A R C H I E F1 9 9 6  
.14
  Irit Batsry
Giacometti's Scale
  USA 1995
Installation
“Before, I believed I could see things very clearly, a sort of intimacy with everything, with the universe ... and then, all of a sudden, it becomes foreign. You are yourself and there is a universe outside which is becoming very obscure ...”

– Alberto Giacometti, Writings.

In the texts to which Irit Batsry refers in this installation, Alberto Giacometti describes his relationship to reality and the role that art plays in his attempts to approach and understand that reality. “Art is but a way to see ...” he stated in an attempt to grasp reality by continually copying it and thus penetrating to the heart of life. But the closer he seemed to get, the more veils he removed, the more unknown the world became for him. The intimate relationship he experienced as a child when everything was unified, was altered for ever. In ‘A simple case of vision’, a video tape from 1991, Batsry had already described this process in response to a text by Buckminster Fuller and she reflected upon the way in which we perceive the world.

‘Giacometti’s scale’ is also about perception and relationships - the perception and experience of the relationships between internal and external reality, image and reality, proximity and distance, in short, the relationship between mankind and the world around him. Giacometti’s texts are literally processed into images here and are contrasted with scenes from Batsry’s video tape ‘Scale’ (1995), black and white landscapes of tracks, moments from memories, in which forms continually appear and disappear.

After entering the darkened space, visitors gradually discover a number of large and smaller images, a play of projections, reflections and dimensions. Video projectors and lenses are used in different ways to project the images and texts. Some projectors are hidden and produce a magical, almost limitless image; others are clearly visible from the light they emit and they present a small, sharply delineated image. The large image shows a continually changing landscape in which vague shadows, silhouettes of human figures appear. The visitor can approach this image and practically submerge himself in it, that is to say experience an almost intimate relationship with the represented reality. To other visitors, he is absorbed as a shadow in a reversal of foreground and background. Giacometti’s thoughts undulate as a sea across the walls. The visitor is constantly moving between extremes - image and text, illusion and reality, large and small, inside and outside - constantly finding himself again in a new relationship after the alteration of scale and materiality.

One of the walls contains panoramic lenses which permit the viewer to see outside. However, they also project a reversed image of the outside world onto the inside and thus transform the darkened space into a camera obscura, which simultaneously like a projector, seems to create the reality outside. A gripping metaphor for the human spirit which in its act of perception both reflects and creates the world.

Geert-Jan Strengholt

7 video projectors


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