will have been

Jörg van den Berg, 2010, for the catalog *EATING THE UNIVERSE*

Scene (one). Hundreds of potato pancakes hang on the wall; they are nailed to the wall. In front of them is a small, old wooden table; on the table is a double hot plate, with a pan on one of the burners. Accompanied by (presumably) the smell of grease. No cook.

View (two). None of this is in a kitchen or a restaurant. There is no dining table, no chairs, no counter. Instead, there is an art gallery hosting a group exhibition on the theme of "eatart." One (or more) viewers.

Scene (three). No plates, no knives, no forks, no napkins. The potato pancakes are cold. It’s not about the food, nor is it about inviting the visitor to join in the meal. A picture.

Judith Samen’s "Reibekuchen Wall" oscillates between stage and painting. It functions as a stage in that it clearly reveals all the action taking place in the foreground. Someone has been cooking here—a good 700 potato pancakes, to be exact—and has nailed these pancakes to the wall behind the cooking area. But neither the cook nor any photographic documentation of his action is visible. Samen calls her installation "Reibekuchenwand: P.O.P II / Performance without an Audience." Because the table with the hot plate remains in front of the wall with the Reibekuchen, the space in between becomes charged as a former and potential space for action. Although there are no materials on the table for the further production of even more potato pancakes, the viewer is placed in a productive state of uncertainty between perception and action. Should they enter the (stage) space between the table and the wall? In this respect, the "Reibekuchen Wall" comes surprisingly close to works of participatory art, yet deliberately refrains from involving the viewer as an active participant. Samen offers a potential role, but the plug is pulled—the hotplate is without power. This is precisely what further heightens the radical nature of the "Reibekuchenwand’s" visual impact.

Without the action and without the person performing it, the viewer stands before an image. An image, however, that is nonetheless not static, for on the one hand, the preceding actions are unmistakably inscribed in the image, and on the other hand, the image changes over time. At least, that’s what a fax from Judith Samen promised when, in 2000, she first proposed the "Reibekuchenwand" as her contribution to the group exhibition "Bleibe" at the Berlin Academy of Arts: "Just for your information: I did the potato pancake test: the potato pancakes probably can’t stay in their assigned spot on the wall for more than a week. They bulge away from the wall in a most peculiar way, shrink, and, on top of that, each one releases at least five drops of fat. CONCLUSION: After about a week, the picture looks completely different! Could you incorporate these considerations into the exhibition concept?"

The moment of actual or potential change over time is a defining feature of nearly all of Judith Samen’s works. This is particularly evident in her videos and performative installations, but it can also be found in her sculptural and photographic works. The staged photographs typically depict a single person (rarely multiple figures), usually in a domestic setting and—very often—with food. An old woman with a dreamy gaze holds a radish in her hands; a little boy sits on a table with his knees drawn up, and a naked chicken dangles from the upper left corner of the frame; the bare-breasted old woman finds herself behind a pile of French fries. The images are curious hybrids between a very classical pictorial tradition of portrait, still life, or interior painting. However, Judith Samen takes the staging to the extreme, turning her "models" into actors, objects into props, and pictorial spaces into potential stages. These stages, however, are stages of everyday life—on the one hand, they seem quite familiar, while on the other, they leave ample room for the absurd. "I usually try to arrange the whole thing so that it not only looks like art, but also has something true to life about it: a bit of tragedy, a bit of comedy." Past, Present, Future: It is precisely this meticulously staged liminal space between tragedy and comedy that is found in nearly all of Samen’s works and defines her distinctive style. In a way, the "Reibekuchen Wall" also seems like an attempt to recreate a slightly psychedelic 1970s wallpaper—which has, after all, become quite trendy again—with its form and color certainly evoking that era. The very act of nailing more than 700 potato pancakes to the wall carries with it a degree of humorous absurdity that the viewer standing before the painting cannot help but notice. On the other hand, the attempt to immortalize the potato pancakes fails tragically, because they bulge out from the wall… Judith Samen transforms the radically everyday reality of the table, the stovetop, and the potato pancakes into the reality of the painting. This painting—as simple as it is—can never be fully pieced together, and it is precisely for this reason that it lodges itself in the memory.