Mariele Neudecker's impressive new film cycle creates images to accompany Schubert's bleakly beautiful 'Winterreise' songs, writes Aidan Dunne
The artist Mariele Neudecker is best known for what she calls her tanks. These are remarkable model landscapes in vitrines. Several are drawn explicitly from the work of Caspar David Friedrich, and they eerily revive the symbolically charged mountain vistas and icy seas familiar from his paintings, the chasms and voids of German Romanticism. It is strange to see the two-dimensional imagery of the paintings translated into three dimensions. Neudecker's miniature worlds exert an added fascination: they seem to be living, breathing environments. Her ingenious use of salt solutions and dyes means that clouds, mist, colour and light all change as we look at them.
Neudecker is an artist, not a chemist (although her father is), and she says that the chemistry involved in achieving these effects is laughably simple. Still, it's also remarkably effective - so much so that she is still strongly identified with the tanks, even though they represent only one, diminishing strand of her activities. But Friedrich's wintry landscapes persist as a reference in one of her more recent projects, Winterreise, a 24-part film cycle showing at Temple Bar Gallery, in Dublin, and as part of a live performance at the National Gallery of Ireland, at the weekend.
Neudecker, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1965, currently lives and works in Bristol. She has spent more than half her life away from Germany, which may account for the neutrality of her accent. Initially, she spent two years in Cork, at Crawford College of Art and Design. "Cork was a good place to move from home to, compact and friendly. And the college was a good place to work in. You'd say what you wanted to do and they would provide materials and so on."
Thinking back, she nods to herself and adds: "Yes, I got through a lot of work there." Somehow one knows she means it. She has an air of being industrious and focused but also unassuming, with a lively, mildly self-deprecating sense of humour. And apart from her busy professional schedule, she has three children, ranging in age from three years to six months. "No maternity leave for artists," she jokes. "We're self-employed." She went on to complete her degree at Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London. "Of course the emphasis there was much more conceptual." Finally, she did a master's degree, at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and has been busy ever since.
The original Winterreise is, of course, Schubert's exceptionally bleak song cycle, composed the year before he died and consisting of musical settings of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller. As ordered by Schubert, the songs chronicle the wanderings of a rejected lover through a desolate winter landscape. The song titles - Good Night, Frozen Tears, Loneliness, Last Hope - give an idea of the unremitting gloom of the beautiful, despairing music.
The work reflects Schubert's feelings of rejection and his rapidly failing health, but it is relentlessly darker than, say, the last piano sonatas, composed at the same time. So much so, Neudecker observes, that it can be bit much. There is a tendency in German Romanticism towards extreme emotion that can seem overly sentimental to contemporary tastes. As the cycle progresses the wanderer's morbid self-absorption, which means he interprets everything he encounters as a harbinger of doom and a confirmation of loss, becomes overwhelming. "It's so gloomy that it can become almost comic," says Neudecker.
It is also extraordinarily ambitious, with, for example, richly textured, detailed writing for the piano providing infinitely more than the term piano accompaniment might suggest.
Approached by Opera North and Leeds City Art Gallery with a proposal to create a visual counterpart to Schubert's work, Neudecker was understandably keen. After all, it was a challenge she was ideally placed to meet. Then there is her evident interest in Romanticism and her enduring preoccupation with ideas relating to geography, mapping, distance and journeys - and, in a wider sense, strategies of representation: she is essentially a landscape artist, albeit in a wider sense than that description normally implies.
Part of what appealed to her about Friedrich, she says, is the fact that he used landscape in such a metaphorical way. "Everything has a symbolic function." In fact, her approach to Winterreise stemmed indirectly from a previous piece centred on a series of casts of the meridian line at Greenwich. She had in mind the idea "of chasing winter around the globe", following the line of the 60th degree of latitude. That wasn't entirely practical, she quickly realised, for various reasons, not least financial, but something in the spirit of it might be.
In an earlier video installation, Stay Here Or Die, she had matched an expansive fisheye view of the steelworks at Port Talbot, in south Wales, with an aria from Handel's opera Alcina. "There's an incredibly ancient feeling to the landscape there. With the smoke from the steelworks there's an apocalyptic air to it, like a John Martin painting. I had in mind this choreography of matching a landscape to a piece of music."
For Schubert she undertook her own winter journey, along the 60th parallel, with four ports of call: the Shetland Islands, Helsinki, Oslo and St Petersburg. These locations and her journeys between and around them provide the material for a visual mosaic of chilly restlessness. The view from a train travelling through a cold night-time world punctuates the episodes. There was, she notes, snow and ice everywhere. "It started to snow in Shetland as the plane was landing. They said it was quite unusual in January. When I started out I knew I wanted to avoid the usual clichéd views of winter landscapes, but in the end I actually ended up with a lot of just that."
Yet, regardless of her intentions or expectations, she was quite strict in her methodology. "In each place I used GPS [ Global Positioning System] technology to set up the camera on the 60th parallel. That determined where the camera goes."
Given this resolute premise there were some serendipitous events. "When I got to Russia it turned out to be a kind of St Valentine's Day. Everybody was buying flowers for loved ones." On another occasion she arrived at her destination to find herself facing a contemporary reworking of a Friedrich, with a wooden post resembling a crucifix and an electrical junction box like a tombstone. "It's one of those moments when, suddenly, everything seems to be there for a reason." She laughs. "Just for a moment."
She doesn't try to quarantine a Romantic vision by eliminating traces of the present day. A prelude features people she met along the way reading the songs' lyrics in their own languages. In the film itself there are also people, plus escalators, trucks, cars, trains, electricity-generating windmills and, memorably, two huge ferries.
Yet the match of image to music is always convincing, probably because the imagery is appropriately beautiful and bleak and, as she puts it, "never quite settled, always slightly uncomfortable". You are extremely unlikely to see so many shades of cold whites, greys and blues in the space of one work again. The final episode culminates in a fade to blank, enveloping whiteness.
Technically, projected onto a large screen, it looks terrific, but it was, she says, all shot on a small digital video camera. "I had the choice of shooting very little expensively or shooting a lot and spending on post-production. I thought I'd rather be free on the filming side and opted to shoot a lot." She smiles. "Then we pumped it full of quality in post-production."
