Alexander Gutke

The photographic work 9 ways to say it’s over, 2006, provides the key to this exhibition, Alexander Gutke’s first solo show in Stockholm. The piece consists of nine film stills of credits from different movies and in different languages, all announcing THE END. Even the very end, it seems, holds open certain possibilities. Gutke’s work, usually cinematic in some sense, revolves around this theme, and more specifically around the well-known idea of the engagement with an artwork’s material conditions as the endpoint of formalist exploration. Since 2001, Gutke has made a series of works that playfully reflect upon the prerequisites for their own making. But while a work like The White Light After the Void, 2002, may at a first glance lead your thoughts to the “flicker” films of experimentalists like Stan Brakhage and Paul Sharits, which manipulate the materiality of the film strip, Gutke’s piece quickly turns out to be something else. A 16-mm film projector shows a seemingly empty film, the familiar dust and scratches flickering on the wall. Suddenly, the film gets jammed in the projector and rapidly melts, leaving behind only white light. But there’s no smoke, no fire. The film does not even stop rolling: In fact, the “meltdown” is created in the computer program After Effects and then transferred to film. In another work, Lighthouse, 2006, a carousel slide projector screens likewise empty frames, slightly out of focus, onto the gallery wall. But the projection does not remain in place. Instead, it seems to revolve in a three-dimensional space, as if the projector lamp, impossibly, followed a single slide through the carousel. Once again, it’s all illusion: With a simple yet effective move, Gutke has crafted the appearance of an empty, rotating image frame in Photoshop. This is formalism as a special effect. Gutke does not reduce the artwork to the material conditions of the medium or the recording and projection devices he puts to use. He employs whatever means necessary—digital effects, elaborate stage settings, props, and so on—to make it seem like he did and then adds a touch of illusionism that inevitably pleases.