© Michaela Melián / VG Bildkunst
Panorama, 2003
Slide projection with sound
2 slide projectors, 160 slides, motor, fabric, music
Installation view, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck 2003
Photo: Galerie im Taxispalais
Panorama, 2003
sewing thread, paper, 42 sewn drawings, each 42 x 56 cm
Photo: Wilfried Petzi
The Panorama (2003) that Michaela Melián has placed in the hall of the Galerie im Taxipalais is a subtle viewing machine which also functions as a time machine. Referring directly to the town of Innsbruck, Melián uses her Panorama to construct a differentiated system of allegorical loops that are superimposed on the topography and the history of the city. With multi-layered points of reference this panorama also represents a treatise on the “logistics of perception” (Paul Virilio).
Panorama is based on the large cyclorama in Innsbruck, one of the last existing panoramic paintings of the 19th century. It was painted in 1896 by the Munich painter Michael Zeno Diemer. Using a striking landscape illusionism, it depicts the battle fought by Tyroleans against the French and the Bavarians on August 13, 1809 on the Bergisel, against the backdrop of the Inn valley with its surrounding mountains and the City of Innsbruck. Ever since it was unveiled, this great panorama has been one of the landmarks of Innsbruck attracting the most visitors.
Melián takes up the idea of the Innsbruck panoramic painting in her installation. However, the images that she shows in her Panorama are of more recent origin. The artist photographed the motifs while driving to Innsbruck and through Innsbruck and then transformed these pictures in later stages. Their general theme is the history and historiography of the landscape, of the mountains, roads, buildings and, indirectly, also their inhabitants even if no people can be seen in them. The pictures show in the continuous motion of the driving car the surrounding landscape and the city which have been focused on in keeping with filmic principles: shot and countershot, tele-shots and close-ups which are sometimes moved closer as if zoomed in and edited. Melián circles the city, and the loops she places move ever closer like a spiral so that they seem to be moving to the center – the hall of the Galerie – and then outwards again. The photographic motifs have been deliberately selected; in part they are clearly non-specific, while at the same time there are some exemplary aspects which could apply to all landscapes and towns, like freeways, access roads, crossings or sewage plants.
Crucial to Melián’s structural interest in the field of vision and its technologies is the fact that she subjects her photographs to a multiple processing before using them in her Panorama. She makes a drawing of each photograph and then photographs it and projects it as slide. The drawing on which the slide is based has not been made in a conventional way but rather sewn with a machine. Melián lets these pictures “run through a machine again,” as she puts it. A machine seam with a continuous thread thus circumscribes the silhouettes of mountains, streets, trees, buildings and interiors which lends the drawn line a strange technical ductus that bears no resemblance to a signature. The sewing machine drawing has the impression of being slightly two-dimensional and schematic, giving the pictures an affinity to moving film. In Melián’s work, what is possibly a postcard motif becomes transformed when it is once again drawn by the sewing machine into a diagram depicting the withdrawal of certain elements. What is now missing is what has made the postcard so popular, namely the photographic-realistic section with color, light, background and foreground.
The Panorama, in which these pictures reappear in the form of a projection, consists of a cylindrical form with a diameter of six meters that has been covered with canvas. It is, in a sense, a variation in abstract terms of a panorama, which Melián has placed in the hall of the Galerie with its glazed roof. From the center of this “Panorama” the artist has hung two superimposed projectors which, alternately, project one picture after the other. As soon as a picture makes a full rotation at moderate speed, there is a hardly noticeable fading in and fading out that marks a change and triggering the rotation of the next image around the cylinder.
Melián expands the optical dimension of the panorama by adding an acoustic element, i.e., the sound of an alpine zither and a motif she herself plays on the guitar taken from the song “Innsbruck ich muss dich lassen” (Innsbruck, I must leave you). She processed this electronically and composed a soundtrack whose machine-like rhythm corresponds to the dynamic of the picture.
excerpt from
Silvia Eiblmayr: Panorama
published in Triangel, Lukas und Sternberg, 2003