Clemens von Wedemeyer
Clemens von Wedemeyer studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig at the turn of the 2000s, a place considered one of the hubs of the new German painting. However, it is through video and cinema that the artist has developed over the past ten years a body of work whose main themes, urban planning, architecture, or history, are articulated with a constant reflection on the cinematic medium and its contemporary extensions. The interest in these fields, as well as Clemens von Wedemeyer's attention to a critique of the spectacle, places his work under the direct influence of cinema and the writings of Guy Debord. But it also fits into a broad genealogy that includes the documentary experiments of Harun Farocki and Italian cinema from the 1960s and 1970s (Pasolini, Antonioni).
Made in 2002, Occupation, one of his early films, refers to the cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s (Eisenstein) and its particular way of approaching the mass and the crowd. Filmed at night, the movie depicted the channelling of two hundred extras within a spatio-temporal framework, that of the cinematic image. A mise en abyme of the roles assigned to the actor and the spectator by cinema, the short film includes, according to a process dear to the artist, his own critique. On several occasions – for Occupation, but also for Big Business (2002) or Otjesd (Leaving), (2005) – it is in the form of a "making of" presented as an appendix or simultaneously with the main film that the artist reveals "the behind-the-scenes." This "bonus" or "appendix" is introduced to shift the viewer's perspective. It allows von Wedemeyer to share his fascination with the image with the viewer, while also providing elements of distance. "I always try to take a look at reality. However, the more you try to approach reality through a film, the more you realise that you are only moving away from it. "But I still try every time," explained the artist in an interview in 2003.
Perhaps in contrast to the "exhibition cinema" practiced in the 1990s by Douglas Gordon or Pierre Huyghe, von Wedemeyer's work does not approach cinema as a territory to inhabit or traverse (in the same way as fiction). He uses it as a tool for diffracting reality. Thus, if he cites Metropolis by Fritz Lang, it is to attempt to approach the complexity of Chinese urban planning and the West's fascination with it (Metropolis report from China made in 2006 with Maya Schweizer). If he approaches fiction, the spectacle, it is to reconnect with the documentary utopia of the transcription of reality. Presented in 2009 for the "Curve" of the Barbican Centre, the installation The fourth wall finds its title in this invisible barrier which, in the theatre, separates the actors from the spectators. It develops through 8 projections all relating to the representations of the "first encounters" between civilisation and the "savages", including the famous episode of the Tasaday, a savage tribe from the Philippines, whose discovery in 1971 by an ethnologist was a hoax.
It is in the form of an open-air cinema screen, clad on its back with a large mirror, that Clemens von Wedemeyer has recently formulated his relationship with the cinematic spectacle. It is a mirror of reality but also an additional screen facing it. Built in Mardin, Turkey, the Sun cinema is a distillation of the cinematic apparatus. Receiving the rays of the sun, it is only time and light. But when night falls, its reverse can serve as a "traditional screen."
