Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.
 
Wolfgang Staehle «Towards Victory»
Wolfgang Staehle, «Towards Victory», 1988
© IfA collection, Stuttgart
 


 
 

Categories: Installation | Video | Sculpture

Keywords: Material | Recycling

Works by Wolfgang Staehle:

empire 24/7| The Thing


 

 Wolfgang Staehle
«Towards Victory»

An aluminium ladder, a small monitor and video player, driven by a car battery, and the line of text 'Vers la Victoire' on the monitor form the elements of this low-tech piece. The text image is taken from a French war newsreel of the 1940s, and transforms the ladder into a symbolic stairway 'to victory'. Bringing it cryptically together with a cheap household ladder, and the placing of a 'television' on the ladder's uppermost rung, undermines the simple symbolism and counteracts the text. In the end, every victory can reveal itself as a Pyrrhic victory. The power of television – whose images can be received even under improvised conditions – is omnipresent. What remains for the artist is the ironic gesture of attaching the TV set to a battery that at some point must run out.

 

Rudolf Frieling