Looking at Painting as Watching Slow Video Art: An Intermedial Experience of Disruption in the Work of Corinne Wasmuht

Critics and scholars of contemporary art tend to consider slowness in particular as a feature of video art, owing to the fact that video is the time-based artistic medium par excellence. Quite a few distinctive works of video art are characterized by slowly changing images that serve as a statement against the fast and fleeting images commonly found in mass media. Reciprocally, many video installations require patience and close attention from viewers due to their complex temporal constructions, in stark contrast to the easily digestible images in mainstream cinema.¹ The interest of these video artists in a slow-paced visual language fits into a more general pattern: the ongoing acceleration of information and production processes increasingly appears to have generated a longing for slowness in various domains, as reflected in the "slow food" movement and the even more recent phenomenon of "slow travel." Although slow video artworks may seek to resist the accelerations of global technocapitalism, they do so through strategic interfaces with new technologies themselves. Through the use of slowness, the presumed immediacy and transparency of the medium are disrupted, in order to switch attention to the interfering act of mediation in visual communication.

These days, the slow, time-consuming process of creating a painting can also be understood as an effort to counteract the seemingly endless and uncontrollable flow of immaterial images in digital mass media, in this case by means of a traditional medium. The authors of the preface to the 2015 exhibition catalog Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age even explicitly link the current "boom in painting" to the "explosion of new digital technologies and media."² This exhibition focused in particular on the expressive and material nature of contemporary painting. The exhibition's title made me rather think of examples of contemporary paintings that evoke experiences of slowness as a dialectical response to this "explosion." For instance, when several years ago I observed the monumental and detailed figurative paintings by the German artist Corinne Wasmuht in the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, I was struck by the similarity between perceiving her paintings and slow-paced forms of video art. This experience made me curious of new ways of understanding that result from looking at a painting as if watching a slow video artwork. To find out, the paintings of Wasmuht seemed to be an interesting case study of "slow painting," even though I could not find any indication of the artist's particular interest in video art.

To pursue the notion of slow painting in more detail, I went back to some of the catalogs of Wasmuht's exhibitions. The artist, who studied at the

Figure 1.

Corinne Wasmuht, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (2007). Oil on panel (207 × 651.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf and currently lives in Berlin, has exhibited widely over the past two decades.³ I became particularly interested in her work entitled Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (2007) (Fig. 1). This painting, much like Wasmuht's other paintings from the past two decades, represents the multiple places that people pass on their way to somewhere else. It consists of countless fragments of images representing roadways, waterways, and boulevards inhabited by pedestrians, or at least by human shapes, most of whom seem to be walking in various directions. Wasmuht borrowed these images from mass media and digitally manipulated them to serve as the basis of a monumental horizontal tableau.⁴ The final work is the outcome of a meticulous procedure of applying many translucent thin layers of oil paint onto a white primed wooden panel.⁵

Since 1986, Wasmuht has been collecting images from mass media as a source of inspiration for her paintings—a strategy used by numerous other artists of the past century, from Robert Rauschenberg to Gerhard Richter. Over the course of the 1990s, she started to use her computer for composing and manipulating the composition of her paintings on the basis of her archive...