R.W.F. (RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER), 1993
For a 1993 solo exhibition at Schipper & Krome, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
transformed an entire apartment in Cologne into an imaginary filmset, evoking Rainer
Werner Fassbinder’s practice of using his own apartment as a film location, mixing
thus private space and cinematographic work. Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition featured
a sequence of rooms, whose décor and brownish colours recalled a glamourous 1970s
era German apartment, while the title referred to the nameplate next to Fassbinder’s
doorbell. R.W.F. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is the only existing work from this 1993
exhibition. R.W.F. is the only work that remains from this exhibition.
An iconic work from the artist’s series of chambres (rooms) that with economic simplicity
construct environments meant to evoke periods (developmental, cultural, historical),
atmospheres or emotions through color, functional or ornamental objects and
sometimes imagery, R.W.F. introduced the idea of characters into the chambres series.
The chambres act like conflations of mnemonic traces, creating spaces full of a vague
concreteness, of half-remembered occurrences and objects, which also characterize
the dynamics of dreams. For the observer these environments can provoke a personal
experience that also includes the feeling of intruding into someone else‘s private space,
even if one that is publicly displayed and may be in part fictional.
Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation recalls by Robert Katz’s description of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s apartment in the 1987 book Love is Colder Than Death: The Life and
Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “He wanted everything to be dark…he gave
me instructions to cover the entire floor with dark brown moquette, the walls with
dark brown velvet, and to drape all the windows with dark brown curtains, so that
no light could enter any of the rooms. He wanted his bedroom to be black, apart
from a long narrow mirror running all round the room at the height of a man’s
genitals. The huge bed, made entirely of leather, had to placed in the middle of
the rooms…It looked rather like a sleazy disco. You had the impression of being in
a cave – a highly luxurious cave. Or a tomb, rather.”
Detail: R.W.F. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder), 1993
(DGF 060)
Exhibition view, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. 1887–2058, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Dusseldorf, 2016
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