LAURI FIRSTENBERG

Visualizing the Contemporary Vernacular: The Photography of Doug Aitken

(…) Aitken’s new artist book entitled “Notes for New Religions Notes for No Religions” presents a kind of disjunctive image repertoire or anti-narrative photo album, mapping various series as a stage for exposing his infinite research, documentation, and negotiation of the documentary and aesthetic operations of the photograph. A still in the book from “Electric Earth” of a shopping cart in an abandoned lot is glaring in its decontextualization. The surprise for some brought on by Aitken’s sleek and dynamic multiscreen installation “Electric Earth” stemmed from its hyper presence of a subject, distanced from his penchant for disembodied domains. The scholarship and the artist discuss the crux of the work as time, movement, and the activation of urban space – the production of a “docu-myth” (Jerry Saltz). Aitken reflects on his intent with the piece: “How can I make time somehow collapse or expand?”

This experiment with splintered screens, montage, timelessness does more than exploit the temporal, it manipulates the strategies of the screen itself, primarily the look’s “emplacement within spectacle, the body, temporality, desire” (Kaja Silverman). The multi-splintered fields of data of this complex work is described by Aitken as “a twilight of perception where ideas and iconography flicker and reinvent themselves”. Moreover, the inflection of difference performed on the screen by the protagonist transforms the dominant scenario and gives rise to the subject’s capacity for “playing with the screen” (Kaja Silverman) in a kind of performance of travesty – of space, time, and race. Aitken creates a dynamic site of place and agency and presents identities in an unreal and uncanny fashion, inhabiting the space of the screen in order to use the screen against itself.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 74/2001, pp. 6–17.

REINHARD BRAUN

Because I'm worth it. Speculations on Visual Discourses and Consumer Cultures

It would seem to be both redundant and necessary to discuss the mutual relation of views, gazes, bodies, identities, apparatuses and socio-economic discourses. “if the kids are united”, a short photo-story in the July 2000 issue of i-D Magazine, about one of the worst schools in Great Britain that has now morphed into a multi-ethnic showpiece art school, needs a stylist and is basically no more than a subtext listing fashion labels: “Marcel (13) wears Polo Sport body top and trousers; Carhartt polo; Nike trainers. (…) Jan (14) wears Armani drawstring bottoms and jacket. (…) Mario (18) wears Aquascutum T-shirt and trousers; Holland & Holland jacket; Caterpillar loafers.” Etc. etc. Of course, this is advertising; but if the only way for the kids of the world to enact their unification is on the basis of style and styling, if race, class and gender are nothing against Nike, Caterpillar, Holland & Holland or Carhartt, and if this enactment gives the impression of being a photo documentation into the bargain, it is time once again to start thinking about images, representations and their cultural modes of operation.

So, for better or for worse, we are faced with the necessity of reanimating a critique of representation. The aim, in so doing, can certainly not be to return to a concept of representation as a theory of depiction or correspondence, but rather, as W. J. T. Mitchell put it, the “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the image as a complex interplay of visuality, apparatus, institution, discourse, bodies and figurativity”. And this concept of representation is caught between socio-economic developments that have nothing to do with an aestheticisation of everyday life any more, but rather with an end-to-end economisation of private, social, cultural and political discourses. The latest issue of IQ style magazine, for example, featured fashion photos intended to demonstrate how to dress cool for the local Vienna council elections on 25 March 2001: “Voting can be fun. Particularly in these clothes: blue T-shirt and brown skirt from Berhart. Skirt, bag and belt from H & M.” So much for the politicisation of everyday life.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 74/2001, pp. 18–26.

ANN THOMAS

"Temporary Volumes": The Cloud Photographs of Herwig Kempinger

Created with precision and a subtle sense of the sublime, Kempinger’s cloud photographs give permanent form to a subject that is constantly changing, disappearing and reappearing. Although they are monochromatic, the prints are rich and dramatic and engage the viewer in an experience that can be both emotionally charged and contemplative. Laminated on acrylic and then mounted on aluminium backings, the unframed cloud photographs function as three dimensional objects, occupying space with the same sculptural presence of the earlier coloured lightwave series. What is significantly different, however, is the way the internal spatial content of the cloud photographs is intricately linked to the experience of time. While the earlier black and white and colour works relate to architectural space, the cloud photographs relate to cosmic space. If the earlier works possess a somewhat timeless quality, the cloud photographs with their perspective of deep space are adventures into both a compression and extension of time and space. The compression of time and space is achieved by Kempinger’s combining data from a number of negatives taken on different occasions into one image. The extension of time and space is a result of the artist’s working method which involves the use of the computer as a tool. Kempinger constructs these pictures of light and vapour particles by moving pixels around within the frame of his luminescent computer screen. This was the first time that he has used this method of working and he particularly enjoyed the fact that his new medium of stored pixels was invisible and hence corresponded to the immateriality of his subject matter. Digitization and a prolonged procedure of carefully building up the image pixel by pixel from selected parts of the stored image data bank subverts the normally instantaneous process of photography. It is largely due to this fact that the production of the cloud pictures is so time consuming. It also accounts for the relatively small number of works included in the series. With the making of the cloud photographs Kempinger continued to be involved with the immaterial properties of his subject matter and he began to use the term “temporary volumes” in order to describe the content of his work. The title of each cloud photograph refers to the time of its taking and includes the range of dates (day, month and year) when the negatives that make up the final image were made. This extended period of time between the making of the negatives for the piece can range from days to months, therefore the perspective of deep space that we experience while looking at one of these photographs is as much an experience of electronically stored time as it is an experience of space.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 74/2001, pp. 27–38.

