Wolfgang Staehle
«Towards Victory»

An aluminium ladder, a small monitor and video player, driven by a car battery, and the line of text 'Vers la Victoire' on the monitor form the elements of this low-tech piece. The text image is taken from a French war newsreel of the 1940s, and transforms the ladder into a symbolic stairway 'to victory'. Bringing it cryptically together with a cheap household ladder, and the placing of a 'television' on the ladder's uppermost rung, undermines the simple symbolism and counteracts the text. In the end, every victory can reveal itself as a Pyrrhic victory. The power of television – whose images can be received even under improvised conditions – is omnipresent. What remains for the artist is the ironic gesture of attaching the TV set to a battery that at some point must run out.

Rudolf Frieling