About the Work
This artist duo has been acting out a 'lifelong photo novella' since the 1980s. It plays out in the petit-bourgeois milieu of apartments furnished according to their choice. There, it seems, relationship conflicts are staged with such violence that the objects literally fly in the couple's faces. Appearances are deceptive, however. What we see is a photographic simulation of the couple being exposed to parapsychologically released centrifugal forces: horrified Bernhard in his conservatively garish Glen check jacket and frightened Anna in her dress with its staidly rotating curly pattern. The bodies and the space are so tightly interwoven that a sort of 'Transcendental Constructivism' (1992-94) ensues. The title the partners have given their photographic work alludes to the fact that it is not easy to retain gravitational control of bodies and architectural elements in a magnetic field of energies governed by the mind. In the living room and kitchen areas of the spiritistic phenomena, everything is on the move, including the inhabitants. During their indoor battle, the traumatised Blumes crash against the walls and doors as if it were a matter of demonstrating the Dadaist principle of fragmentation on their bodies and other objects and giving the living subject a whiplash injury. But the rooms in which all this happens are transcendent constructions illuminated by artificial light: what looks like a white geometric patch is an intangible construct whose immateriality attracts people like moths to a light. Buffeted by paranormal energies, the honest and upright Blumes are incapable of action. Without the possibility of freeing themselves from the structures they have created for themselves, they remain stuck between the constructional elements of the lives they have built up. For this powerless spatial fixation between a German living room and a German forest, Anna and Bernhard Blume have discovered the camera to be the instrument with which to record their violent pantomime of life.
