Reset (EN)

We may assume that there are things we do not see because they remain concealed from our view: behind a blind, behind closed doors or the reflection of a window pane. Our thinking is thus thrown back onto a field of options and speculations. The eye scans the surface; the machine begins to hum. When entering this field of projection, boundaries dissolve – boundaries between space and surface, between the present and other streams of time, between situation and simulation.
The video works and installations of Thomas Lüer focus on a few comprehensible elements: two persons, gesturing; a dog in a “burrow”, an avatar speaking to the observers, the facial expression of a dreaming person, architectural structures. Through this reduction, a complexity emerges, which, broken down into a multitude of different levels, is at once capable of addressing contemporary, political and historical topics. Precisely in this discerning reduction lies the art of Thomas Lüer.
The current topicality – and basic driving force of the works – stems from his intuitive approach to “encountered realities” and quite frequently is even based on local coincidences. Reoccurring, constituent elements are, for example, the world of work and public spaces, involving both the place of action itself and the place of installation. Much of the work develops as an “impromptu” and arises from the context, by being fully immersed in a particular place and by the surfacing of unexpected details. His installations adapt in a chameleon-like manner to their environment: a window next to other windows, an entrance at the place of another, a space within a space.
Lüer’s projective mapping turns its attention towards rather inaccessible territories, which always have one thing in common: Their occasionally extraverted “transparency”, or public sphere, at the same time serves them as the ideal hideaway – whether this concerns the thin atmosphere of the manager world, virtual characters or the seclusive universe of particles physics. His observations are based on the paradox of a world that, in its exuberant complexity, continually relinquishes its claim to comprehensibility. Causality is a thing of the past. And yet, so-called profound knowledge is constantly being processed and prepared in order to suggest to an interested public the notion of an explicable or even meaningful world. It is no coincidence, that the majority of the video works, in terms of their theme and structure, are borrowed from the realm of scientific research mediation.
Equivalent to a test run of possibilities, the image sequences are inspired by experimental set-ups or are realized through improvised explorative devices: for example, in an early work, a dog that strolls through the empty halls of the former Museum für bildende Künste in Leipzig with an infrared camera mounted on his head – bringing all that is visible to the viewer in a quasi aleatoric and at the same time alienated manner (“Revier”, 2002).
Lüer concentrates on a kind of empirical practice, that is fragmented into manifold parts; so much so that – shielded, exclusive and elitist – it is actually no longer verifiable and thus has evolved into an enigma. What is going on in the laboratories of the photon accelerators? To which theoretical model does an experimental set-up adhere to and what does this imply? And for whom?
Not everything considered non-public is hidden, neither the so-called private nor the exclusive domain. And not everything that is public automatically is visible. In our present day and age, permeated by an omnipresence of unconditionally available data, where criteria like “public” or “private” have yielded to a mimicry of functional worlds of imagination that have exceeded any form of empiric verifiability, installations like “Spot” (2008) or “Spin” (2010) make the ins and outs of information processing visible, mechanisms which otherwise are noticed only subconsciously. His projections, broken down to a merely simulative structure of their actual subjects, thus reveal the underlying structure of the scientistic aura and, in a very direct manner, connect it to our immediate surroundings.
With “Facies” (2004), sound loops become increasingly relevant in Thomas Lüer’s work. In a sporadic, asynchronous, heterogeneous, ambiguous and repetitive manner, they interfere acoustically with the image sequences, thus producing a second level of simultaneity, at once coupled to the video itself as well as directly to the respective environment. This may, as in “Reinraum” (2010), take the form of two concurrent acoustic sources – video track and portable radio. In the case of “Cooperate” (2010), moreover, an already ambiguous sound track heard in the background is supplemented by a bilingual instruction to cooperate. The resulting impression is unsettling, for the sound, in its ambivalence, doubles possible interpretations of the visual impact.

Reverberations of the artist’s works may trigger in the observer flashes of insight, those rare highlighted moments, in which a structure or coherence is generated on our retina and the docking maneuver to reality takes its course. Thomas Lüer stages his issues and settings as a re-infiltration of reality that appears to be almost incidental: as projections on and in windows, shops and walls of buildings. Or as a space in a space complete with the parallel time continuum. Or as an experimental nexus between white cube and black box, in which the transcended experimental set-up is now being exhibited – the museum. Yet, neither an arrival on secure territory, nor an escape from the ever-flowing exterior world is underlying this final displacement of the public sphere. But, once more, the pointers are set back to zero, electricity flows, and the machine begins to hum.

Gabi Schaffner, 2011 (translation Barbara Lang)