The Presence of the Transient
Reflections on Dorthe Goeden’s Works

Shadow Images

The question for the origin of painting is closely tied to a myth that intrigues art and art history up to the present day. In his “Naturalis historia” (1^st century AD), Pliny the Elder tells of a girl from Corinth who retraced the outlines of her lover’s shadow as cast onto a wall by candlelight. The young woman was so enamored that, when faced with the imminent loss of the man who, according to Pliny, was about to go abroad, she decided to preserve at least his image in the form of a silhouette. This first image that sought to compensate physical absence with pictorial presence resembled a phantasm – a line that tried to capture the immaterial negative of the body.*
In the 18^th century, the silhouette became fashionable all over Europe. Situated somewhere in between parlor game and scientific experiment, it drew upon the idea of the outline of the shadow as the archetypical image of man. Johann Caspar Lavater, for instance, took in his Physiognomischen Fragmenten (Physiognomic Fragments) the shadow as the mirror of the soul and pursued on the basis of a multitude of different silhouettes a kind of psychoanalysis avant la lettre. This technique sought to pin down the shadow, essentially a transient phenomenon depending on the respective light situation, and make it legible. Dorthe Goeden is far away from those silhouette sittings of the Goethe era, particularly since she does not work with scissors but with cutter and scalpel. But still she could be called a silhouette cutter. Her fragile and complex papercuts are always black and white and bear witness of a distinct awareness of the relationship between outline and undifferentiated inner form, as well as of the peculiar presence of the incorporeal – two aspects that make the phenomenon of the shadow fascinating up to the present day. The shadow is something secondary, bound to the person or thing that casts it. It indicates corporeal presence, bears witness of vitality but is, taken by itself, still immaterial, impalpable, downright ghostlike.

Memory

In an abandoned house, the artist found curtains that had been left in place while life had long since withdrawn from this place. Relics of home, traces of an individual that once felt at home here. The patterns of the curtains stuck in Dorthe Goeden’s memory and became part of her stock. This stock is a kind of loose herbarium of fragmentary visual impressions and materializes in the first instance in small, mostly very reduced drawings, often done on plain notebook paper. The drawings are exercises in remembering. What of my ‘wild environment’ gets stuck when I walk along a road – what do I take with me when I leave a place? Often it is the transient, peripheral and hardly palpable aspects which are most memorable. The said curtain pattern, for instance, the shadow cast by a branch, or the reflection of the apartment tower on the other side of the street on my own window pane. But memories solidify in repetition. Sometimes they may be ‘cleared’ of unsortable excess in this process, sometimes they remain like dream images: precise in their impression but vague in their form.<

Dorthe Goeden accounts for both those tendencies with the larger papercuts that emerge from the basis of her stock. Before scalpel or knife are applied to the cardboard, the motif has to be precisely defined and the form clarified, especially since the reduction to the black-and-white contrast, which arises from the elaborate interplay of subtraction and residue, always means a concise formulation. But Goeden still allows a certain resistance to her works. When trying to decipher the cuts, the spectator will come across distortions and entanglements; lines break off, go astray or seem strangely tremulous. Out of her memory of the curtains left behind, Goeden developed three new ‘curtains’ with different patterns – this time made of black cardboard and discharged from their initial functionality. The papercut seems like the negative image of a curtain, almost as if Goeden, like the young woman from Corinth, had pinned down a shadow play. There is a distinct transience in these papercut curtains. One of them seems to be pushed together a little by a gentle breeze, another one looks as if hung a little askew, and both even cast their own shadows, as only a few nails fix them to the upper edge of the wall. They are two-dimensional images of a visual impression, memories of things past, and at the same time newly created objects with a corporeal quality and yet a special aesthetic appeal.

Unrestrained Growth and Order

Holly leaves and an Alp plant, seen during a hike in the mountains; organic patterns of curtains from the sixties; the metallically-reflecting curtain wall of a modern apartment tower: Dorthe Goeden draws upon the abundance of forms between the poles ‘nature’ and ‘culture’

Some of the papercuts, also the small-scale ones, feature a form that reminds of a baroque ornament. Tellingly, the Rocaille, characteristic for this epoch, is itself a form derived from nature for the decoration of architecture; it has both an elegant and a playful effect. Goeden extracts this form from its context and combines it again with botanical motives like delicate branches. Another work consists of an ink blot. In arts, it has ever since been a fascinating symbol for the creative power of coincidence and for the image creating itself; here, it is, so to speak, cut to shape by Goeden, but still retains – almost an ironic comment – its amorphous structure.

