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Reflections on Birgit Sauer’s, “Permanent is Nowhere,” OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art,
Spring, 2010.
by
James Seckington
“I remember you when you were young and strong
in your summer dress and your legs so
long
My memories are only for me I
prefer them to reality”
--from the song Disconnected, written and performed by Rancid
The American photographer William Eggleston once likened his radical color photographic technique to a shot-gun blast. Shot from the hip, the resulting image was loud, scattered, and bright—shockingly bright. Eggleston was not necessarily concerned with hitting any specific target or capturing a particular subject with his camera. Rather, he reveled in the act of blowing things up.
The work of Austrian artist Birgit Sauer also drips with highly saturated hues. But the macho “explosions” of color we are accustom to experiencing in an Eggleston print do not apply to Ms. Sauer’s current exhibition, “Permanent is Nowhere,” presently on display the OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art.
Despite their boldness, her paintings and mixed media presentations evoke the mystery of a whisper shared between two lovers as the lights dim and the motion picture begins to roll. Why did she laugh like that? What promise made? What inside joke alluded to?
For all the explicitness that Ms. Sauer’s gaudy use of color implies, her images are strikingly modest. It is this tension in “Permanent is Nowhere” that not only holds the viewer’s gaze, but keeps him coming back for another look. For Ms. Sauer has accomplished what illustrators never attempt to try, what smart artists aim for but rarely achieve, and what creators produce only after much toil: she has given birth to Wonder.
If a painting--or a photograph, or a novel, or a motion picture, for that matter--does not produce a sense of wonder in the viewer, it is not a work of art. It is simply decoration, and in which case, it is better to leave the wall bare and projects one’s own imagination onto it. After all, a blank canvas is ripe with potential, but a decoration is just another thing to run the dust-rag over.
In contrast to the decorative illustration, Ms. Sauer’s work fuels wonder as she takes us on a rollicking ride to the heart of nowhere. . . .
…Roaring down the highway, a semi-truck bisects the canvas; in the motel, a woman’ s shadow pauses in an open doorway, is she going or coming? Was it something I said?
Moving again—this time through a tunnel. Fast, oh so fast. Shiny smooth legs in stilettos cavort before a large box of a fan and now it’s so very hot.
Back out into the night, a freeway overpass beckons. Which way, Ms. Sauer? What exit should we take? Laughter. ‘Just drive my friend, drive. Faster, go faster.’
But where’s Neal Cassady, Ms. Sauer? Did we leave him at the last stop? Oh, well, pardon me, of course, of course, I see him now-- surely that’s his hand there between those legs draped in the fishnets—oh, those legs again--Yes, yes, it is him, he’s jumpy as Hell, “Let’s go boys, let’s go. She knows time, ah, yeahp, yeahp,” he mutters, thumbs hooked through the belt-loops on his trousers.
And what to wear, what to wear? An outfit laid out on the bed, decisions, decisions…
Back out on the road beneath a pomegranate sky, the fields are still so very green and the road still the best way to get from here to nowhere. . . .
James Seckington’s criticism has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Sacramento News and Review, and Z Magazine. His images have appeared on the walls of the OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art.
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