, maybe even of an outdoors breakfast. Engl creates the conditions for encounters and chooses a platform reserved for friends, which can be entered by strangers.

Beate Engl creates places, which Michel Foucault describes with the term heterotopia: really effective places, which are drawn into the arrangement of the society, so to speak, counter-placements or abutments, actually realized utopias, in which the real places within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and turned around. For Foucault, the ship is the heterotopia pure and simple. Similar to Merry-go-round it is a moving part of the room, a place without place, which lives out of itself, which is closed in itself while at the same time being exposed to the infinite of the sea.

For the Observation of a Painting Beate Engl asks the visitor to step onto a small vibrating platform standing in front of an abstract painting. From the start the artist thus creates the condition for the observers reaction desired by the artist: excitement expressed by the vibrating body. The observer is given no chance at all to stand still or step nervously from one foot to the next, while he struggles in front of the painting pondering what the point of the painting might be. The emotional effect of the installation seemingly finds its physical expression in the vibration. This is intended to allow for conclusions about the interpretation of the work. According to Edmund Burkes treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful when we have before us such objects as excite love and complacency the body is affected much in the following manner: the head reclines something on one side and the breath drawn slowly, the whole body is composed and the hands fall idly to the sides etc. Sublime characteristics of works of art, however, cause violent emotions of the nerves, his eyes are dragged inwards and rolled with great vehemence and the whole fabric totters etc. Beate Engl enhances this effect and directs the viewers interpretation. As in the work Merry-go-round she manipulates the perception of the observer by putting the platform on which she asks him to step in motion.
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