Lecture/Audience/Camera, 2008/2011

Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Holanda)

The work of artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh evokes the public and the private, the human and institutional relationships that are the engines of civilization where the importance and value of creation and work and the social mores that inform these relationships are proscribed by the definitions of the status quo. Social descriptions are conveyed through documentary poetics, through which the worker, the artist, the woman, the marginalized and the invisible of society emerge as protagonists. The work of Wendelien van Oldenborgh is a socio aesthetic inquiry into the state of the world. Lecture/Audience/Camera, a 30-minute film, was produced over the course of three lectures open to the public, the public being the main protagonists of the action. The work thus proposes the museum as site, the lecturers as protagonists and the audience as part of the cast, fulfilling its cycle of relativity. The lectures and the surrounding dialogues form the basis for the script; the relationships between speaker and audience, audience and camera, and camera and speaker are being addressed both by the lectures and the actual film. The film is edited to interweave the relationships within and between the three live events, as well as the position of the viewer of the film. With its title referring directly to Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror, the film by Wendelien van Oldenborgh is an homage to the ongoing inquiry into the interrelationships within the constructs of knowledge and meaning in public situations such as a performance or a lecture.