Magdalena Jetelová
Song Line 75°36'52'', 1998 The core of the project Song Line 75°36'52'' (1998) is, on the one hand, formed by ten radar reflectors set up in Melbourne in equal distances and in a precisely measured way. They signify the beginning of a line that links this city with New York, on the other side of the globe. On the other hand, this line (beginning) is reproduced in the form of ten light circles on a digital radar photo taken by a satellite of the area of Melbourne. The artist places sculptures into the urban landscape of Melbourne, but only the photograph taken from a greatest possible distance and, based on it, all other works unfold the visionary dimension of this project that conceives the earth as a sculpture. Its irredeemable character enables the images that numerously develop around it, in which Magdalena Jetelová can spread her idea, her concepts beyond the photograph, thus giving the project its actual significative space. Innumerable overdrawings of maps and photographs of Australian landscapes, on which the artist discovered line-shaped geological structures on which she puts her own dotted lines, circle around the project's essential concept. Again, as in the Iceland project, certain points - places the artist has visited - are marked with their precise position. As a matter of fact, two systems of finding position and meaning are superimposed: on the one hand, the degrees of longitude and latitude system belonging to a geography that sees itself as enlightened, modern and scientific; on the other hand, the system found in the original culture and pictorial world of the Aborigines, which has been transmitted in the 'dot paintings', these pictures of magic structures consisting of dotted lines - the song lines - that are incomprehensible for Western culture. In the overblending of these two geographical ways of thinking in lines and dot structures - mathematically sober the one, imaginary and magically dreamlike the other - all pictures of this project are created. They are about the perception of different levels of reality and dimensions, in which places are marked and linked in a global context. Close proximity and greatest possible distance are playing a role, the experience of the real place and its global dimension, the attention to geological and historical phenomena and the visualization of imaginary landscapes, the sober surveying and the tracing of emotional, mythical dimensions which escape a scientific geography. The detail also stands for an essential dimensionalizing of perception, pars pro toto. Thus the view for the individual is also, always, the form of perception for the different dimensions of the whole. Being an emigrant, without the reinsurance of a homeland, Magdalena Jetelová is in a position of overblending the different perceptional concepts for places and perspectives in an open way and without giving preference to one view. Only when one sees all that together, the question of dimension in the artist's works becomes really interesting. Magdalena Jetelová is a sculptress who uses elemental materials and shapes. She applies her interest and her energy on sculpture, extending herself to the last. At the same time, her projects develop a dissolution of a physically three-dimensional way of experience. The light as a drawing in space opens up, in the direct event and on the images created around it, an abstracting level of perception of an idea developed during the nineties, of a conceptual global sculpture and its possible realization in particular places only. (1) The lines, the projected texts, the rows and movements of dots in and above the picture, the translation of connections and motions into a graphic idea of global space, all this is transformed in the course of each project from the illustration of concrete three-dimensional and significant phenomena into pictorial structures, which still carry those mythic dimensions and yet disclose own, artistically analogous connections of meaning. The laser light drawings and the reflection of radar beams directly embody the three-dimensional action. But the artistic concept always contains the exploration of the possible perception of the image character, too. For Magdalena Jetelová, this reaches from the photographs of her interventions with light, with lines and texts, to the pictures containing their meaning coded in geometrical drawings and calculations, or the extensive digital codes of the satellite photos of the Song Line project in Melbourne. Even the completely abstract structure of the digital code that registers the picture point for point finally means - in yet another language and pictorial expression - nothing else than the perception of this line of ten light points. And it is the most cryptic encipherment of the magic of this idea of a global sculpture that links the places of the earth which are most essential to the artist. ........................... (1) The context of 'land art' cannot be applied to these projects, as they are largely abstracting from the local factors. Because of the intellectual relationship and contemporaneity it makes more sense to refer to Martin Kippenberger's project 'Metro-Net' (1993-1997). His sculptures are the entries of underground stations and he creates an imaginary system in which these places all over the world are linked. There too, the real three-dimensional image as part stands for the imaginary, conceptual whole, which in all its irredeemable global dimension reveals its potential of significance and imagination. - cf. Documenta X: POLI/ETICS. Kassel and Ostfildern 1997, p. 194/195. URBAN LANDSCAPE Magdalena Jetelová Text by Werner Meyer |
