Sublime Journey
New works by Caroline Rannersberger
Official opening by Minister Marion Scrymgour
Showing: 20 April - 18 May 2007
Caroline Rannersberger lives on the outskirts of Darwin. She combines painting and printmaking to create large scale landscapes on paper which deal with the politics of her immediate environment. In this new body of work, Sublime Journey, Caroline continues to explore the post modern landscape as a metaphor for society, as well as investigating aspects of her own heritage, culture and identity.
Sublime Journey creates a bridge from Caroline Rannersberger’s recent work, Sublime Territory, and the new work, a series of small etchings which explore concepts of exploration and colonisation from the personal perspective of the artist’s own German/Australian heritage. The seventeenth century German literary character, Simplicissimus, reappears as the narrator/protaganist of a new history Caroline is beginning to construct from her experiences and from her research into German philosophy and literature in relation to Australian identity and the landscape. The small works are indeed like pages from a travelogue, and are based on photos taken during a recent trip from the northern tropics, through the desert to the southern reaches of Australia.
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The landscape in these new works operates on two levels, implying the potential existence of parallel worlds. One world might be seen as an embodiment of our day to day consciousness, the other, an underworld, inhabited in this case, by chimera-like faustian creatures drawn from the artist’s German ancestry. For Rannersberger, these creatures represent explorers in a broader sense, but metaphorically they suggest an ominous duplicity inherent in the complexities of society. In these works, seventeenth century German literary character, Simplicissimus, accompanied by German renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer’s Monstrous Sow of Landser (1496) travels the world in a futile search of redemption against a backdrop of social upheaval. Floating above this underworld are snapshot etchings of landscapes, subtly changing as time passes, seemingly disconnected from the forces of the underworld; a juxtaposition of apparent beauty and innocence against imaginings of duplicity and instability. As Simplicissimus laments at the end of his explorations, “But when I came, after my sainted father’s death, into the great world, then was I simple-minded and pure, upright and honest, truthful, humble, modest, temperate, chaste, shame-faced, pious and religious, but soon became malicious, false, treacherous, proud, restless, and above all altogether godless, all which vices I did learn without a teacher.”
Grimmelshausen, HJC 1912, The Adventurous Simplicissimus, translated by Goodrick, A.
The text printed over the map of Australia is taken from the original 1669 novel, The Adventurous Simplicissimus, is as follows:
Ich wurde durchs Feuer wie der Phoenix geboren.
I rose from the ashes like a Phoenix
Ich flog durch die Lüffte!
I flew through the skies
… Ich wandert durchs Wasser,
…I journeyed through water
Ich raißt über Landt, …
I travelled overland…
The text suggests possible linkages between concepts of redemption through travel, as in the case of Simplicissimus, and the artist’s own investigation of heritage, culture and identity. Each work is associated with concepts of the text, namely fire, air, water and land. Through the landscapes and figures the artist seeks to imply that concepts of the post modern sublime, far from romanticising the artist’s connection to the land, is today seen as a type of negation which is based on a continuing critique of cultural representation.
