Stars and Stripes

Marcel Odenbach belongs to a generation whose visual memory of the political events of 1967-68 (he was around 14 at the time) is in black and white: the black and white of amateur super-8 film, press photos and sharp oppositions. Yet Odenbach is able to condense these memories, and the traces they left behind, with a clarity few other artists are able to achieve.

Eager to stroll around the fallow ground from which historic signifiers rise like lurching tombstones, he sometimes stumbles, only just saving himself from falling into the open grave of abstract generalisation. But in his strongest pieces, he successfully jumps gaps as wide as continents: for example the gap between African-American culture and the imaginary, parallel vision of it which has evolved in the minds of German subcultural types over the last 30 years.

His most recent video installation, an eight-minute mini-drama with the Rumpelstiltskin-like title Ach wie gut daß niemand weiß (Ha, how glad I am that no one knew, 1999), comprises four large, transparent, free-standing video screens which flickered in the spacious tube of the Cologne Kunstverein. The first of the four parallel screens shows footage of the demonstrations that took place around the shooting of Martin Luther King on 4 April 1968; the second shows the legs of a black basketball player jumping up and down, as if to warm up; the third those of a white pole-vaulter engaged in the same activity; and on the final screen, the uproar after the shooting of student Benno Ohnesorg by a Berlin policeman during a demonstration against the Shah of Persia on 2 June 1967.

Using such heavily-charged historical visual material from both sides of the Atlantic, along with some of the most pervasive myths of black and white male bodies, the work could have remained a set of blunt equations: black civil rights struggle meets white student movement (the outer screens); offbeat White Men Can't Jump basketball elegance meets white Riefenstahl Olympic body control (inner screens). But Odenbach goes beyond this simplistic equation, taking opposing cultural stereotypes, and while pretending to buy into their myths of the male body, twisting them around their axes, both in time and space. Sense is created not with a mere combination of elements, but in the way they are set into motion, the way they are dramatised. Small digital cameras were mounted on the athletes' torsos, recording a projection of the archive footage as they jumped on a trampoline. Thus, synchronised with the rhythm of the two sportsmen, the historical footage is literally shaken. The second defining motion comes halfway through the piece, when the two sportsmen jump out of their screens and into each other's space, exchanging political and cultural contexts.

But the most important element in dissolving the fixed symmetry is Odenbach's use of sound, and the way it shapes the choreography. The score unfolds, with the sportsmen casually taking off their sports suits and tying their shoelaces. Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations blends and merges into Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain, and a drip-drop, fluid simultaneity streams into the space. But then you see the close-up and hear the sound of a needle scratching violently across the record. The jumping begins in slow motion and the sound of the trampoline is like the dark heartbeat of a galley, while the historical footage lurches at the same pace, stopping just short of making you seasick. Rotating carwash-brushes sweep up a windscreen and water blurs the vision, until the piano melody and calm rap-flow of Gang Starr's Hip-Hop-elegy 'Moment of truth' seem to transform the tension into a mourning melancholia. But then a short sample from Hitchcock's The Man who Knew too Much (1956) appears: the orchestra scene in which, at the exact moment a percussionist clashes two cymbals together, a shrill scream resounds in anticipation of a weapon waiting to be fired. The scene ends with a close up of door handles on the two outer screens and the harsh sound of their locks falling into place.

It is as if a polyharmonic, polyrhythmic music has triggered a process of struggle that is divided and conquered by the beat forced upon it. It's striking that the bodies of the original performers are not erect: Glenn Gould is bent over the keyboard on his odd little un-upholstered chair; Miles Davis' muted trumpet points at the floor, as if he was playing to himself and listening to his body. In a way, this imaginative and autosexual trance was exactly what American music offered a German postwar youth torn between facing up to, or breaking loose from, the Nazi past that had elevated their parents' generation's passion-killing virtues of order and cleanliness. The 'must of a thousand years', as a common student slogan went, not only emanated from the gowns of university professors but also from the parental bed linen.

Yet, the relationship with America was an awkward one, to put it mildly. In their protests against the Vietnam war, German students felt solidarity with American counterculture. But common slogans such as 'USA-SA-SS' had the shrill ring of schizophrenia: throwing inherited German guilt across the Atlantic as if to get rid of it. (Marcel Odenbach recounts throwing his guilt a shorter distance: in the form of tomatoes aimed at the Amerikahaus in Cologne.)

Against this background, white, and especially German, fascination with black maleness has long been underpinned by a kind of manoeuvre of reversal. The war generations had transformed the polymorphous liveliness of bodies into the machinery of violence; for some of the subcultures that emerged from the 60s onwards (not least in Germany), black skin seemed determined to absorb the neglected; a fetish of reclaimed longings - from militant German students fascinated by Black Power, or teutonic Rock dudes imitating Hendrix, to young white fans of 2Pac. As Odenbach has worked and lived in both New York and Ghana, many of his video works of the last years have consciously circled around the historic and libidinal implications of this fascination.

Kobena Mercer, in his essay 'Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and Homoerotic Imaginary' (How Do I Look?, 1991), has mapped the ambivalence of neglected and reclaimed gay desire in Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial 1981 'Black Nude' series: at first, the photos seemed to objectify black male sex; but ultimately, the racist (or sexist) hierarchy of looking and being looked at, of active subject and passive object, was suspended by the reversibility of the homoerotic relationship.

A copy of Mercer's text, laid out in slices to form three vertical Adidas stripes, appears in a work from a series of collages that Odenbach recently exhibited at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig. All the works in this series share the three stripe form, while the backgrounds comprise a wide variety of black male iconography from 2Pac to the Jamaican Olympic four-man bob sled team from the comedy feature film Cool Runnings (1995).

The Adidas stripes are not just any brand sign: they represent the odd history of a little company founded in the German provincial town of Herzogenaurach by a man named Adolf 'Adi' Dassler (his brother went on to found Puma), which became popular following Olympic media exposure in the 70s, and developed into a major fetish for old school Hip-Hop imagery in the 80s - commemorated in Run DMC's classic track 'My Adidas'. Odenbach noticed how the three stripes, with their empty serialism, became a global signifier of black culture, bridging the historically different situations of African Americans and Africans. In today's globalised media economy, the huge demonstrations and organised street presence of the political masses of the 60s are increasingly replaced by an endless series of individuals clinging to their respective combinations of brand names. African-American culture has itself become a worldwide brand, as if franchised and tailored to local needs - the German pop charts, for example, are dominated by domestic Black Music products, sung or rapped by the children of immigrants or American GIs, such as the national R&B-hero Xavier Naidoo who comes from Mannheim. Ultimately, the three stripes embody a shift that took 30 years to develop: from the collapse of 60s political bodies to the ascent of the 90s sporty bodies; from street politics to muscle-flex economy. Odenbach confronts the current dialectics of globalisation and the national compartmentalisation of youth culture (whether in sports or music) with the political dissent from which it has long been divorced. This doesn't necessarily equal nostalgia for the good-old-days of 1968. Rather, it ambivalently delineates how old paradigms fade, washed from the windscreen like dirt.