In photographs, films, and wall pieces, space and image are yoked together in a temporal axis. The pop effect, like deconstruction, is the principle that runs through Märzendorfer’s works: repetition and displacement of the possibilities of interpretation, often in a full-scale representation. No image, in her art, is ever a self-contained object, decoration on a wall; no book is pure reading, no sculpture, a work meant to last forever. A restlessness inherent in what the “material” as such implies is given form, and its manifoldness is made the plot of the representation. This principle applies to Märzendorfer’s use of her materials, including titles and subjects.
Post Studio is a mise en abyme, presenting a repetition with variants.
The photograph shows several individuals in the rooms of Claudia Märzendorfer’s studio.
In the foreground sits the artist, looking toward a cropped globe. Other people and artists from the building are part of the scenery, in varying positions in the image and the suite of rooms. They gaze forward into the camera, directly engaging the beholder in mute eye contact. Next to the artist, in the foreground, a picture hangs on the wall that shows almost the same scenery, on a smaller scale, a nested representation that repeats ad infinitum.
In the game this structure initiates, the protagonists change their positions in the room in each repetition of the picture within the picture hanging in the foreground, getting smaller and smaller, plane by plane, in the rhythm of repetition, until the representation becomes unrecognizable. At the center of each image, in the center of the studio, stands a sculpture, a hardened water cast.
Along the rooms’ floors and walls, one reads text and labels, communications whose function is explained by the studio setting. In the context of the photograph, their meaning undergoes variation: POST STUDIO, perfect evanescence, LISTENING LOOKING …