Cine-scope

Alexander Gutke, Cine-scope, 2008 Video still © Alexander Gutke

Alexander Gutke

Cine-scope describes a voyage through a 16 mm-film strip. In a hypnotic black-and-white loop, flecks and dust and long scratches rush towards and past the viewer, like trees along the roadside in a monotonous road movie, in a panning of the film material itself, a film about film.

A recurring theme in Alexander Gutke’s oeuvre is the exploration of the inherent technical and mechanical processes of the media he uses. Cine-scope is no exception, but the journey that the work chronicles is both mysterious and, of course, unlikely. In addition to scanned film material, the film contains digitally animated scratches and marks, creating an illusion of depth that could hardly be achieved with a thin, transparent celluloid strip.

Nevertheless, the perception of the film material as a threedimensional space is anything but foreign to us. Simultaneously with the breakthrough of abstract painting in Western Europe, experimental film-makers in the 1920s were engaged in exploring the spatiotemporal properties of the film medium, and what could be achieved cinematographically with the two-dimensional surface. In abstract animations, the early experimental film-makers focused on portraying the nature of the camera, the film material and the projection surface, rather than seducing the viewer with a narrative flow and figurative images. Cine-scope reverts to the pioneers of abstract art, only to span a history where faith in absolute image structures has long since dissolved, where abstraction has eschewed absolute truths and instead embraces paradox. In Cine-scope the pictorial surface becomes the space between the film and the viewer, the space where the image could be perceived to happen.

Alexander Gutke

Born 1971 in Gothenburg
Lives and works in Malmö

Education

1996–2001 Konsthögskolan i Malmö/Malmö Art Academy, Malmö

Selected solo exhibitions

2009 Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit [US]
2009 Culturgest, Porto [PT]
2008 Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin [DE]

Selected group exhibitions

2010 Under Destruction, Museum Tinguely, Basel [CH]
2009 La Preuve Concrète’, Centre Européen, Actions Artistiqueset Contemporaines, Strasbourg [FR]
2007 Die Wörter, Die Dinge, Kunstverein Düsseldorf [DE]

Selected bibliography

Brian Scholis, ”Disassembly Instructions”, Alexander Gutke, Culturgest, Lissabon/Lisbon, 2010.
Bettina Klein,”Devices, Loops and Slices of Time ¬¬¬– Interview with Bettina Klein”, Alexander Gutke, Culturgest, Lissabon/Lisbon, 2010.
Helena Selder, ”Tingens mekaniska melankoli – intervju med Helena Selder”, Varför blev du konstnär? 2010.

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