Angelus Novus,Marlene Dietrich
Exhibition Essay Jennifer Davy, 2005

There is a painting by [Paul] Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Walter Benjamin, “Thèses sur la philosophie de l’histoire,” Denoël, 1971, traduction corrigée. S

Suzanne Kosmalski pictures legendary icon Marlene Dietrich as an angel of history who, like Benjamin’s angel, perpetuated her historic presence as time propelled into the future. Working with still and moving pictures of the German chanteuse and actress from her early films of the mid-twentieth century and her late concerts towards the end of her career in the 1970s the artist complicates Dietrich’s eternal image making visible the invisibility of legend.

Consistent throughout the exhibition are the opposing qualities of presence and absence. Within Kosmalski’s work there is an appearance of an image but its presence is dependent upon its absence—the image only appears as a representation of its disappearance. In Moving Picture: Angel (2004) Dietrich, seated formally and aesthetically like a decadent “angel” in a winged-back chair, begins to slowly disappear frame by frame in the layered sequence of repeating still images. Beginning with the first frame in this sequence Kosmalski complicates the image. She reveals the actress in an undistorted, full frame but veils the image behind a translucent overlay inhibiting transparency. In the adjacent frame the image repeats as if it slid out from underneath the first, stuttered and stretched, wiping out Dietrich’s face and train of her dress. Stretched horizontally and vertically respectively, two additional frames, the former partially masking the latter, overlay what is presumably a mirror image of the “original” frame in the right portion of the print. Yet only a portion of her right elbow, now her left, is made visible. Through framing and re-framing her muse Kosmalski manipulates the image as a malleable medium, expanding, doubling, stretching it into oblivion so that not only is the image complicated but so too is time and perception.

In the artist’s video projection The Last Concert of Marlene Dietrich (2005), the diva appears from behind velvet curtains and walks onto the stage yet she only “appears” shrouded in a translucent mask that hovers over her every move. Dietrich makes her entrance to center stage where at that moment of climax Kosmalski retracts, reversing the sequence back behind the curtains. In her manipulation of this original film footage, the artist employed masks, deleted and recomposed frames to create an agitated, eclipsed image of her muse endlessly making her entrance yet never truly arriving. Here time metaphorically becomes a static recycling as it is literally canceled out over and over again.

From the lack of visibility to the lack of fluidity Kosmalski’s stuttered sequences establish a constant interference with the image that acknowledges and underscores a corruption of perception. In the artist’s animation piece, Angelus Novus (2005) the artist creates an interesting parallel to the investigations of perception in Duchamp’s roto-reliefs. The opening of the animation begins with a cropped image of Dietrich horizontally framing her eyes. Depicted like an angel, her eyes outstretched like wings, the actress looks out and upward as if she “were about to distance” herself from her audience. Her image is replaced by an opaque pink circle surrounded by the appearance and disappearance of concentric circles yet there is never a determined center. The circular lines, like the tracks of a record, rotate and break apart into shards disrupting the viewer’s focus. The background of the animation continuously alters as well beginning with the image of an old poster from one of Dietrich’s shows which is only perceptible for a moment before it is magnified into a mirage of color.

For the artist color is another strategy she employs that can influence our perception of time. From subtle variations in tonal contrasts to monochromatic colorizations Kosmalski manipulates hues in order to match time or, as revealed in this exhibition, to mask time. Frustrating the desire for lucidity the artist consistently obfuscates time and perception, deflecting the gaze denying access and possession—a strategy of the diva herself, an Angelus Novus.