NEW YORK: Marcel Odenbach at the New Museum and Goethe Institute - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1999 by Bill Arning

The German artist Marcel Odenbach is celebrated on the continent though rarely seen in the States. He is best known for his video installations (which of all mediums translates least well in reproduction), in which he is attentive to the spatial implications of the deployment of monitors and projections. From October to January, the New Museum presented five of his installations as well as two single-channel videos, which were shown as room-filling wall projections.

In the video Vom Kommen und vom Gehen (Coming and Going), 1995, we see pleasure boats in an urban river or harbor cruising back and forth across the width of the screen. Odenbach then overlays ghostly historical footage of forced migrations with boat-lifts of sometimes panicking refugees. At the very end he adds clips of a second type of "cruising": gay men are seen promenading on an abandoned Hudson River pier in the West Village. The men might be perceived as leisurely pursuers of pleasure or as outcasts driven to the edge of civilization, according to the viewer's political, social and sexual sensibilities. As the legendary pier slips into history, closed to cruising during the New York mayor's erotophobic campaigns, so the imagery slips somewhere between Odenbach's vintage and contemporary themes.

Other pieces explore motion-based effects. Mir hat es den Kopf verdreht (It Turned My Head), 1995, is an anthology of footage of gyrating entities, such as dervishes and a merry-go-round spinning out of control. In Auf den fahrended Zug springen (To Jump from a Moving Train), 1991, images presented on a wedge of six monitors produce the impression of hurtling down the tracks. The central metaphor of motion in both works is intended to convey the difficulty of getting one's bearings in the rush to the end of a tumultuous century.

Works such as these suggest that Odenbach shares his viewers' anxieties about what it means to be alive at this moment. By contrast, a good sense of his humor and sensuality was offered by a concurrent exhibition of 20 years of drawings and notebooks at the Goethe Institute. One drawing of stripes records a fantasy of hiring Daniel Buren to make drapes. In other drawings, Odenbach's fascination with black men's bodies is expressed again and again.

Odenbach, we learn from the drawings if we have not already deduced it from the installations, does not pontificate. If he overloads some of his works with imagery and sensation, it is not to browbeat us but to approximate the sometimes overwhelming nature of contemporary experience, and to direct us to the understanding that our lives do matter.