If
I was Emil Nolde today is a work group which switches medium - whereas Nolde worked in the classical fine art media of drawing and painting
(oil and watercolours), Ponger approaches her interrogation of the material by means of photography. In The Mask has been Dance I she takes
Nolde’s Der Missionar (The Missionary) (1912) as a model.  In The
Mask has been Danced II (five masks) she approaches Nolde’s Maskenstillleben (Still Life with Masks) (1911) she also approximates
the formal structure of Nolde’s work using carnival and ice-hockey masks from Western popular and sport culture. Whereas Nolde used a combination
of carnival masks and non-Western  objects
(a figurehead from the prow of a canoe and a head-hunter’s trophy from Brazil) for their emotive power and completely out of their original
context, Ponger’s selection brings out certain stereotypes prevalent in Western society - the cannibal with a bone through his nose, the Indian
with war paint and the insidious Asian. There is also (upside down in the background) what appears to be a caricature of a totemic figure. There
is a final, incongruous item - an ice hockey goalie mask - which does not fit into the established category of the other four masks in the picture.
It is the equivalent of Nolde’s use of the non-Western objects but, contrary to Nolde, it is not a “foreign body,” is functionally
protective and is thus an ‘authentic’
artefact marooned amongst chimeras. |
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Thus there is also a contrast in the works in that Nolde appropriates objects for Western painterly concerns and Ponger, formally replicating
the appropriation, examines the underlying social and cultural assumptions. Another of the photographs in the series, a single frame from an amateur
tourist film of Papua New Guinea, (found footage) presents its ‘authenticity’ in another way. It shows a blurred impression of natives punting
their canoe along a river. Read together with the other works it is the equivalent of Nolde’s watercolours made on his South Seas journey. It also represents,
in its original role as a tourist souvenir, the carvings, masks and other objects Nolde purchased and brought back from the same location. Even at that
time there was a lively trade in ‘tourist art.’
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