On the work of Tine Bay Lührssen
Karolin Meunier
Translation: Karen Michelsen Castañón

Tine Bay Lührssen handles space as if it were a projection screen; its surface as a question of proximity and distance. However, that which is manifested goes beyond the familiar and that which seems to lie in the distance is not necessarily beyond reach. Although borders are immanent to both space and desire, Lührssen approaches them with systematic insistence, in a project pursued with an earnestness that is not devoid of irony.

Technically elaborate combinations of drawing and video projection are central to her installations. Here, meticulously drawn objects and landscapes generate the illusion of three-dimensionality, though they remain planar and remote. Perspectivist depth becomes contestable, for the overlay of sudden video sequences projected over the drawing on paper suggest a different form of naturalistic three-dimensionality.
Thus, the drawings acquire a stage set character by virtue of their interplay with the video projections. A stage set signals a readiness to be inhabited by a story line and, at the same time, it provides the framework that enables a plot in the first place. In Lührssen’s work, however, no real actors enter the stage; it is the projection that activates its silent and perennially waiting images: objects, people and animals populate the videos and short actions take place within the setting of the drawing. The filmed bodies, digitally extricated from their original environment, gather in the space of the image as if by chance, detached from any explicit context. For a moment, these moving elements seem to overcome the pure semiotic character of its representation by accentuating its functionality: In »Panorama« (2003), the drawing of a window with a landscape view points to the difference between inner and outer space, as well as to the foreground created by perspective; there seems to be a real pane in the window when the foreground projection of a woman appears and wipes the empty surface. In »Carpet« (2005), the reduced setting of a single traced line turns into a visually ambiguous figure: The intermittent video image shows a carpet being rolled out, ending precisely at the line. Our perception of this line jumps back and forth between electric cable or horizon line.

The rear-view figure before a vast landscape, associated with the topos of longing, as well as the window with an outlook into an ulterior world are staged as iconographical signs – transposed into the profane reality of the everyday. The romanticizing impetus, or that aura of transcendence and remoteness it generally invokes, finds itself propelled into a mundane inventory: escalators, aluminium ladders and garden fences, a car, a trailer and a plastic pool, a spring board, carpets, veneered door frames and recurring windows appear in Lührssen’s work. Those requisites that were evocative of awakening and change, now come from a contemporary, bourgeois interior. In a reversal of its mass culture reproduction, the image repertoire of romanticism is represented by commonplace objects.

This ambivalence verges on absurdity in the »Tools«. The sculptural, rollable vehicles almost ask to be operated, but they still appear strange and fantastic; they are useless. All tools incorporate a two-sided passage, as well as a platform, seemingly inviting from the distance: conceived as a podium, »Tools II« (2003) is furnished with a garden fence, so that the highest step of the podium may be stridden over but with no room to remain there. Conversely, in »Tool I« (2002), a rollable cupboard-like vehicle with a small ‘balcony’ opening on the rear side, promises an outlook upon the distance and a manorial feel if one holds on to the balustrade. Lührssen’s Tools incorporate everyday longings. They evoke a private utopia come true through many trips to the hardware store and, simultaneously, they seem like prototypes of a new useful object. While the red »Tool III« (2004) is equipped with maritime attributes, such as the gangway that can be tilted up and down, the more recent work »Tool IV« (2005) makes use of the world of the front yard owner: A green, circular piece of artificial turf, to be rolled out between both garden house fragments, points to mobility, as well as to the fact that a bourgeois idyll may be set up at all times, everywhere and on the smallest spot possible.

Indeed, Lührssen does not endeavour to negotiate the aesthetic quality of the objects by divesting them of their normal function and inserting them into a new context. The actions and gadgets borrowed from the everyday realm are not fetishes, nor do they function as ready-mades in this sense, but rather, they remain requisites for a narrative. In fact, Lührssen’s range of references draws on the iconicity of romanticism, as the literal translation of its imagery into contemporary objects provokes a shift in meaning. It is not the everyday that is questioned, but the idealized image within the everyday.