The Devil May Care: on Marc Brandenburg’s Exhibition “Tilt”
By HARALD FRICKE
Titles play an important role for Berlin artist Marc Brandenburg. There are drawings such as the “Tiergarten” series; there was the exhibition “Meddle,” a playful reference to the psychedelic side of Pink Floyd. And in the Galerie Crone Andreas Osarek, he presented the “Hirnsturm” (“Brainstorm”) cycle. And now, “Tilt,” a survey and slogan for a new phase of work encompassing precisely detailed drawings of scenes from an amusement park and white, plastic-covered “modular” moveable walls on which Brandenburg has plastered stickers with reproductions of earlier works, creating an explosive collage of dense juxtapositions.
Pop cultural associations are evidently bound up in the new title, ranging from the strict definition of the word to references to biographical influences.
In English, “tilt” implies a slant, an angle, an inclination, a downward movement without, necessarily, a direction, like the movement of Walter Benjamin’s melancholic, who tumbles in his fall. “Tilt” also appears on an old pinball machine when it’s pushed too hard, kicked or shoved. The ball suddenly and silently falls, as if the machine has been unplugged and we watch helplessly as the whole game is deleted. “Same player shoots again” is merely cold comfort. “Tilt” was also the title of a Scott Walker song on his last CD of eleven years ago, back in another, faraway century. Time passes way too quickly. You can hear it in the trembling, wistful voice of the downcast, all but forgotten British pop star from the ’60s. Singing of buffalos breaking away, he suggests a desire between cowboys, one that needs to be roped with a lasso, though that never really “happens” in this early Brokeback Mountain.
Marc Brandenburg calls his exhibition “Tilt” and here all these streams of desire meet: towering figures stepping out of a kingdom of shadows, motifs from a fairground flashing up grotesquely, the little bit of love dissolving. The drawings circle around one another, forming rows and ornaments as they dance to an imaginary beat, bumping into each other from time to time. In the new medium of the stickers, however, which Brandenburg has recently begun to arrange in dynamic clusters, they seem to derive new energy: Action Painting not in the sense of Jackson Pollock’s dripping cosmos but as a multiplicity of figures derived from Marc Brandenburg’s everyday life. Hence the dark power of signs discharges itself in the acid bath of memory about which a Las Vegas king named Elvis once sang, “The devil may care.”