The duality of unrestrained growth and order shapes the ornamentation of an architecturally-installed floor work from the year 2013 in a special way. Recurring silhouettes of coniferous branches and cones that remind in the reflection of a Rorschach-test are put together to a hypnotic black-and-white medallion pattern. Natural irregularity thus merges with inorganic-regular order. The forms of this and other works remind of the kaleidoscopic effects of fanned out natural stone slices, the mathematically-cool beauty of crystal structures or even the depiction of natural scientific phenomena. The single object which serves as a model for the tile pattern merges into a higher order, as the values black and white become equal carriers of meaning in the pattern. How stable are those meanings that we attribute to the material world around us?<

Segments

Goeden’s monochrome works, the more recent works as well as the wall paintings that mark in her oeuvre the transition to the papercuts, play with the balance of contrasting values. The artist applies the technique of cutting out so ingeniously and in so many varieties that the works present themselves to the attentive beholder as an inspiring deceptive game between negative and positive forms. In one case, the artist keeps cutting material out of the cardboard plane until only delicate black nets are left which work like the outlines of a drawing.

In another case, she detaches the motifs as recesses from the black cardboard in a way that they are defined as negative forms only by the white background that will be put behind the work for presentation. The work “horch was wächst” (listen what grows) translates this deceptive game into a spatial context. In a vacant store in Maastricht, the artist used a foil which she prepared as a stencil to apply black paint to the window panes in a way that in the end the motif, the proliferous botanic shapes, presented themselves as openings that allowed not only the view out of the window, but also the lighting of the motif from within the room, which was visible from afar. Not only the black-and-white papercuts impress with their diversity – Goeden even expands the range of expressive opportunities. A stage design from the year 2008 unmistakably bears her hallmarks, just like the back-lit screen prints „käme ich noch mal dort vorbei“ (“if I passed by there again”). These hallmarks are revealingly idiosyncratic and sometimes almost intimate, although they do not exhibit any spontaneous-gestural moments.

Rectangular edges border many of her works, thus resembling conventional picture planes. Analogous to Goeden’s technique of detaching forms from the cardboard, the motifs appear to be cut out of the world and their context. A large-scale papercut from the year 2011 shows small rectangles, hatching-like cut out of the black, that remind of the structure of an apartment tower façade with its reflecting windows. The format of the whole work captures only a part of this façade, so that the image itself might be understood as a view through a window. Thus, the picture as a window that shows an exact segment of the world, like Leon Battista Alberti phrased it in his treatise on painting? Dorthe Goeden consciously declines to follow this standard, for the classical perspective is suspended by the technique of the silhouette, by the transformation of the world into contrasting lines and planes of black and white. Her works thus become idiosyncratic structures that playfully explore the realm between abstraction and concreteness.

Precious Things

A beholder faced with Dorthe Goeden’s works will initially be attracted by their graphic precision and the black-and-white aesthetics. But the closer you get, the more of their technical intricacy becomes apparent, which is the result of a demanding and extremely time-consuming work process. The eye gets caught in the almost glimmering structures, it discovers familiar forms, but will also come across fragmentary, confusingly ambiguous elements.

The specific quality of these papercuts lies not least in their corporeal presence. The first impression, that of ‘classically’ framed pictures hanging on a wall, is broken by the special way they are presented. Goeden does not stick them firmly to the background, she only uses some small metal pins to fix them to the wall or the frame and thus allows them a certain mobility. The fine sheets bulge, some elements protrude slightly, respond to every draft of air. Their materiality, after all, distinguishes them from the medium of drawing – some works even have the character of fragile sculptures. Like rare butterflies or precious jewelry, especially the smaller papercuts seem to hover behind the glass.
Dorthe Goeden is not shy of giving the remembered fragments in her work a new, powerful form. But perpetuating the transient does not mean depriving the shadow of its own life.

Clara Wörsdörfer and Juliane Duft, translated by Caroline Strack, 2014

 

* Maybe for this reason the girl’s father, the potter Butades, finally intervened and transformed the ghostly image by means of his pottery skills into a sculptural figure that could be regarded as a substantial substitute for the beloved. On the complex implications of this origin myth and the meaning of the shadow for the history of pictorial representation in general, see Victor I. Stoichita, Eine kurze Geschichte des Schattens, (Short History of the Shadow), translated by Heinz Jatho, Munich 1999.