American Night
Julian Rosefeldt is one of the most powerful artists working at the intersection of narrative film and complex filmic installation. Since the late 1990s, his suggestive imagery—clearly hinting at the baroque tradition of 'theatrum mundi'—is dealing with the cinematographic play of appearance and reality and a life in continuous repetition. On another level, almost all of his art works refer to the idea of the tableau vivant and its animated stillness.
This lavish book is based on Julian Rosefeldt’s opulent 5-channel-film-installation American Night (2009), in which he reflects on America's foundation myth with its current hegemonic foreign policies through the genre of the Western and its central motifs. At the same time he exposes the cinematographic logic of the scenes and allows for a view on the set and an insight into the production process.
Julian Rosefeldt: American Night is published by Kunstmuseum Bonn, in cooperation with EX3 Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea in Florence; it is edited by Stephan Berg, Lorenzo Giusti and Arabella Natalini.
Stefano Cernuschi writes in Mousse Contemporary Art Magazine Feb/March 2010 (p. 151):
"This catalogue is mesemerizing, baroque and lavish in its imagination and inventiveness. The same holds true for Rosefeldt's work itself, specifically American Night, a grand new video production – over 40 minutes – that adopts the aesthetics and lexicon of the Western genre, as key to addressing some rather archaic and certainly enduring ideas as the Fight in the name of Justice, Civilization, the Frontier, the Gun, and the risky life of a Hero (white, male, Republican?) into the open world of Nature. This whole contextual and visual framework constitutes the field in which Rosefeldt builds his narrative, setting in motion the psychological decomposition of forces and characters. And just unfolding the sumptuouspages of the publication makes this revelation a striking and fascinating one."