In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time?
Reflections on the Artistic Work of Vadim Schäffler

1. In Schäffler’s 2007 “Spiderwoman” video, a young acrobat is hanging beneath the ceiling, tightly wrapped and waiting for her cue, caught in the light of irritating laser beams. The scene Vadim Schäffler filmed appears to be mysterious, since it may be associated with the circus or sadomaso nightclubs. Suddenly, the woman is buzzing down her rope, doing several somersaults, to finally start her performance.

At this point the video ends: The artist is not really interested in function-oriented constructions of time and place, but the more in situations that seem to undermine conventional constructions of that kind. Therefore, Schäffler as a cameraman was in the wrong place at the wrong time and for this reason did not film the artist’s performance, supposed to be admired in the first place.

Being in the wrong place, a precarious way of placement, is, as we will see later on, one of the main problem areas of this particular artist’s work that, as far as “Spiderwoman” is concerned, is brought into the aesthetic play by means of the wrapped positioning of the acrobat.

Additionally, a second main motif of Schäffler’s art is found in “Spiderwoman” just the same, dealing with implications of speed, accentuated through the young woman, rapidly buzzing-down.

2. In the video “Giraffe” from 2007, breaking with the concept of time and place presents itself in a more playful kind of way. Nevertheless, it appears to be very consistent: One is looking at the head of a giraffe and its long neck before a blue patch of sky, head-down and swaying from left to right like a pendulum. Then, the pendulum starts moving more quickly and so wild that this giraffe, doing its round-and-round loop, is leaving the square the camera had caught it in before from time to time. This so-called animal-like clock has actually skipped its beat, freaked out by the quick motion of speed and resembles something Paul Virilio labels as “a phenomenon of pure momentum”, - depicting the state of modern times.

Placing the animal head-down and making it move in a kind of “racing standstill” (Paul Virilio), - since the giraffe is, same as each and every loop, constantly returning to the same positions in the room -, are playfully corresponding with the tension between time and place seen in “Spiderwoman” before.

3. A short excursus
Immanuel Kant, one of the main philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, has labeled the categories of time and place as sine qua non concerning the rational constituting of subjects.

Among other things that is the case because the place as well as the moment we are in, are exclusively reserved for one certain subject only, - and vice versa: Naturally, it is impossible to be in more than one place at one time. A person, able to be in more than one place at a time, would, quoting Paul Virilio once more, “nobody … To actually be nobody, however, one has to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time”. Observed from the opposite perspective, the categories of time and place create stability and lay the foundations for biographies to this day.

4. Every time, the rational constituting of subjects no longer works out because a proper orientation in time and place fails, human beings as such inevitably turn to masks pretending to be characters.

The artist himself experiences this in his video “Mask” (“Maske”), 2005: Carrying a mask, he is standing in a computer generated nowhere-place, in a nowhere-place without any traces of dimension left. His mask has been adapted from the computer program “Poser”. Suddenly, the masked man seems tired of waiting (for Godot?), takes a step forward and is run over by an along-racing - speed!- truck right on the spot.

That way, the collision of virtual and actual reality produces situations of a disastrous quality. However, thanks to a wide array of possible simulations offered by computer technology, our man gets up again: Wearing a second mask, we can watch him again in the video’s nowhere-place.

5. Let us finally turn to Schäffler’s group of works from 2008, called
“LOOK“. In this group, the aspect of dealing with disastrous situations reaches its peak and almost gains apocalyptic characteristics. Again, Vadim Schäffler uses the computer program “Poser”, this time in order to transport the characters “Woman” (“Frau”), “Man” (“Mann”), “Child” (“Kind”) and “Dog” (“Hund”) from this program to another, more complex one, to a computer program allowing the artist to compose abstract landscapes.

To achieve this, he first made scans of textile structures to use their visual qualities as a basis for grey and anonymous as well as empty landscapes. Into these apocalyptic, colourless, cool and weird settings some of us know from Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic story “The Street” (“Die Straße”) from 2006, Schäffler placed his idealized characters, forming different groups, some of them waiting and looking out for something, some of them marching, others involved in discussions.

The irritating deconstruction of time and place gains a rather constricting as well as prophetic dimension. These groups of characters in the midst of their nowhere-places do not experience the rational constituting of subjects Kant had in mind. Instead, idealizing the characters by means of the computer program named „Poser“ tends to drift in the direction of uniform object modeling, so to speak: In “LOOK”, the “Nobody” Paul Virilio discussed has materialized in the form of virtual reality.

Raimar Stange