A definition from the 1811 edition of a famous German dictionary, the Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart: “UND (and): a short connecting word, the simplest in the whole language, which merely describes the existence of one thing next to another.¹ ” So far, so good. However, the next sentence in the definition begins to complicate matters, as it introduces a “but.” It goes on to read, “but, it connects,” a phrase followed by a list which, for its part, owes much to invisible “ANDs.” Determining which “things” are connected by this little function word puts us on a wide variety of levels. The dictionary lists “individual words, concepts, and circumstances,” and “individual clauses of a single or a periodic sentence.”

In reading Adelung here and now, we find ourselves in the field of language alone: language dictates how language relates to language. If we leave this field and go over to the medium of drawing, the numbers of combinable elements will also increase by leaps and bounds. Words can reappear in the form of drawings, connecting with outlines; outlines can be layered and assembled to form objects or not-exactly-objects. A swarm of possibilities — even more of them now, two hundred years after Adelung, in the age of technical recombination, when drawing utensils can be a mouse, a sheet of paper, a computer screen — all of these are further varieties of AND. And this is also why, in Ursula Döbereiner’s work, the AND occurs in another, more general sense. It is, grammatically speaking, not (at least, not merely) the copula that connects two or more things, for at the same time, it also describes an entire genre of works. The AND is heading and subject alike, the word that creates order and is put in order, and because it appears on both sides of this organizational dividing line, it creates disorder.

Looking at the Web site www.ursuladoebereiner.de, it is easy to understand this. The site is constructed according to the principle of taxonomic branching: Four categories, “Animations,” “Installations,” “Links,” and “Drawings,” form the first hierarchical level. Even here, though, one starts to wonder, because the alphabetical principle does not differentiate between her own works (let’s say: ICI) and references elsewhere (let’s say: AILLEURS).

If one clicks on the “Drawings” link, one immediately sees more lines in alphabetical order: and in these lines — which form a chronology from 1994 to 2006, and otherwise mainly line up attributes (COLOR, YELLOW, B&W) or substantives and proper nouns (AUTOS, GENA, POCKET) — the AND is clearly an outsider; an interesting foreign body, an unconnected-connecting alien in an everyday context.

This goes along with a shot from one of the many Godard films that Döbereiner has translated into the medium of drawing. On a vaulted surface in front of a dark background are the letters ET, massive and immobile like a sculpture that has fallen from space. It is hard to get past this ET: it acts like a main character right at the beginning of Godard’s film. With ICI ET AILLEURS (France, 1974) in mind — the film the image is from — Gilles Deleuze saw in Godard the filmmaker “of the method of the AND,² ” and he explained elsewhere what he meant by that: “[T]he AND is not even a special conjunction or relation; it takes all relations along with it, it provides as many relations as ANDs; the AND not only destabilizes all relations, it also destabilizes existence, the verb…etc. The AND, ‘and…and…and’, is the creative stutter precisely, the strange use of language, in contrast to the conformist and dominant use of language, which is based on the verb ‘to be’.³ ”

What Deleuze describes as the production of a grammatical and epistemological vortex can be studied through Godard’s very specific images and sounds, through frequently unexplained relationships between image and image, word and image, between texts, sounds, and all manner of possible and impossible cross-connections. Godard sets up experimental arrangements, almost all of them surprising, often approaching punning and word play: contrasts, confrontations, assemblages. Between these elements (and, in the nineteen-seventies, between the media of film, television, and video) there is always the AND, sometimes visible as an edit, sometimes invisible. Hardly any other film director has retained such a prominent interest in montage — call it, if you will, the theoretical and practical expression of the AND in film — throughout a period of what is now fifty years. Montage can be found either between the shots, or smuggled into the visual composition, as combinations of intertwined, yet different, partial images.

In Ursula Döbereiner’s AND drawings, this interest in layering, in the relationships between text and image, and in coupling elements has left its mark in various ways. To move in concentric circles from the periphery toward the center: the AND is, at first, a very general category that makes it possible to file the heterogeneous under a common term. According to the logic of the AND, the AND drawer provides plenty of space for things that can also be found in other categories: for instance, there is a series of “pocket” drawings, which is also About AND With Ursula Döbereiner and Elsewhere

A definition from the 1811 edition of a famous German dictionary, the Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart: “UND (and): a short connecting word, the simplest in the whole language, which merely describes the existence of one thing next to another.” So far, so good. However, the next sentence in the definition begins to complicate matters, as it introduces a “but.” It goes on to read, “but, it connects,” a phrase followed by a list which, for its part, owes much to invisible “ANDs.” Determining which “things” are connected by this little function word puts us on a wide variety of levels. The dictionary lists “individual words, concepts, and circumstances,” and “individual clauses of a single or a periodic sentence.”

In reading Adelung here and now, we find ourselves in the field of language alone: language dictates how language relates to language. If we leave this field and go over to the medium of drawing, the numbers of combinable elements will also increase by leaps and bounds. Words can reappear in the form of drawings, connecting with outlines; outlines can be layered and assembled to form objects or not-exactly-objects. A swarm of possibilities — even more of them now, two hundred years after Adelung, in the age of technical recombination, when drawing utensils can be a mouse, a sheet of paper, a computer screen — all of these are further varieties of AND. And this is also why, in Ursula Döbereiner’s work, the AND occurs in another, more general sense. It is, grammatically speaking, not (at least, not merely) the copula that connects two or more things, for at the same time, it also describes an entire genre of works. The AND is heading and subject alike, the word that creates order and is put in order, and because it appears on both sides of this organizational dividing line, it creates disorder.

