FLEETING INTRUSIONS

Schlegel/Teckert

Video shown at: „L.A.NDING”, MAK-Mackey Apartments, Los Angeles / „HOTEL UTOPIA”, curated by Constanze Ruhm, Summerstage Festival, Vienna / „HEILIGE GEEST (EINDE)”, Voorkamer, Lier, 1997

Three „camera- drives“ intrude into the filmic images of Los Angeles, images of places already known and present in the collective memories through an endless number of Hollywood movies. The piece tries to readdress these places (locations) of memorized films, which contain the possibility of creating subtle time-gaps between the contemporary video-image and the aesthetics of the movie-sequence by choosing mainly 1980`s movies. The episodes either start or end at the garage of the Mackey Apartments in Los Angeles, at the garage`s back-wall, onto which the pieces were originally projected as part of the exhibition L.A.NDING. The movement of the camera implies a fictional character, that intrudes almost seamlessly into filmsequences, thereby altering the contents and the time-spatial logic of the movie in retrospective.

The chosen films were of specific personal importance in the way they created images of a city that cannot be represented in terms of a coherent spatial and temporal experience (like its counterpart New York, for example), but more in terms of movements through a series of "states of mind". The filmsequences address the question of time directly (in the dialogues of American Gigolo and Heat) and by showing places of passage, transitional spaces (a tunnel, a bridge, a drive-way, a ramp, an elevator). The work is an attempt to intervene in the time-spatial diagram of a city that itself has become a "screen", a potential background for filmic representation.