Rotation

The title already provides information on the experimental arrangement on which the video is based: Rotation is compiled from several manual 360-degree-pans, which at high speed, let merge the ever same stretch of landscape and the four seasons. The work, by the fine artist Herbert Distel - with dancer and painter Petra Otahal behind the camera - introduces a wild game of throw and catch of chaos and structure, which casts a subdued glance at the world that returns to us, transformed.

Like a child who spins around its own axis with twirling arms, and takes the ensuing dizziness into account for the sake of the joyous sensual adventure, in this arrangement, too, play and consequent performance converge to subvert conventional forms of awareness. In the inability of the human eye to sufficiently grasp the landscape flying by, the content of the image forms anew. Through the speed, image and afterimage overlap, while present and past regroup, letting the relationship of space and time become fragile. The two-dimensionality of the screen becomes successively tangible. The depth of the picture space disappears, while the viewer is directed toward his or her own body. Without orientation or anchor, one must first learn how to find one´s bearings. What remains are the colors of the grass and bushes and the nervous flickering of additive and subtractive patterns that incessantly reform with relationship to one another. The result is an ecstatic, abstracted image, comparable with an impressionist painting. In the constant circular movement, cut and montage remain astonishingly unnoticeable in the end. Only gradually, it becomes clear that different recordings are assembled here. The motif of repetition is doubled by the video´s soundtrack, which the filmmaker made himself. Breathlessly, it dictates the speed, supports the rotation of the dancer and in this way, stabilizes what is seen.

With his work, Distel shows that the abstract image is always inscribed in the actual pictorial information. He strengthens the methods of minimalism and cinematic structuralism, and shapes them to a piece of ecstatic-meditative body cinema. (Shilla Strelka)