29.03.07 Susana Medina will be reading 'A Retinal Tattoo of Light':
A millisecond divides life from death. Or is it an attosecond? Or a femtosecond? The beheaded lose consciousness in two seconds, if the blade cuts through the neck in one go. The brain has enough oxygen stored for metabolism to persist for seven seconds after the head is cut off: the eyes flicker, the mouth might still move. On the 16th November 1880 , Edhard Gustav Reif was decapitated in Heidelberg . His wife had died and he had killed his two sons, perhaps an act of desperation. If the future didn’t exist for him, it didn’t exist for his children either. (...)
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GALERIE BRIGITTE SCHENK, COLOGNE, GERMANY
29 March- 20 June 2007
Derek Ogbourne’s Museum Of Optography has an accompanying book, The Shutter of Death. Contributors are Dr Alexandridis, the only person to have successfully produced optograms in the 20th century, Professor Richard Kremer, historian at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; Dr. Ali Hossaini, author of Vision of the Gods: An Inquiry Into the Meaning of Photography, Paul Sakoilsky, artist and writer, Thom Kubli, artist and broadcaster, Richard Niman, artist and opera singer and Susana Medina, essayist and novelist.
GALERIE BRIGITTE SCHENK
ALBERTUSSTRASSE 26 50667 KÖLN. GERMANY
TEL: 0221. 925 09 01, FAX: 0221. 925 09 02, Mobil +49171.8995515
bs@galerieschenk.de, www.galerieschenk.de, www.derekogbourne.net
DEREK OGBOURNE
Museum of Optography
A hundred and forty delicate retinal drawings arranged as a disk that echoes the retina, video, photography, archival material and yet more drawings, conspire to create a tantalising world of pseudo-imaginary science in Derek Ogbourne’s Museum Of Optography. Part science, part detective story, part history lesson, part psychogeography, but always already, simultaneously, ‘art’, in this exhibition Ogbourne explores his fascination with the curious myth of the process called optography:
In the mid 17th Century, a Jesuit Friar called Christopher Schiener observed an image laid bare on the retina of a frog, a faint, fleeting record of what the eye had been fixed on at the moment of death. The fixing on the retina of the last image seen before death came to be known as an Optogram. (Time-Life, 1970).
In Heidelberg, Germany, the physiologist Wilhelm Kühne made the first and most successful visually identifiable optograms recorded as drawings in the late 1870’s. He also had obtained the only known ‘human optogram’, in Bruchsal. Optography was believed to be a new criminologist tool that would help to solve murders, akin to early DNA testing. A condemned young man, two scientists, Jack the Ripper, Salvador Dalí and the only known human optogram are leads extrapolated within the Museum Of Optography in the quest to uncover the truth and constant fascination behind this myth.
Part invention, part archive, this show investigates the human preoccupation with what exists within the very fine line between being and not being. Within every gaze that contemplates death. We imagine death, we imagine when and where. This project is about imagination and death. As a poetic metaphor, optography suggests a series of associations: the eye as camera; the eyelid, its shutter, the moment of retreat into the internal, the virtual and eventually, a real death moment.
