Gustav Mahler wrote ‘Kindertotenlieder’ (Songs on the Death of Children) between 1901 and 1904, 70 years after the German poet Friedrich Rückert had written his similarly titled series of 425 laments in the wake of the deaths of two of his children. Of Rückert’s poems Mahler chose five, all of which deal in one way or another with the theme of light and darkness, which he set to music. Mariele Neudecker has extended this sequence of appropriation still further by taking Mahler’s five pieces of music and building for them individual structures that provide a physical and visual frame to the form and content of the works.
Previously shown in York and Bradford, ‘Kindertotenlieder’ has been reinstalled at Colston Hall in Bristol, the city’s major concert hall, which sits otherwise unused during the summer months. Four of the five structures occupy the space in the auditorium between the tiered seating and the stage, while a fifth (which in fact corresponds to the first of the five songs) sits tucked into a smaller space by the entrance to the auditorium. Acting as a note of introduction, this first piece is a maquette of a domestic room with a single window, through which is projected an image of an alpine sunset onto the interior wall. As with all the works in the installation, the corresponding piece from Mahler’s song-cycle plays from speakers alongside, and, as with all the works, one’s attention is sought as much by the diorama’s frank exterior as by its semi-illusionistic interior.
In the main space the interiors ascend to lifelike proportions, each wooden box sitting like an abandoned shipping container in the room. Built with one side open and bearing a projection on the back wall, the allusion to cinema or theatre is clearly borne out through the spaces’ role as screening rooms for the 16mm static shots of landscapes that function both as scenic backgrounds and framed images. The projections contribute to the works’ illusionism to different degrees; in one room a window reveals an alpine view visible through (digitally superimposed) floating curtains; in another the image of a young girl skipping through a meadow is encased within a translucent doorknob.
Most of the time, however, we find ourselves on the outside of these fragile fictions, examining the back-stage aesthetic of the wooden walls and the back-projected images, which are, of course, visible from the exterior as well as from within. It was from this aspect that the work was most revealing; not inside the highly directed presentations of sound, image and text that teetered on the edge of melodrama, but standing in between each work, listening to Mahler’s lieder washing into each other and watching the projectors throw their glowing images onto each structure. We know from Neudecker’s past works that this is the position in which she is most interested – a sense of distance, of the wide-angle shot (so beloved of viewers of landscape) so broad that the edges of the view itself begin to show. Her tank pieces, in which three-dimensional renderings of romantic landscapes sit suffocating in atmospheres of coloured liquids, are all about the construction of feeling and belief. What is never quite clear, however, and what allows Neudecker’s work to stay alive in our minds, is her own ambiguous relationship to her subject. The landscapes she refers to, and their representation in painting, literature and music, never entirely lose their sense of mystery and power, even when they are revealed to be made of little more than painted fibreglass in a tank or coloured film over a bulb.
While Mahler’s music could be undeniably powerful, heard within the single-point perspective of a live concert hall performance, Neudecker complicates the possibility of emotional submission to the music by placing overriding emphasis on the physical (and so by implication the cultural and behavioural) structures that it sits within. The spiritual and fearful associations of Sublime landscape that were so inherent to Romanticism are emphasized by Rückert’s texts, transcribed on an inside wall of each room (‘In this weather, in this horror / I would never have sent the children out’) and borne out by the distinct focal points of alpine imagery. At the root of the work is the sense that Neudecker is examining such ready-made ways in which we attempt to identify, control and even revel in ordinarily unbearable depths of feeling. Four years after Mahler wrote ‘Kindertotenlieder’, his daughter died of scarlet fever; he later wrote that ‘When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs’. Neudecker’s installation does not hope to convey or reproduce in the viewer the despair of a parent losing a child. Instead, it presents five formulations, or neutralized descriptions, of grief, revealing the way in which our response to the idea of such an event owes as much to certain cultural traditions as it does to unmediated emotion.
