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Email PageThe Conquest of Happiness
January 12, 2006- February 18, 2006
Oliver Pietsch
Goff+Rosenthal
537B W 23rd StThis was to be my final hit. But let's be clear about this: there's final hits and final hits. What kind was this to be? Some final hits are actually terminal one way or another, while others are merely transit points as you travel from station to station on the junky journey through junky life. --Trainspotting
Art is truly modern when it has the capacity to absorb the results of industrialization … while following its own experimental mode and at the same time giving expression to the crisis of experience.” --Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Oliver Pietsch, an emerging video artist and filmmaker working in Berlin, demonstrates that there are, in art and filmmaking, no “final hits” – no conclusive imagery or idea in film that cannot be recycled, renewed and reinterpreted. And while his work seems to fit Marxist critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno’s description of what successful modern art should be—at the same time reflecting and transgressing society and its ideologies—his own 1.5-second loop video from 2003 entitled “Adorno” splicing TV footage of the philosopher with David Cronenberg’s exploding head from the movie “Scanners” seems to absorb even the philosopher/critic himself into a new critical discourse, both reverent and ridiculous.
Goff + Rosenthal is pleased to present Pietsch’s new video“The Conquest of Happiness.” Forty-five minutes long, the film took Pietsch two years of research and editing to finish. It encompasses more than three hundred drug-related video clips taken from the history of film. It is organized according to the particular drug being addressed—heroin, cocaine, marijuana, etc—and set to a soundtrack devised by Pietsch. The soundtrack includes music by the Eggs, the Mooseheart Faithstellar Groove Band, Neil Young, F.S. Blumm, Neu, Pass into Silence, Pascal Schäfer, Spaceman 3, Roy Orbinson, John Carpenter, M.T. Fern, Brian Eno, and Daniel Lanois. Music is a key element of production for Pietsch, as he says it “has to work with the pictures, to hold all the different material together like glue and at the same time transport a certain feeling or point of view.”
Says Pietsch, “’The Conquest of Happiness’ is equal parts documentation, experimental film and music clip. It is a compilation film about drug-use and its representation in movies.” Pietsch is part of an emerging group of contemporary video artists and filmmakers including Christian Marclay, Paul Pfeiffer, Candace Breitz, and Pierre Huygue who sample from, reorganize, re-edit and use other ways to interpolate into existing films in order to represent them as new works. An important recent exhibition at the Milwaukee Museum of Art curated by Stefano Basilico called “Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video” was devoted to this mode of new video art.
Film historian Rob Yeo, writing in the exhibition catalogue outlines the radical nature of this new group of video artists: “By subverting narrative structure, manipulating the ‘official story’, and questioning the controlling elements of our world as represented through media, found-footage filmmakers challenge the foundations of filmic language, conceptually undermining permanence, stability, and linearity.” Yeo also explains that this kind of video art has a history almost as long as that of popular film itself, from Joseph Cornell’s re-edited version of “East of Borneo” called “Rose Hobart” in 1936, to Bruce Connor’s montage piece entitled “A Movie” from 1958 (which may be the closest antecedent to Pietsch’s work), to Craig Baldwin’s “Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America” from 1991.
Born in Munich in 1972, Oliver Pietsch lives and works in Berlin. He has received numerous awards for his work and has been in many group exhibitions across Europe. This is his first solo exhibition in the United States.
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Goff+Rosenthal was last updated: 2008-10-10
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