Love Lounge 3_ Desperada, walkable mirrored cube, 140 x 140 x 260cm
Collaged song lyrics from
advertisement posters, mirrored drop, 150 x 50 x 50cm,
Videostills from Robert Altmans "Fool for love"
Kunstverein Baden, Baden, A, 2004
…the things that are pleasin you can hurt you somehow… Desperado by Don Henley and Glenn Frey
In her installations, objects and works on paper, Ulrike Johannsen questions the promises of happiness and prosperity made by our consumer-oriented lifestyle culture. She quotes, processes and manipulates the seductive language of a pop and cultural industry that claims to encompass all areas of life.
Unlike Pop Art in the 1960s, she is not concerned with promoting a subculture – pop music, Hollywood films, comics and other forms of ‘low culture’ have long since become an integral part of the art world's frame of reference – but rather pursues a strategy that explores the potential for identification within the banalities of love and loneliness, fun and pain from the perspective of a participant. Ulrike Johannsen counters the pop myth of immediacy, unadulterated authenticity and credible idols with moments of soul-searching and self-questioning, which, intertwined with personal stories, memories and experiences, generate forms of action that break through consumerist attitudes and subversively undermine them. The starting point for the exhibition developed by Ulrike Johannsen for the Kunstverein Baden are the ideals and dreams that found expression in the disco wave of the 1970s. In the installation Love Lounge 3, Johannsen offers visitors a cube that can only be climbed like a raised hide via a narrow ladder and whose walls are lined with small mirrors on the inside. The mirror tiles are a reference to the disco aesthetic, which used cool, metallic reflective surfaces and strobe lighting to create spaces for expanding consciousness and celebrating dance as a form of liberation. In the narrowing of the space to a cave – the cube can only accommodate one person – the broken mirror surface becomes an instrument of self-questioning. The perspectively arranged depth of space is fragmented and the viewer sees themselves, multiplied in the reflection, thrown back on themselves, facing an interior space whose dimensions and boundaries cannot be discerned. Ulrike Johannsen also plays with the interfaces between individual and popular cultural mythologies in her paper collages. Following a strict concept, she assembles individual letters cut out from magazines and advertising posters to form song lyrics and then sticks these back into magazines or onto advertising posters. In interaction with the articles and advertisements, these inscriptions construct new meanings that comment on and often counteract the original, animating advertising messages. The moment of appropriation of the pop song as a personal message or philosophy of life is clearly evident in the style. As a trace of active action, the manual cutting and pasting of the letters is almost diametrically opposed to the smooth aesthetics of glossy magazines. For the exhibition at the Kunstverein Baden, Ulrike Johannsen has further developed her group of works created in recent years in the form of a wall installation.