Film
Cavelight (Höhlenlicht), 2022
Animation, digital film in color, no sound, 5184 x 3456 px
9‘ 12‘‘
5433 individual photographic images plunge the eye into a state of delirious overload. Cones, like those in a stalactite cave, are drawn into a dynamic maelstrom by a storm of light changes and camera movement. The result is a sculptural spatial effect that is neither abstract nor concrete. The irritating thing is that, although the film was created using classic animation techniques, the production process is not revealed. In terms of form, the viewer is left with nothing to cling to. This in turn opens a view to the purely abstract and the lyrical rhythm of the images.
On the one hand, Mirjam Baker’s work is in the tradition of the “flicker” film. But unlike Tony Conrad’s classic The Flicker from 1965, her film does not refer to the technical apparatus of cinema with its 24 moments of night per second.
As for the pioneers of abstract film 100 years ago, who were also painters, Baker’s cinema begins where the fine arts come up against their limits. Just as her previous film, Staub (Dust), opened up imaginary spaces through animated color field painting, the boundaries between pictorial and imaginary space once again blur. Höhlenlicht (Cavelight) is a paradox: just as we see the cave only when we bring light into it, our eyes surrender to the excess of the imagery; where seeing ends, imagination begins.
As it happens, built sculptural objects were the prerequisite for the creation of this film. Single frames were made of hundreds of cones made of tissue paper mesh; four different movement sequences were cut into one another. As in minimal music, analytically formed structures thus find sensual expression. This musicality of images allows us not to feel the absence of an audio track. And there is something else that connects this masterpiece of structural film with the pioneers of the avant-garde: ever since Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí sliced an eye in Un Chien Andalou, there has existed a painful longing to look behind the visible, as it were.
(Daniel Kothenschulte)
Translation: John Wojtowicz
Distribution: sixpackfilm
Photography
Cavelight (Höhlenlicht), 2020-2024
The untitled black and white photographs were taken in connection with the film Höhlenlicht (Cavelight) and are of sculptural origin. As in Dust, the abstraction also allows associations with unreal impressions of nature. All photographs stem fom the pictures originally made for the film Cavelight.
Artist’s book
Höhlenlicht – Cavelight, 2024
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Mirjam Baker. Deep into the Images” from May 31st to June 30th, 2024 at the Kunstverein Leverkusen.
Introduction by Wulf Herzogenrath, interview by Daniel Kothenschulte, poem by Mirjam Baker. 56 pages with 38 full-page photographs. Texts in German and English. Published 31 May 2024.
The book texts are available here.
Publisher: Edition_, Cologne
Editors: Kunstverein Leverkusen, Jörg Jung, Marcel René Marburger
Design: Steffen Missmahl
Image processing: Georgios Michaloudis / Farbanalyse, Cologne
Printing: Kettler printing company, Bönen/Westphalia
ISBN 978-3-981424-65-2
Supported with funds from the state of Lower Austria (Kultur Niederösterreich) and Jörg Jung.