Phlegethon-Milczenie III, 2006 Limited edition color print. Published before 1945 German classical literature and music, crayons,
graphite, pigment, pencils, the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Dresden.
Phlegethon-Milczenie III, 2006 View of the installation and performance at the Kunsthaus Dresden. Published before 1945 German classical
literature and music, crayons, graphite, pigment, pencils, the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Dresden. Photo: David Brandt.
Phlegethon-Milczenie III
Phlegethon (River of Fire) is "the river that flows with fire which burns and does not consume" (Virgil VI, 265, 551). It is one of the five rivers in the realms of the mythological underworld. Milczenie
in Polish means silence, muteness, and the inability to speak or to convey.
"Phlegethon-Miczenie III" is a site-specific installation composed of a triangular sculpture from books, projected video, sound environment and the artist's performance. The books are open and placed in
several rows and layers on top of a wooden base. All books were published before 1945 in Germany and include classical German literature, history, mathematics and sheets of classical music. Among the books
are drawings representing naked and solitary human figures, which the artist created on pages torn from the books in the installation. All this material bears traces of charcoal, graphite and pigment,
left by her performative action. On March 9th the artist lay among the books drawing around her body. The process was filmed by a video camera, which she suspended from the ceiling. The resulting video
reflects and alters the two-dimensional view of the triangle from books and the solitary figure of the artist. Weiss composed the sound from the recording of the burning of Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus"
and the voices of German speakers reading fragments of poems by Paul Celan.
Kunsthaus Dresden, March 9 - May 7, 2006 Click here to view an online review.
