The German artist Andreas Müller-Pohle describes the river from out of the river. For each frame, he photographs under water, at the water surface, and the views to be had from the river, thereby bringing together the color of water, its movement and the cultural landscape, which is related to the river like a stage-set. So for Müller-Pohle, the castle in Bratislava seems like a delusion, an eye from which a final tear has just been brushed. The ruin of the bridge at Novi Sad has a poetic analogy in reeds that outline incomplete arcs. Müller-Pohle thus presents strange metaphors that make us feel as if we were seeing the river for the first time.
Some things cannot be described photographically. At major points along the Danube, therefore, Müller-Pohle took water samples, twenty-one in all, which he then had analyzed according to chemical standards. An excerpt from the resulting data has been added as a code line to the images of the river, a sobering and de-idyllizing measure. Serious chemical contamination is detectable in the water shortly after the source in Swabia. The Danube River Project conjures up the river’s primal form while also giving an account of its hydrological substance. With video projections that stare at the water with the patience of an angler, and a sound installation that has taken its cue from the acoustic shock experienced by divers, the exhibition draws the viewer into the whole matter.
So the artist-photographer waded into the river to reverse the customary perspective: not the river doing decorative credit to the cultural landscape, but the river first and foremost, and behind that the cultural landscape it has given rise to. The latter both reveals and at the same time denies its political history: the supremacy of the Turks, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the destruction of the Nazis, the Soviet empire. While the river washes poison and rubbish into the Black Sea, as if to obliterate the memory of all that, the diplomats row upstream so as to dock in the glistening administrative metropolises of western Europe. The south-western Danube countries, formerly dictatorships, are tugging their way back to their European origins; Slovakia and Hungary are already anchored in the Union, while Bulgaria and Romania are moored before the locks.
The journey from the source of a river to its mouth is always a mise-en-scčne. Yet what the chronology of the course of the river illustrates is the rapid changes that have been made to its natural, technical and cultural form. As it passes through Germany and Austria under numerous bridges, the river is decked out as a tourist amenity, in Romania and Serbia, however, the political depths remain almost insuperable. The journey down the Danube is a journey towards poverty. In the delta, where from day to day fishermen survive in huts on its banks, air travelers descend to watch rare birds or unearth family roots.
Andreas Müller-Pohle, one of the new guests, has dipped into the river at famous and at forgotten points. His apparatus resembles Cousteau’s deep sea capsule, transformed into a transparent safe that shields his electronic camera. The object – the water – is kept at arm’s length so that it looks like a stage. The expanded space can be read visually as extended time. This is the only way to link or mix the physical-biological space with the historical space of the landscape: two quasi cinematographic images. In any search for precursors, David Hockney’s multi-layered landscapes could be mentioned, for which the artist used Polaroids, forerunners of the digital image; or Germaine Krull’s discovery of the Leica by way of 19th century metal architecture – a new technology for deciphering what was considered a familiar object. Andreas Müller-Pohle’s Danube River Project seems a lot less euphoric. Under his specific gaze, the Danube appears as a poetic promise, which the Europeans still have to fulfill.
Ulf Erdmann Ziegler