The Eagle Document forms the second stage of an ongoing project by artist Monika Oechsler.
Oeschler visited Farnham last September with a radical live performance combining modern dance, performance art, experimental music and a falconry display.
Stage two of the The Eagle Document is the culmination of filmed performance rehearsals, and bird flights presented on five screens. The installation examines notions of performance and 'live' art using projections onto multiple screens. The theme of the bird, the Eagle, is carried through into the new installation and used as an object/prop within the projections.
The viewer experiences multiple views from different camera angles and their non-synchronised timelines and sound creates overlaps and repeats; this repetition playing on notions of time and duration. The screen configuration also echoes the mechanism of film production, its rhythms of flow and interruption, to be experienced as a physical and spatial phenomena.
The Eagle Document was originally inspired by Marcel Broodthaers' Musée d'Art Moderne, a critical commentary on art production at the end of the modernist period. Broodthaers challenged the notion of the permanent art collection, the museum and the status of the art object by creating a series of nomadic, non-permanent and fictitious museum collections. One of these fictitious collections The Département d'Aigles (a collection of diverse eagle paraphernalia) cancelled the status of the eagle as a symbol of power and reappropriated the art objects as a method of display.
The installation borrows Broodthaers device 'the object as method' and investigates the 'object' within expanded art concepts. Both choreography and action are reminiscent of the early video performances of Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn.
The work also looks at 'body and space' a familiar theme in performance art. The installation contrasts the closed space of performance with the open space of the installation. Thus viewing and experiencing the work involves the onlooker navigating the space and assembling images and sounds.
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