Looking at the Web site www.ursuladoebereiner.de, it is easy to understand this. The site is constructed according to the principle of taxonomic branching: Four categories, “Animations,” “Installations,” “Links,” and “Drawings,” form the first hierarchical level. Even here, though, one starts to wonder, because the alphabetical principle does not differentiate between her own works (let’s say: ICI) and references elsewhere (let’s say: AILLEURS).

If one clicks on the “Drawings” link, one immediately sees more lines in alphabetical order: and in these lines — which form a chronology from 1994 to 2006, and otherwise mainly line up attributes (COLOR, YELLOW, B&W) or substantives and proper nouns (AUTOS, GENA, POCKET) — the AND is clearly an outsider; an interesting foreign body, an unconnected-connecting alien in an everyday context.

This goes along with a shot from one of the many Godard films that Döbereiner has translated into the medium of drawing. On a vaulted surface in front of a dark background are the letters ET, massive and immobile like a sculpture that has fallen from space. It is hard to get past this ET: it acts like a main character right at the beginning of Godard’s film. With ICI ET AILLEURS (France, 1974) in mind — the film the image is from — Gilles Deleuze saw in Godard the filmmaker “of the method of the AND,” and he explained elsewhere what he meant by that: “[T]he AND is not even a special conjunction or relation; it takes all relations along with it, it provides as many relations as ANDs; the AND not only destabilizes all relations, it also destabilizes existence, the verb…etc. The AND, ‘and…and…and’, is the creative stutter precisely, the strange use of language, in contrast to the conformist and dominant use of language, which is based on the verb ‘to be’.”

What Deleuze describes as the production of a grammatical and epistemological vortex can be studied through Godard’s very specific images and sounds, through frequently unexplained relationships between image and image, word and image, between texts, sounds, and all manner of possible and impossible cross-connections. Godard sets up experimental arrangements, almost all of them surprising, often approaching punning and word play: contrasts, confrontations, assemblages. Between these elements (and, in the nineteen-seventies, between the media of film, television, and video) there is always the AND, sometimes visible as an edit, sometimes invisible. Hardly any other film director has retained such a prominent interest in montage — call it, if you will, the theoretical and practical expression of the AND in film — throughout a period of what is now fifty years. Montage can be found either between the shots, or smuggled into the visual composition, as combinations of intertwined, yet different, partial images.

In Ursula Döbereiner’s AND drawings, this interest in layering, in the relationships between text and image, and in coupling elements has left its mark in various ways. To move in concentric circles from the periphery toward the center: the AND is, at first, a very general category that makes it possible to file the heterogeneous under a common term. According to the logic of the AND, the AND drawer provides plenty of space for things that can also be found in other categories: for instance, there is a series of “pocket” drawings, which is also found under its conventional rubric, “POCKETS.” After all, that is the advantage of the virtual drawer: something that is kept in the AND drawer can be in any other drawer at the same time; there are potentially endless ways to sort things, simply by clicking the refresh button.

In all of the AND drawings, there are at least two elements (objects, colors, media, layers, etc.), and that is the second level on which the AND comes into play. At first, this seems to be nothing more than a very small common denominator (the AND as a multifunctional bond that combines different elements and likes to make a mess of the rest of the categories). However, it can also combine different spaces, something that is especially clear in the large, wallpapered computer drawings. A kind of secondary architecture is applied like a net to the existing exhibition space, so that dimensions, corners, and surfaces are wedged together. This is especially conspicuous in the artist’s connection of mostly functional, austere exhibition spaces with the neo-baroque, excessive, escapist extravaganza of Castle Linderhof (esc002 to esc006, 2007). Here, the AND would be the oscillation between two or more possible ways of perceiving space.

Finally, the drawings that are actually called AND (und001 to und007), reintroduce these kinds of formal determinants to the level of naming. Without exception, their references are all taken from Godard films: und001 is a coarsely stippled felt pen drawing of two overlapping newspapers; “Palestine” can be read on one of them, something like “Contine…” (the rest of the word is hidden) on the other. On one cover is a veiled woman, on the other, a woman whose faces is also hidden — but, as it seems, by a motorcycle helmet. The motif, like the big ET, comes from ICI ET AILLEURS, and it combines two geographic and political spaces, two ways of life, and two cultures. In the montage, similarities and differences collide.

und003 is also a felt pen drawing, but in a glowing green. It shows Juliet Berto, with an Asian hat and chopsticks, standing near a gas pump. On the wall can be seen two letters leftover from an Esso sign: “SS” (from LA CHINOISE, 1967). On the pump is a big tiger, ready to leap. A second glance shows that the fuel here is marked “Napalm,” and the image calls up, in an allegorical way, a political constellation (an overpowering predator, the United States, versus defenseless Vietnam), because it appropriates its technique of abbreviation from advertising.

Hatching and stippling are used to register yet another medium, to add yet another AND, to each of these examples. Even if one is not familiar with the films, one gets the impression that the drawings are taken from frozen moving pictures, brought to a standstill. Yet at the same time, it is obvious that the individual images are not content with their motionless state, for in Döbereiner’s animations, they are actually re-translated into periods of movement. The drawings present images on the cusp of motion, and they remind us that the AND (the AND and the AND) between the film images in the projector is often made to vanish, while in Döbereiner’s works, it is clearly recognizable.