Introduction
Focusing on the DEAL
The exhibition DEAL is related to RothStauffenberg's installation exhibited at Art & Economy (Hamburger Deichtorhallen, 2002), formally as well as with regards content.
By means of a split screen five film sequences shot by five cameras simultaneously are displayed on one TV screen, whereas at the Deichtorhallen five separate screens were used to reflect the positions of each camera on the set. The film shows the act of waiting for a drug delivery at the apartment of a drug dealer.
The central piece of the exhibition DEAL is a switchboard type of tabletop, on which three monitors are placed, mounted on tripods. Each monitor assigned to a different camera position, the film shows the work of two drug squad officers whose occupation consists of the observation of the happenings - or rather the lack of happenings - at the drug dealer's apartment, thus likewise reflecting the central theme of waiting.
Further elements displayed on the table interact with the fictitious space of the film as well as being part of the real exhibition space.
Between the TV monitor and the "investigation platform" a hybrid partition - half mirror, half soundproofing - hovers in space, with the great promise, the lyrics of the song Here Comes the Mirror Man, says he's a people fan... by Human League (1982) written upon.
The concentration on the central theme of waiting causes a conscious avoidance of what according to Gilles Deleuze's film theory constitutes the "attraction," the crisis of an action. Not the action itself, but its absence is focused on by a static pictorial architecture, which does not call for any kind of editing or arranging.
The strong emphasis on the meaning of the off-space, the voids, the vacuum of action resulting from the unedited images running parallel, leads to a heightened imagination of space within the beholder. But while at the installation in Hamburg the placing of the monitors at the exhibition site equalled the cameras' positions on the set causing the proper motion of the beholder, at the gallery this effect is almost reduced to a mere movement of the eye.
An expansion of space results nonetheless. By integrating side scenes and voids the space, where lacking in content, is occupied by the element of time; its meaning is diametrically opposed to the intended action – the procuring of the drug, the conviction of the drug dealer.
The use of music - an important tool also in the Black box films which likewise reveal RothStauffenberg's interest in the deconstruction of plots, scenarios and in a shifting of viewpoints – creates the impression of a concluded course of action, which in fact denies any dynamically inspired climax (which the consumption of the awaited drug would have promised.)
In DEAL this interest in a shifting of perspectives and the combinatorial potential of images is multiplied by connecting two spatially divided, but mutually related actions.