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Figure 1.

Marcel Odenbach, Nothing to Add, 1996. Video installation: two videotapes, two projectors, two VCRs, and plexiglass plate, each approximately 45 mins. Photo: Courtesy: Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Figure 2.

Marcel Odenbach, Die zwei Seiten der Madaille (The Two Sides of the Coin), 1995–96. Installation view from Three-Legged Race, Firehouse, Harlem, New York, 1996. Video tape installation: two videotapes, two projectors, color, sound; 13 mins each. Photo: Courtesy: Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Figure 3.

Marcel Odenbach, Step by Step, 1998. Video installation: two videotapes, each approximately 8 min loop. Photo: Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

[Marcel Odenbach was born in Cologne in 1953; he was the subject of a major retrospective at the New Museum in New York in the Fall of 1998. Born in Freeport, Bahamas, in 1964, Janine Antoni is best known for her performance pieces, especially Loving Care (1996), in which she dipped her hair in black dye and mopped the floor with it, and her process sculptures like Lick and Lather (1993), which featured seven self-portrait busts in chocolate and seven in soap. A 1996 finalist for the Hugo Boss Award of the Guggenheim Museum, she has exhibited widely in North America and Europe. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. From July 29–November 15, 1998, the Whitney Museum presented her first major video installation, Swoon, curated by Elisabeth Sussman. Janine Antoni, Marcel Odenbach, and Nari Ward presented a self-curated installation, Three-Legged Race, in an abandoned firehouse on West 141st Street in Harlem at the beginning of the 1996 art season. The following conversation took place on July 27, 1998.]

JANINE ANTONI:

Let’s start by talking about the reception of your show at the Anton Kern Gallery in New York this past spring.

MARCEL ODENBACH:

That’s an interesting starting point. I was very surprised at how people reacted to my show at Anton’s. The two video installations dealt with racism and black issues in the United States. Some people couldn’t understand why a German artist who has so many problems with his own country is dealing with these issues. What is interesting for me is that we are now in a position, politically and in terms of communications, of coming closer and closer. So I do not see my problems as German problems. And I see American problems also as my problems. I have a lot of experience and connections in this country. I live here for four months of the year and many of my boyfriends have been black. So when you are with somebody, you have to be sensitive to their problems and being German, I am very conscious of racial issue.

JA:

Not to mention the fact that you chose to do the show here.

MO:

Exactly. I wanted to do something that related to America as well as to my private experience here.

JA:

And I don’t think people see it that way, that it’s your private experience.

MO:

No, they don’t.

JA:

They believe a German artist should only talk about German issues.

MO:

Have you ever done a piece only about the Bahamas?

JA:

No, but my experience of growing up in the Bahamas is at the core of my work, although this has never been addressed critically. When I first came to America, I became painfully aware that my body language was inappropriate. This situation is what brought me to use my body as a tool. Carnival has also been a huge influence, especially in a piece like Mom and Dad, where I dress my mother as my father, and my father as my mother. So the influence of the Bahamas is integrated into the content. But my art education has primarily been in the United States, so that has shaped the form that my work takes.

MO:

I know what you mean. Germany was occupied by the United States for forty-five years. And American culture is...