The Society of Spectacle
The Critics of Self-Spectaclization
HDLU 2016, Zagreb
GET YOUR OWN PICTURE
The Austrian artist Luise Kloos presented her work Get the Picture at Your Own from 2016. The work consists three glass panels 75 x 75 cm, framed in metal frames and mounted on the gallery wall. The panels contain inscriptions engraves in glass that create clearer und blurrier shadow on a white wall. The fist panel is engraved with the inscription GET YOU OWN PICTURE, the other with IMPROVE YOUR GAZE, and the third with PERCEIVE THE THE PENOMENON IN ITS TOTALITY. For a number of years Luise Kloos has been making installations using optical fibers. The artist states that „the media broadcast the idea oft he image through optic fibers (telecommunication links), and this material its he medium for reflecting light, it transform he light in the space and expresses the totality oft he space, light and installation“. She has been using this transparent material in her installations places at various locations, from Tuzla through New York to Graz, Nin and Zagreb since 1997. Even in the works displayed in the Bacva Gallery she plays with the material properties oft he glass and how it reflects light onto a surface. The visitor is faces the meditative issues, almost mantra words, into the world governed by the phenomenon of image and spectacle. The artist points out the most spectacular part of her work are that she has abandoned any spectacle. The use of glass panels has two levels for her, transparency and ambiguity. Transparency unable an insight into an empty space with a written note formulated as a request. On the other side oft he glass is something that creates „ a certain boundary between the empty space behind the glass and the viewer in front o fit“. Luise Kloos says that such condition resembles „breaking the comfort zone!, which is disturbed by the requests, written on the glass. To understand the phenomenon in its entirety one needs to respect the integrity oft he moment. It is in the moment that one can experience the glass panels-objects as a form of meditational emptiness. The artist opposes this form oft he expansion of human consciousness tot he society oft he spectacle. She sees the society oft he spectacle a the condition that increasingly makes people stay in their comfort zone. „we should not be active in order to feel comfortable“ and thus forget about democratic values. The artist thus confirms the complete domination oft he spectacle, because as Guy Debord states, the spectacle represents „a world view transformed into an objective force“. Precisely in such a world of illusion Luise Kloos poses a mantric puzzle that separates us from the world filled with images.
(Josip Zanki)
