Deep Gold

The German artist Julian Rosefeldt positions his video and film works at the intersection between film and visual art. The exhibition in the State Gallery Linz shows two of Rosefeldt’s key works, illustrating his way of working between commercial film production and visual art. Whereas the five-channel film installation American Night (2009) plays on the film genre of the Western, the black and white film Deep Gold (2013 / 2014) interprets a scene from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic L’âge d’Or (1930), situating it in Berlin of the 1920s, where various parallel worlds interact in the surroundings of the big city. Like its model, Rosefeldt’s film undermines existing social conventions and explicitly refers to more recent feminist history. The place where decadence and an emphasis on pleasure is celebrated is the burlesque bar “Deep Gold”. Julian Rosefeldt’s medium is the moving image. The artist frequently produces his films as multiple-channel installations and arranges them as overall artworks taking over the whole space. His visual-acoustic settings transport the viewer into a sometimes seemingly hyperrreal (counter-) world, a veritable parallel universe, which is also manifest in photographic works and can thus be translated into a different, static medium as well. In his works Rosefeldt probes the thin (semi-) permeable membrane between reality and alienation. He exaggerates real places using various staging mechanisms, with which familiar milieus and ordinary situations are distorted to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Julian Rosefeldt’s jump cuts between times and different spaces always also say something about current sensibilities. By offering filmmaking itself or disposition, he translates human desires, which have a fixed place in the illusion-machinery of Hollywood cinema, into the reception-aesthetic categories of visual art.