Secret Writing III (It does not exist if it is not framed), 2006
Video on DVD, Looped
Format 4:3
Edition 3 + 2 AP

... abstract of »Isadora's Shawl«

The video installation "Secret Writing III" (2006) projected at the end of a rising, dark corridor shows a emerging ghost hand writing: "It does not exist if it is not framed" appearing like a teacher writing with white chalk on a blackboard. The thought of Derrida's essay "Parergon" (accessories/ornament) comes to mind from "The Truth in Painting". The text takes as its starting point Kant's characterization of framework in his "Critique of the Power of Judgment", not as an essential element but rather as an external addition - Parergon. According to Kant, the framework makes the shape of the actual work (Ergon), more clear, definitive and complete drawing attention to what is done inside of the framework - the content. This, determines Derrida, makes the framework, however, an utterly irreplaceable ornamentation - that is a constitutive element. Because only the frame makes the work independent (autonomous) within the field of the visibility and determines thereby the conditions of the visual reception. Through the frame a picture is never just one thing among others, but rather it makes it the object of contemplation. For Derrida the framework answers to a significant and principle absence in the work itself. This absence makes "framing" necessary and not only ornamental and arbitrary, as Kant assumes, but essential. Indeed Derrida shakes up the hierarchy of work and framework, without establishing a new opposition from the work and non-work, to transfer both sides by reference to the paradox of its being into a dynamic relationship. This consist in the fact that the frame seeks to separate the work from its context and thereby grabs our attention to an object through its encasement, which one understands immediately as a work of art and is able to attribute meaning to it. The framework resolves itself in relation to the work in a general context, however in relation to the context it resolves itself in the work. Hence the frame actually seems to disappear completely, because it has no place. So Derrida proposes to speak no longer about "frame", but rather only of "framing" in its active form or to be precise, of "frame effects". "There is framing", says Derrida, but the frame does not exist. To the extent that Susanne Winterling's video work, has the disappearance of the frame being the actual subject, it can be read, also as a contemporary formulation of René Magrittes "Ceci n´est pas une pipe", with which it shares the same naively seeming handwriting on a black background. While Magritte concentrates on the space that one is not able to fill between the object and its image and demonstrates the incompatible possibilities of the legibility of its representation, and lets it collapse in the end, Susanne M. Winterling concentrates now on reinforcing the medium and the frame, beyond the representation as such. A video film project on the gallery wall, which consists of this handwriting written over and over, makes the framing function of the exhibition space clear. Here again and again the ghost handwriting on the wall programs the expectations of visitors and disciplines their behavior. Susanne Winterling thus reverses the "hermeneutic surplus" of the exhibition space and immediately undermines it by making it the subject of the reflection. By Birgit Kulmer. (c) Parrotta Contemporary Art