Which Cinema is your Cinema, which Discotheque is your Discotheque? Is a space-filling work by Tobias Putrih, which was presented for the first time in summer 2001 at the Pavel-House in Laafeld. The more than one and half meters large object hangs freely from the ceiling and has an opening at its lower end, offering room for one person who is able to stand upright in the interiors of a body, which is lavishly built out of with cardboard and scotch tape for packages. The interior view offers a completely different picture. The viewer sees him or herself surrounded by mirrors of the size of one square centimetre, as if the disco ball would have been inversely placed around one’s head. A strobe light remains true to the cliché of rendering white disco light, however; with every flash, the lit person can see him or herself in the glass shaft. This apparatus works like a therapeutic testing model to balance egocentric fields in self-referential entertainment worlds, mediating a bodyless and spaceless event simulation, which we experience with computer games. The testing or model character of this device is reinforced since small sheets on the inside address the viewers with the question: Which Cinema is your Cinema, which Discotheque is your Discotheque?, which they can answer with the supplied pencil.
Tobias Putrih had in mind to create a room, linking the idea of “absolute cinema” with a ”One-Person-Discotheque” (T. P.). However, his version of body-free, virtual, “absolute” experiences is an atopia, or place showing the limitedness of technicist world concepts. To know the apparatus at least in its technical conditions, another person has to be included, looking at the isolated viewer inside the object via a black and white camera. A monitor, which is linked with the camera, gazes like a porthole out of the egg-shaped object and, because of the rhythmic strobe light, renders the impression as if the recording of the “inner” viewer would be a relic of the early history of moving pictures. To seize the whole process, an interpersonal action, which must be triggered by the involved people, is necessary, because every party is excluded from one part of the information source. A mentioned before, Tobias Putrih’s work only has a model character. However, it is exactly this character, which shows that without “analogue” communication - from person to person - artworks remain the intelligence made believe by the “big heads” of our cultural and entertainment industry.

Gregor Podnar
Translation by Walter Seidl

First published in the annual 2001 of <rotor> association for contemporary art, Graz 2001, p. 88-89.

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