The sense of possibility defined by Robert Musil in his novel Man without Qualities, being “the capacity to think how everything could 'just as easily' be” is perceptible in the installation Dans la vision périphérique du témoin by Marcel Odenbach: firstly as an explicit manifesto inspired from a dialogue, then as a sculptural and architectural creation. Ulrich, this man of possibility, man without qualities, whose physical being Odenbach seems to want to create, can be defined as a proliferation of ideas, “without core”. Perhaps here, like Ulrich in his novel, we should conjure up “impracticable rooms, revolving rooms, kaleidoscopic rooms, adjustable scenery for the soul.” Odenbach's young baroque hero is both a man of the past and of the present, a character whose thoughts always lead to two places at once like imagining Sans-Souci from Versailles, skyscrapers from imperial residences or traffic when walking. He is able to play with time through his sense of possibility. And if this man of possibility is the example, par excellence, branded by what Robert Musil refers to as “active passivism”, his field of vision is then the perfect place for transforming ideas and forms. The installation Dans la vision périphérique du témoin is primarily presented as theatre. It literally puts into play the idea of how one forms one's vision depending on one's position at the time. A conversation chair invites the viewers/visitors to take their places, one next to the other, but each facing opposite directions towards a screen. They need to turn towards each other in order to make conversation, and turn back or change places to see the other video. The sounds of each video are as loud as each other, forming a more pronounced mixing of noise, music and voices. The two videotapes are each presented in triple format. A “classical” field of vision is divided by a vertical image-band that slices down the centre creating a sort of rift. Two or three shots are shown together in this tripartite fashion in which only the peripheral parts of a shot are revealed to the eye-witness/camera, whereas another reveals only its central part. Raymond Bellour referred to this fundamental structure in the artist's video work as forme-bandeau (band-form) and Paul Virilio as the fente de visée (focal split). Using this sectioned triptych system, Odenbach chose to create a sort of minimal variation on two of the installation's video-tapes producing plastic effects of movement, colour and line. As in the polyphonic music of a J S Bach concert used by Odenbach in all its resonance, there is a structure in the two band-images that seems to yield to architectural laws and to effects of inversion and modulation, orchestrating patterns relative to a combinative art. The first video-tape juxtaposes two series of tracking shots: on one, a man (the artist himself), is filmed from behind, running in slow motion against the flow of traffic down the centre of a main street in Paris; on the other, we see a close-up of the wings and galleries of Versailles, showing all sorts of different people floating in and out, first in modern dress and then costumed. The camera's movements, and those of the bodies and cars respond to each other in band-form in a continuous flow of appearances and disappearances. The band images are alternated between being placed peripherally or centrally, giving the impression that the spectator is seeing the same scenes again without necessarily seeing the same field of vision. The second video-tape compares images with sounds that are more heterogeneous in origin, but create, by their structural resemblance in movement and pattern, the same type of rhythm and symmetry as in the first video. The contrast between the margins and the centre is emphasized by a contrast between effects of documentary and fiction. The town, suggested by a montage of façades, windows, street scenes and crowds, passes by in black and white. It first appears in the peripheral parts of the image, sometimes to kaleidoscopic effect. In the middle, in the split of its symmetrical caches, two men in colour suddenly appear wearing baroque dress, approaching and then walking away from a fixed camera that has been set up in the grounds at Versailles. A young man is eulogizing the evidence to his elder, stressing the Musilian theory of slowness and possibility. The peripheral parts of the town strangely correspond to his perceptive comments by offering a choice of a variety of similar patterns. Reaching the loop (if there is one), the town comes back to the centre and reality fuses with possibility. Another non-reality is evoked from outside the field of vision – the soundtrack. The voice of a woman being threatened, as if straight out of some thriller, rises above the documentary style city murmurings. This Hitchcockian evocation of cinema takes place outside our field of vision, and the viewer's imagination is strengthened by the relationship between the visible and the invisible. We could ask whether, with Odenbach's multiple use of caches and non-caches, the out of vision loses its relevancy. But we could equally suppose that by the emphasis on the form of the split, what is out of vision is simply divided in two making the central vision ambiguous. This video effect could be labelled double entendre or, as with Musil, just as easily.

Christa Blümlinger

Translated by Diana Tamlyn