2016/18
EXPANDEDADA VINCI

Site-specific installation, 04:13 min, loop, single-channel movie, invitation card, front page, DIN A6, final format 0.105 x 0.210 m, ASIFAKEIL – Q21 – MUSEUMSQUARTIER VIENNA, AUSTRIA.
ASIFAKEI – Q21 – MUSEUMS QUARTIER WIEN, AUSTRIA

Quotations from artists should often be viewed as at least partly tongue in cheek, and Frank Geßner himself calls his oeuvre a “footnote to Modernism” (Geßner 2016: n.p.), for example in the installation DADA VINCI. Here, not only is an arc drawn from Leonardo da Vinci to Dadaism; the media-reflecting code of Structuralist avant-garde film is brought together with found-footage elements from “Goldene Regel der Pinselpflege” (golden rules of brush care) issued by the da Vinci paintbrush manufacturer. As serious as other source references in PANORAMAVISION may seem, in some cases they reflect “actually existing facts” (Geßner 2016: n.p.) in another way. Frank Geßner thereby sees himself in auteur filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s tradition of “Facts and Fakes”. Kluge remarks: “Through narration, the most unpleasant events become beautiful, conveyable, reinterpreted, falsified. That’s why there are not only facts, but also fakes. That is a necessity. If someone claims he can deal with facts without adding any thoughts of his own and without falsifying, I don’t believe him. But from someone who lies, from his lies, I can still tease out a piece of fact.” (…) “Each of these stories, these fairytales in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, is more trustworthy than a news broadcast from today, in which everything is related at best in extremely truncated form.”

Text excerpt: Franziska Bruckner, “Panoramavision, Contextual Panopticons“, pp. 300-302, in: FRANK GESSNER, PANORAMAVISION, EARTH SEEN FROM THE STUDIO, 2018