The significant technique in the video installations and performances of Marcel Odenbach (born in Cologne in 1953) is the collage, a fusion of different media into an often antithetically presented overall picture that unmasks one's own behaviour as a consumer and the notions of the educated classes with subtle irony. The combination of historico-political documents of our time, clips from documentary films and newsreels, and scenes from everyday life into a complex mosaic that appears fragmented by discontinuities and cuts, with black areas as dividers and focus of the picture, is structured by a soundtrack of western classical music, African rhythms, or sounds of his own. Sound and frequently integrated writing remain autonomous to a certain extent, they do not explain the picture, but they represent a commentary, expanding the narrative character of a world of images that is often dealing with political reality.

In his early series of drawings from the seventies, the text represents a second level beside the picture which allows the viewer to re-enact the thought process of the artist in his own mind. For instance, in a drawing showing the trace of a pen that has pierced the sheet above its central axis, and the comment: "the impact of one of my thoughts on this sheet of paper 10.75". As the artist deliberately produces himself for the viewer on a level of action and its reflection and, according to Andreas Vowinckel, confuses the recipient by this "rationalisation of the irrational", he not only creates the basis for a distance to himself but provokes a critical reflection on the part of the observer that is to become a basic demand in Marcel Odenbach's later video tapes and installations.

The play with language using well-known sayings or phrases is evident in Odenbach's choice of titles for his performances and video works in which he also integrates poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, quotations from Baudrillard and Botho Strauss.

The use and questioning of well-known pictorial symbols that make for the beautiful appearance of pictures and their contrast with the historical and political reality of German history is a matter of deep concern for the artist, who did a degree in architecture, art history and semiotics from the College of Technology in Aachen. His early performance "Ich hatte es immer viel zu gut in meiner Kindheit, aber trotzdem empfinde ich meine Erziehung als folgenschwerste Strafe meines Lebens" ("I Have Always Had It Too Good in My Childhood and Yet I See My Upbringing as the Most Significant Punishment of My Life") at the Gallery Philomene Magers in 1976/77 gives a clue to Marcel Odenbach's personal artistic struggle with the morals of a bourgeois society and his own unpolitical upbringing.

With his video equipment bought from the sale of fifty drawings, Odenbach begins to explore this new technology from 1976. As a result of a grant in Paris, he produced his black-and-white video work "Abwarten und Tee Trinken" ("To Wait and to Drink Tea") and which – as the title suggests – plays on everyday activities and visits to cafés and on the beautiful cliché images of Paris.

During that period, Marcel Odenbach founded "ATV – Alternative Television", video as a new solution and competition to television, together with Klaus Vom Bruch and Ulrike Rosenbach.

In the late seventies, he carried out several performances combined with either video or slide installations. "Ich glaube, ich bin mir selbst verloren gegangen, denn Ihre Klischees hätten mich beinahe vernichtet." ("I Think I Have Lost Myself Because Your Clichés Nearly Destroyed Me"), in 1976, is once again dealing with stereotypes, though not with specific world views or attitudes to life, but with prejudices of the artist. In parallel to an Odenbach exhibition, he confronts the public in person, sitting behind a windowpane wearing a black face mask, seeing himself as an "anonymous something", alienated from himself because the notions and opinions about his person, collected in an exhibition, have become overpowering.

Odenbach stages confrontations or pairs of opposites as in the representation of mass media typical for each of the three countries Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands in his video-installation "Die Grenze" ("The Border"), in 1978, or images of past and present political attitudes in our culture in "700 Intellektuelle beten einen Öltank an" ("700 Intellectuals Worshipping an Oil Tank"). Here, the pictorial aesthetics of a staged ideal world alternate with photographs from the Magic Flute or the then topical RAF (Red Army Faction) film from television. Similarly, Odenbach creates an analogy in his video performance "Einfach so wie jeden Tag oder sich selbst bei Laune Halten" ("Just Like Every Day, or Keeping Oneself Amused") (1978) by confronting press photographs of terrorist attacks with two groups of players turning violent.

In his installations of the eighties, Marcel Odenbach works with the movement or position of the viewer in the room. The video monitors are arranged in such a way that the recipient has to either move around or decide to use one of the seats specially designed by the artist while constantly being lured by the signals of one tape or the other. This is expressed succinctly in the 1986 work shown at the documenta 8 "Dans la vision péripherique du temoin" which was produced by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris under the direction of Christine van Assche. In "Der Elefant im Porzellanladen" (The Bull in the China Shop") of the same year, precious porcelain objects of an affluent society, were set on pedestals, arranged in an orderly fashion and placed opposite monitors apparently randomly distributed in the room that were showing video tapes about the deployment of German Wehrmacht soldiers. "The silence in German rooms frightens me", observed Odenbach in his video installation of 1982.

During this period, he also created video works with collage-like combinations of different realities in which the frame is emphasised by black borders or dark coloration and mostly classical music is linked with the African sound of drums, as in "Die Distanz zwischen mir und meinen Verlusten" ("The Distance between Myself and My Losses") in 1983, or the documenta work, and in "As If Memories Could Deceive Me" of 1993 which contains scenes of art historical monuments and photographs of the Nuremberg Trial from the Hitler era.

In parallel, he created the collage drawings "Der Gärtner ist immer der Mörder I, II, III" ("The Gardener Is Always the Murderer I, II, III"), "Der Täter wohnt links oben" ("The Culprit Lives Upstairs on the Left"), and "Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht" ("As I Think of Germany at Night") executed in dispersion and graphite on paper, into which Odenbach integrated pictures from everyday politics.

In his work on subjects from German history, Marcel Odenbach is guided by the maxim that it always has to be connected with his personal life. In the nineties, he therefore refers directly to the topical subjects of exclusion: racism, xenophobia, homosexuality. In his installation in two different rooms entitled "Keep in View – Black and White" at the "Mediale Hamburg" of 1993, Odenbach again and again gave small glimpses of the other's world. Since 1992, the professor, who teaches at the University College for Design in Karlsruhe, has reacted to the xenophobic arson attacks of Mölln, Hoyerswerda and Solingen with an exhibition with his students at the Badischer Kunstverein (1993) on the subject "Burning Fires – Works on the Subject of Racism and Violence in Germany".

Marcel Odenbach lives and works in Cologne.

Lilian Haberer