Innocent

Drawings and Paintings

Since Adam and Eve, innocence has become a questionable and even debauched concept, a concept that is considered to be the ideal, the projection and a claim of the power structures of the world, which always has the potential to be manipulative. Childlike innocence, religious innocence, national innocence, the innocence of a woman, the military, art: all fantoms of longing for better life, better past and better society. Not that there’s no such thing as innocence, it is only the very moment where it’s ideologized or instrumentalized, when it must be demoralized.

Michael Jackson and Britney Spears’ fall from the popstar throne have raised questions of fault and at the same time, such stars have always had a connection with an image of innocence. The legends of pop culture all share in the transition from entertainment to politics from the pure nature of a comprehensible and collective luxury product to a function of state and moral.

Daniela Wolfer’s sequence of images , “Innocent” addresses the game between mainstream culture, innocence and naivety and its instant loss. Medial signs and signals become muddled, diced and assembled into and self-exposing context. The works are composed of partly ironic and partly cynical commentary about public unconciousness: the colorful monster of Mangas peering from behind japanese teen eroticism, Jesus and Mary as camouflaged figures sightseeing in Bagdad, armed children playing in the infantile glitter of play-hell, a soldier coming out of a tank in a latex mask: how sexy is Abu Ghreib actually?

In this context, Daniela Wolfer focuses the fall of Britney Spears, an image of fallen innocence, the nimbus as a ray from Uncle Sam’s watch or its immediate rise in flames. And, always in time, the bodygaurd with a baseball bat, intoxicated by violence, acting as the big avenger of the consorted and dishonored. In ‘Burn another Day’, the smoking guy à la James Bond rises in flames, like a suicide-assassin, in front of the backdrop of Bagdad. The last season of the voyeristic-terroristic Soap opera called ‘Oops I did it’. Enjoy the show!

Johannes Schlichting