Ulrike Ottinger at David Zwirner and the Goethe Institute - photographs and films - Brief Article

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Sarah Valdez

A known advocate of the exotic, Ulrike Ottinger has pushed boundaries in feminist, film, ethnological and psychological theory since the mid-'70s. For those who habitually anticipate the rare opportunities to view her hard-to-find work, the summer in Manhattan provided a happy extravaganza: Ottinger film stills were displayed at David Zwirner; the Goethe Institute hosted photographs and screenings of Taiga, a documentary project she conducted in northern Mongolia; concurrently, MOMA and the Anthology Film Archives showed a selection of her narrative films, often associated with Berlin's avant-garde of the `60s and `70s.

The extent of Ottinger's brilliance as a filmmaker can't be fully appreciated by viewing her stills, but in them her taste for the extraordinary is in full evidence. A scene from Freak Orlando (1981), for example, shows a bald midget wearing nothing but a codpiece, his body painted with black-and-white spots. He walks a dalmatian down the street and carries a black-and-white spotted banner in a parody of identity and affiliation. A wondrous array of giants, cross-dressers, transvestites and limbless people have also made their ways into Ottinger's lush films, which extravagantly and transgressively indulge our desire to look at the unusual, liberating both subject and object of the camera's gaze from shame. Included in the Zwirner show were also the ultimate fetish objects for the Ottinger fan: the artist's extraordinary notebooks, which contain handwritten notes, photos, sketches and collages made in preparation for her films.

Ottinger characteristically packs her narrative works with multiple-entendres, the warring entities of culture (science, beauty, freaks, social structure, power, money, media, etc.) represented in rollicking, campy, nonlinear narratives. The filmmaker's penchant for this variety of spectacle is aptly expressed in Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia (1989), in which a character, the Broadway star Fanny Ziegfeld, gushes praise to one Mickey Katz, an obese Yiddish-speaking connoisseur/glutton and fellow passenger on a trans-Siberian train: "You, my dear Katz, are in any case a large, conspicuous swatch of color on our monoculture!" This film in particular is a strange and wonderful hybrid: it's a big-budget, on-location epic, an underground art film and an exercise in postmodern anthropological theory--on top of which it boasts a major star, Delphine Seyrig.

Ottinger's Taiga (1995), on view at the Goethe Institute, stemmed from ethnographic work she conducted in northern Mongolia. Consisting of a series of photographs, an eight-hour documentary film and a book, the project is filled with straightforwardly beautiful landscapes and visually enchanting people. Not quite in keeping with the spirit of Ottinger's work was the gallery checklist that "explained" images such as Waiting for the Reindeer Race, in which a group of smiling young brown men is shown assembled on a windswept plain, alongside odd-looking animals. One of the hallmarks of Ottinger's work is her refusal to provide culturally uninitiated viewers with explanatory glosses that might clarify what exactly they are looking at. What is foreign, fascinating and incomprehensible is left so, and hasty intellectual colonization thus avoided. By graceful example she asks us to look reverently upon her subjects without touching, letting understanding unfold in its own time.