Michael EB Detto was born in West Berlin and grew up in small villages in
northern Germany and in the black forest, then in Mannheim and Heidelberg.
In 1988 Michael Detto started working with moving pictures. He had experimented with video by making a three-minute-version of Dostoevskij’s novel “The Demons” which used a re-enactment of a photograph by László MoholyNagy.
In 1991 Detto worked on the restoration of subheadings in silent movies for the
Munich Film Museum while he was trained in traditional animation techniques at Trickfilmstudio Pfenninger & Gamper, Munich. Works followed consisting of inserted layers of imagery into texts, which he shot with a single-shot rostrum camera (Crass). He created images influenced by concrete poetry.
In line with Detto’s postgraduate studies at the film school in Łódź, Poland
(teachers at that time: Krzysztof Kieślowski, Andrzej Mellin, and Mariusz Grzegorzek) he completed the shooting of the film “Żertwa, jeśli chcecie” (35 mm, color and B/W, 35 min.) in 1995. It is a film about two women preparing for a party. There comes a moment when both women are becoming aware of their own subtitles. They occasionally destroy first single letters, then whole words while the conversation goes on. In the end one of the women is dead. The film went for post-production back to Munich. Detto shot still shots (slides) from VHS-copies of the digitized version. The film was stolen from a storage unit while Detto was overseas. A few photographs could be restored (plus the outtakes).
In 1997 Michael Detto developed with the artist Wu Min-an for their project “Light
+ Shadow” so-called impossible triptychs: Nine triptychs representing certain
concepts (e.g., “Camera”, “Ghost”, “Cowboy”, “Fun”) which consisted of three
Cibachrome prints, framed in a steel frame, hinged together. The side wings were landscape format showing buildings or scenes as known from street photography.
The centerpiece was portrait format, therefore a closure of the triptych as
suggested by the construction with the hinges, not possible. The centerpiece was a digitally created tapestry consisting (in Chinese, English, and German) of the
title, a poem, absurd formulas repeating basic arithmetic operations, and
coordinates. Two colors were digitally extracted from the side wings, a third color was red. Detto’s part in the project consisted of the representation of the shadow as an inapt mirror of the real world. The nine altar pieces explored different approaches to that problem: the satirical, the scary, the comforting properties of the shadow.
Emerging from his occasional work with an independent theater group, Detto
wrote in 1997 a theater play in verses inspired by the writings of Louis Kahn:
“The Grotesque Room”. The plot revolves around a man and a woman, waking
up in a gallery showing Detto’s artwork. They cannot leave the room. After one
hour they fall in love. Live music, angels and ghosts are involved. After the
couple died, the curtain opens again, with the same words, the same gestures.
But this time the resurrected couple is aware of the repetition. They try to leave
but they cannot change the text. Text and image unfold together a seductive trap
that cages and terrorizes the players with a magic spell thereby referring to dark
tales of the Romantic age. The play was performed at different theaters in
Munich in 1997, 1998, and 1999.
In 2001, Michael Detto had a solo exhibition at Literatur Moths in Munich. He
showed fourteen Cibachrome prints, embedded in burnished metal frames. In
each corner of the frames a metal pole was inserted carrying a transparent film
parallel to the image. On this transparency a short story was printed, organized as a small square. Next to the story there was the shadow of a man. At the opening lights were provided to let the shadow and the texts move into the images, matching and erasing shadows in the Cibachrome prints.
The images/sculptures where loosely organized according to the Stations of the Cross. The exhibition “Auf der Jagd nach dem KSM, dem Kleinen Schwarzen Mann” (Hunting the KSM, the Little Black Man), referring to the popular Romantic novella of Schlehmil, who sold his shadow to the devil and tries to get his shadow back ever since. By renaming the shadow to “KSM” multiple semantic fields had been added to an old tale.
After emigrating to the United States in 2004, Michael Detto became involved in the art scene in Los Angeles by supporting the yearly fundraiser for the Venice Family Clinic as an artist and as a committee member. He took classes at the Otis College of Art and Design Photography Certificate Program; it was comDpolwetneldoaind May 2013.
Invited by Meta House in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, he presented the conceptual
solo-exhibition “Cambodian Ghosts”, accompanied by a catalog in 2012.
Follow up was the group show (six artists) “Ghosts”, curated by Detto and Sayon Syprasoeuth.
A lecture about the writer Sebald was held by Detto at the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles in 2015. And in 2015 Detto and Syprasoeth presented the group show “Cabinet of Ghosts”: 14 artists and the band “Dengue Fever” in a live performance. A catalog and a record documented the event (a song was produced using a piece by Walter Benjamin translated into Khmer).
