Hajnal Németh

Gogo 01

Video, SD-PAL, stereo, 6', 2004

Performer: unknown

Camera and Sound: Volker Schaner

Producer: FuFoo Film GmbH

Recorded at: Deutsche Bahn buildings at Revalerstrasse, Berlin

The two go-go videos manifest the same basic idea in two different ways: the extraction of things from their original position and their simple recontextualization fundamentally changes, and casts a different light on, their essence.In specific cases a process, or more precisely, a well choreographed happening with premeditated impact is displaced from its almost exclusive context into a less estimable, disconcerting situation.The well-known genre of “table dance” is strongly associated with the atmosphere of a night club; one might say its impact mechanism only exists and asserts itself there.In Gogo – which is in fact not identical to table dance – 01, the striptease dancer performs her routine number in front of the graffiti-covered wall of a barren industrial building.There are three observers present apart from the dancer and the camera, only perceivable as elongated shadows cast on the wall. Much more significant than their covert visual presence in the picture, devoid of identity, is their audial presence due to the conversation which can be heard almost intimately close. As we are let in on the conversation, we become privies to the group vis-á-vis the dancer performing her somewhat non-erotic striptease, exposing herself in the actually quite ungraceful situation she has been brought into. In Gogo 04, the striptease undergoes the same transformation – only a lot more intensely: four dancers perform their fundamentally solitary, but now automatically synchronous dance.The viewer is turned into a lone voyeur by the absurd situation that, apart from the cameras in the corners, there is no one in the studio-like, brightly lit space but the girls dancing for them. This feeling is intensified by two factors. On the one hand, the fact that the girls – again in a situation that exposes them - disclose and offer themselves only to the camera. On the other hand, the editing: the video deliberately shows almost more of the preparations, which, left on their own, the go-go girls carry through as accurately as the performance itself, already stripped of its magic.

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Photo: Volker Schaner