julika rudelius: lecture questions & response

Visiting Artist Lecture: Julika Rudelius: October 5th, 2010

"Julika Rudelius (b. 1968, Cologne) addresses a broad field of complex themes in her videos and photographs, ranging from structures of social power and prejudices to role clichés, identity, and cultural hegemony. Rudelius sees art as a form of social expression, as a communicative tool for drawing attention to seemingly trivial observations of everyday life, revealing at the same time their complex social characteristics."


Question one: "In addition to Rudelius's delicate sense of social dynamics, it is these clear structures that make the sometimes edited, sometimes free dialogues in her works so powerful for the viewer." How do you think the edit of your questions out of these "conversations" effects the audience? You remain unheard, yet your questions are what lead your subject to think and speak of something they did not think to project out vocally.

Question two: "Her photographs document the tension between togetherness and distance most subtly. For these pictures are by no means “documents” in the sense of authentic representations of social reality in the Netherlands. The pictures are faked. And Rudelius has carefully inserted little mistakes into her arrangements... Sometimes the mental clichés block access to the world around us and then we see a person only as a race rather than as an individual." If this is so, then why try so hard to embed "artificial elements in to make a point? Is the act of that, not only embed a little of your mental cliches into it rather than the audience?

Response after lecture:
I believe the most interesting part of the lecture was towards the end, the artist's attempt to re-evaluate her methods and research and answer questions that arose from the audience. Perhaps because of her honesty and genuineness in trying to answer the questions that made her answers more believable. I think the way I felt at the end was what Rudelius wanted me to feel through all her other works too; assessment of truth, curiosity to find it, and where truth tends to show up.

Three words to describe Rudelius & work: curious, human agitation, connectedness
The find the ability to feel disconnected and yet still try and try and try to understand and become whole with other elements surrounding you is inspiring. It is hard to constant want something solid to stand on. And also harder to keep it and feel secure enough to not be constantly worried about it being taken away from you at any moment.

After listening to Rudelius's lecture, something that stands out to me was the things she said towards the end, after watching her work "Forever" and "Politician; Charismatic Leader", was when she spoke of her work being "manipulated". That in this manipulation lies the truth.
Because she "controls" her subject through head pieces, guiding them to answer certain questions and move in a particular fashion, it is contradicting when she originally states that "although I manipulate the films, my subject, and the viewers, I still keep the authentic nature in it". From that I have been able to form this:

:People will not have "truth" be handed to them.
:They deny the thought that "truth" can be a gift to give.
:Non-controlled parts of people are only easy to detect when every thing around them is controlled.
:We desire to have truth, but we refuse it when it is handed and delivered to us.
:So we come up with this way to sort of trick ourselves, we manipulate the "truth", steer it in directions we want it to go, push certain ideas forward, and only then do we begin to reach the outer skirts of "truth". By seeing what is left behind, the honest "slips" or "mistakes"; the truth is revealed. And in these mistakes, we are able to trust ourselves, we feel human again, human enough to admit to mistakes and that is the the sincerest form of truth.

We basically trick ourselves only to later realize that, it was and will always be the only way to get ourselves to where we want to be.

All of Rudelius's work have lead me to that conclusion, and that conclusion is only relevant for the "now", because tomorrow everything will be re-analyzed and re-evaluated again.

P.S: I wish I could have actually seen all her work in its full length. What a let down, they were truly intriguing and engaging. The role flopping back and forth from spectator to participant definitely exist like she wanted.