ABSTRACT
I begin by considering two video installations by the contemporary German photographer, Beate Gütschow, the full titles of which are R#1 and R#2 (2007) (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). Each installation consists of a brief video with a running time of approximately five minutes. On first inspection, the images conveyed by the two works – running water in the foreground, tombs flanked by a dead tree and swaying green trees in the background, a ruined castle at the vanishing point and grey-blue, lowering skies – seem wholly unyielding as to what exactly is going on. It thus helps to know that Gütschow has used HD moving imagery to meticulously reconstruct two paintings by the well-known seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael, both entitled The Jewish Cemetery, the former in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and the latter in the Detroit Institute of Arts.1 It also helps to know that Gütschow has built up her reconstructed video imagery from a number of different sources: the ruined headstones are from the Oudekerk Jewish cemetery painted by van Ruisdael himself, the derelict building is Corfe Castle in Dorset while the ‘natural’ features have all been chosen from locations in the Hampshire New Forest. Like van Ruisdael, Gütschow has combined selected images and locations, to create a single idealized reality. And, like van Ruisdael’s work, both installations offer an experience which calls attention to the relationship between the plane of representation and the circumstances of its making.
