Taking Positions

In the installation Taking Positions, a moving image is split into three synchronized channels and presented across three vertical displays propped up on customized wheeled stands. Embedding moving images in a mise-en-scène, these video sculptures weave together conceptual and aesthetic threads spanning figuration and abstraction to critically revisit the relationships between sculpture, the female body, and performance. The installation also envelops us in space that fleshes out the disavowed kinships between aesthetic regimes and ideologies that are traditionally seen as antithetical, thereby unsettling the sacrosanct concepts of classicism, modernism, and abstraction. Taking Positions thus underscores unexpected transactions across systems of visual thinking, regimes of representation, and political thought.

Taking Positions was filmed in the former Berlin atelier of Arno Breker, an official sculptor of the Third Reich. During renovations to transform the studio into a new exhibition venue called Kunsthaus Dahlem, Marsh gained access to the site, where she directed six female performers to embody the poses of six Breker sculptures representing idealized femininity in the form of mythological figures including Eos, Psyche, and Humility. In postproduction, Marsh combined abstract color animations with footage of the performers. Influenced by Joseph Albers’s book Interaction of Color (1963), which she updated by selecting colors released by Pantone from 2000 to 2018 and subjecting them to the Munsell-like algorithms of color adjustment underlying digital production, the animations provide a fresh counterpoint to the worn-out opposition between figuration and abstraction, which opens up a space for play and elaboration.