Marcelino Stuhmer
Get Ready to Shoot Yourself

from 24/01/2009
to 26/04/2009

Marcelino Stuhmer situates himself both through and against a pictorial and video “postproduction” of the famous final sequence of The Lady from Shanghai. In the installation Get Ready to Shoot Yourself, the artist probes the spatial ambiguity of the amusement park that Welles used for the fi nal scene of his fi lm and he reinterprets it, creating a three-dimensional structure that simulates the space/time after the shootout in the mirror maze. The visitor moves through a complex interplay of paintings, mirrored surfaces and empty frames, getting pulled into an alienating perceptive experience. He is induced to feel an ambivalent sensation of infinity and intimacy with space because he physically enters the profilmic and narrative world of the film. Unlike the sensory experience of a fi lm theatre, where the images move and the spectator remains motionless, here it is the movement of the public that sparks the breakdown of temporal sequentiality and mingles the real and virtual elements of representation. When we are in front of the installation, the image of the shattered mirror maze is recreated through a studied spatial relationship between the painted surfaces and the three life-sized outlines – Elsa/Hayworth, Michael/Welles and Arthur/Sloane – but as we move through the space of the installation, we can perceive that each painted image is merely a level of complex and fragmented representation. The three outlines of the leading players exist – literally – outside the paintings, but they also blend into the pictorial surface of the panels, so that the visual unity of the mise en scène is constantly broken up and reassembled. This shaky spatial perception is accentuated by the fact that the mirrored reverse of each painting and of the three painted cut-out figures mingles the painted illusions and the reflected ones. The suggestion of the mirror maze ends with a video projection in which the flow of the film sequences is slowed down to focus the viewer’s attention on the abstract beauty of each separate image; the soundtrack is an audio track created by the artist in collaboration with DJ Tad Murawska, remixing the dialogue, music and sounds from the film with a rhythm that, at some points, is cadenced and obsessive, and then dissolves into broad musical loops. This cinematographic fascination concludes with a series of paintings taken from the sequence preceding the final shootout and they complete the installation. In one case, a close-up of the captivating Rita Hayworth is juxtaposed with the painting Arthur Bannister (as played by Gilles Deleuze), which portrays a man in a grey overcoat and felt hat standing between two mirrors. His peculiar resemblance to Arthur Bannister conceals the portrait of Gilles Deleuze, the philosopher who theorized the idea of the crystal-image, demonstrating it through the cinema of Orson Welles. The artist carefully unravels the tangle of meanings and suggestions encompassed by this portrait, giving us a conceptual key that allows us to understand the entire “postproduction” of Get Ready to Shoot Yourself.

download the press release ZIP

 

 

Opening
Friday 23 January, 6.30 PM
at Jade Art Gallery, Bergamo

Open
Monday/Saturday 9.30 am/12 pm

Artists
Marcelino Stuhmer

 

Exhibitions
Get Ready to Shoot Yourself from 24/01/2009 to 26/04/2009
MVG YELLOW from 15/10/2008 to 10/01/2009
Anthology from 10/05/2008 to 07/10/2008