Professional Documents
Culture Documents
american
vertigo
petrol green paint
seen in staircase,
537 Broadway, NYC, 2009
A significant quality of a painting is that it exposes the viewer to a complete instant visual sensation and,
due to its composed nature, a narrative one.
American Vertigo (AV) explores the side-by-side of this instant and progressive seeing and translates the
experience into a surrounding.
It was first installed in Robert Janitz’s studio in Brooklyn in 2009. When entering the studio, the viewer2
was gradually drawn to different visual stimulants: light, volume, flatness, surface, trompe l’oeil surface, a painting
attractive and non attractive colors, open and private areas. from the installation
Also the possibility of a private living situation was evoked, notably through the casually put together
cardboard shack marked with fluorescent tape and partly reflective sub-furniture. The marking tape and the
mirrored surface in particular grab attention when first entering the space. They help to contextualize some
small scale paintings that one discovers, once stepping in, on the three surrounding walls.
The environment includes a looped, vocal audio piece and which amplifies the emotional charge.
The viewer’s sense of balance3 - a key element to spatial navigation, is challenged through a slanted wall
add-on.
The paintings in the installation depict a multiplied the horizon line, stabilizing spatial orientation.
They are put in sets of three on three of the walls. These three groups of paintings resemble each other.
Entering the space one is gradually becoming aware of the paintings - and their communicative task within
the whole studio environment.
Painting condenses space-time. Here its spatial layering is magnified and translated into a time
based spatial experience. The space time coherence of the all-at-once surface is expanded.
A painting serves as a model for an environment, that again includes paintings. As such it is a
circular logic, a first-person experiment.
This project suggests an answer to the question “Why do people put something (art) on their
walls?”
The multiplying horizon lines in the paintings lets them function as biomechanical devices that help
the sense of balance and overcome somatic vertigo
The paintings operate in the whole environment, mutating the space into a psychomechanical
device that first triggers and then navigates the viewer through their emotional vertigo.
shelf / painting
viewer
position 1
viewer
position 2
slanted wall/
cardboard
-add-on
marking-
tape
reflecting aluminum
paintings