.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
1.6.2000 >> 30.6.2000 .
. . . .
. . . . . "Famous Unknowns"
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Otto Saxinger was born in Austria (1967). He attended the University of Art and Industrial Design (1990-1996) in the city of Linz, where he currently lives and works. The installation piece at the Office in Tel-Aviv is the fourth in a series of works created in recent years, thus entitled Glowing Idyll IV.
The installation consists of seven light bulbs suspended from the ceiling and twelve figures painted on transparent sheets pinned to the wall. The visitor/user flicks the light on and off, thus rendering moving silhouettes visible on the wall, in accordance with the number of bulbs turned on. The silhouettes are transformed into reflected figures casting a shadow on the wall. When all the bulbs are lit, the images are virtually unrecognizable. The viewer is blinded by his/her self-produced glare, a condition which challenges his/her very play.
In Famous Unknowns, Saxinger uses photographs of ordinary people published in marginal newspapers or as backdrop to famous figures. These "assistant figures of the mass media" provide an "image of the other" (Lacan). In their identifying function they are like a mirror; a reflection of an "unconscious" self-staging and self-depiction of the public. These everyday subjects have been transferred onto transparent sheets and reduced in size, so that the viewer/visitor must first make the image appear by means of the light bulbs hanging directly before him/her, and only then can he toy with these image-fragments from afar.
The works play upon the notions of figure, image, and memory. Acquaintance with the figure is the condition for its identification, just as the knowledge of a word in language is the key to its understanding. The image of the other is a reflection of the self, "for me it is like a private view of the world."
Turn on, turn off - remember, forget…