SUSANNE NEUBURGER

Lisa Holzer: Test Spaces / Passages

“Sets” is the name that Lisa Holzer gives to her photographic works created over the past two years, a group of works consisting of two-part and multi-part sequences labelled with the day, month and year for identification purposes. Together with the more general term “set”, the chronographically precise specification describes the (photographic) dispositif of these works, emphasising a structural character that cites distances, repetitions and similarities. More (thematic) meaning ensues from the scenic dimension of these photos, models and installations that Lisa Holzer builds in her studio and that can be interpreted as other »sets« in the domain of film, television and theatre and as advertising photography.

These scenes are decorated, functional sites, staged as a plot for a specific period and which compensate for their provisional nature by means of light, props, actors and spectators. In this sense, Lisa Holzer’s models are emptied scenes, recomposed in utopian memory. “To stay in a room calmly, to make room”, she says, creating with reduced means, with light and limited materials spatial situations that are captured in subtle shifts in the final photographic editing of the series.

These models are a space in space of which one is larger (and which constitutes a neutral framework), whereas the other is the illuminated centre refocused again and again. The reference space can be the dark out-of-vision or part of the setting; relative standpoints are not created in relation of the spaces to each other but rather in the sequence of the series, where relations are equally important as the objects themselves. Another frame of reference is provided by photographs as a kind of reference, photographs that Lisa Holzer has taken and collected in different places: the seats on the Paris Métro, the attic situation with numerous different doors, a playground in Japan, upturned chairs in a room, all unusual, deserted, anonymous places whose function falls short of an (the??) artificial, reminding us of how real places outside of art can be appropriated as such.
These places are full of traces reminiscent of modernist design and display, but which can also easily tip over into the opposite: destruction and damage. Design and negation of design are linked by an artificiality that morphs in the photographs into a formula for emotionalism that remains as abstract as the place itself.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 74/2001, pp. 39–44.

YORGHOS TZIRTZILAKIS

Maria Papadimitriou: Observation as Destiny

Maria Papadimitriou is an artist whose work of the previous years revolved around the notions of parody, the paradox and personal identity. As she started to apply her past experiences to social matters, the artist’s interest was attracted by the locality of Avliza in Menidi, a shabby area in western Athens used as a pied-à-terre by migrant populations such as the gypsies and the “vlach-Rumanians” from Veria. Papadimitriou was immediately struck by the irrepressible dynamics of the area’s changeable “emotional topography” and the secret awe which is implicit in the tense relationships developed around there. In 1998, she began to process these elements through discussions with local people, friends and associates.

In Avliza the power of the metropolitan tornado most people today call “nomadism” defies all those who described it as the dominant model of the future and asserts itself as a vulgar local peculiarity. Indeed, what we have here is the concept of a makeshift settlement, a kind of mobile, post-urban city which serves its inhabitants’ temporary housing needs and economic activities. (…) Yet Menidi does not propound any aesthetic theory but the notion of randomness: the disparate visual and anthropological elements fuse together through tolerance and co-existence. Everything forms part of this townscape: clothes, interiors, unfinished, gaping buildings, streets, cars, the sky, the people.
Papadimitriou launched in that area a collective project under the general title “Temporary Autonomous Museum for All” [TAMA in Greek means religious offering]. The project comprises architects, sociologists, musicians, local people and artists, with Papadimitriou acting as liaison and general coordinator. The subtitle describes in a dry but precise way what the project is about: “Social Facilities for Itinerant Populations”. The starting point is the set of relationships which will develop, and the aim is not to produce “new images” but to process the visual and empirical data of Avliza, which concerns more people than the idle visitors of a gallery. What is really attempted here is a new system for artwork production.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 74/2001, pp. 45–50.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur Fotografie. Vom Platz zwischen den Bildern.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 74/2001, pp. 51–52.