ELKE KRYSTUFEK

NEIN. Why is there no genital grope and touch cinema?

In the words of Alexander Kluge : It is better to proof-read a text than not to proof-read it. Women are proud of their mistakes and flaws. The way in which people make mistakes says something about the way they work. Just as the manner of deformation says something about formlessness, the consummate non-form : a bubble. I would like to be proof-read in a bubble, please : so that the old mistakes are elegantly replaced with new ones, thus lending a didactic patina to the texts, like the sound of metal on glass, the plastic clicking of keys. For example the old letter ß, I want it to stay, and the lowercase mak, that is less intrusive than the uppercase MAK, and the Greek photography (Fotografie in current German spelling) with its phallic PH value. Not that effete Fotografie. Making mistakes is good, doing away with officialdom and documents. My passport has several mistakes in it because it is nothing like my self-portraits, that tell you much more about who I am. For example, I want to take all of my self-portraits to customs and ask if they will let me through now ? Does that fit in your country ? Then they will say the reproduction of you is worth much more than you, have you ever exported yourself in this multiple form ? Proof-reading, if you are familiar with my work, is of course a contradiction, but I still wanted to be proof-read just this once. A linguistic cosmetic operation. Art is one big personal preference, and talking about it always verges on slapstick. The nice thing about mistakes is when they are pointed out to you. The relief you hear when someone discovers a mistake, the joys of discovery that make the person discovering the mistake feel better, or to put it more aptly : I am preserving a profession – that of the first reader before the public. Pictures, though, are not proof-read. A good artist but she makes mistakes, thank god. My former art dealer’s favourite saying : You’re seeing it wrong. The rest is proofed out to make the book easier. The book focuses on its elegant outfit from Savile Row. So Jo Spence gets perfect styling after all, posthumously, a Cindy Sherman prosthesis and a Tracey Emin décolleté. You’ve got to have some kind of compensation after all.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 11–22.

CHRISTIANE ZINTZEN

Margherita Spiluttini: Photgraphic Traces

Since the early 1980s Margherita Spiluttini has been laying such photographic tracks: urban situations, architectural characters, the composition and configuration of landscape. Implicitly visual as well as decidedly pronounced, the indication always remains of her own sense of her view of things, the productive potential of subjectivity. And this – nota bene – in manoeuvring with a medium which still is perceived as evidence, icon and fetish of the “objective”. Between the reality of architectural artefacts and the photographic “reality- effect” (Roland Barthes), “the woman with the camera” (freely adapted from Dziga Vertov) eminently expands the scope of architectural photography beyond the borders of the genre.
Margherita Spiluttini’s work makes an illuminating vision possible for us as viewers. In it we find our apparently so self- evident reality in versions and formulations that we never knew how to look for. Images iluminés, whose decisiveness instantaneously makes sense and illuminates us enduringly: we cannot return behind the second of her having seen. Spiluttini’s images have opened our eyes. Just as the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach opened our ears. Or Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew”.

Three work groups may bring to mind that and how Margherita Spiluttini’s photographic work has taught us to see. There would be 1.) the photographic survey for and with Dietmar Steiner’s guide Architektur in Wien (1984). There are 2.) the landscape photographs brought together in the exhibition “Nach der Natur” 2002 at the Technical Museum Vienna. There is 3. ) the catalogue- artwork räumlich | spacious composed by Margherita Spiluttini according to multiple criteria.
[…]
Margherita Spiluttini has worked in and with the very material of Vienna, she has participated in making the history of views of and insights into European architecture. If one were to be dramatic, one would say: with her persistent and precise work the photographer has considerably influenced our intellectual, visual and form- sensitive culture of knowledge, thought and discourse for more than thirty years.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, p. 23–35.

REINHARD BRAUN

Nicole Six & Paul Petrisch: On Airplanes, Images, Boundaries, Politics and Art

In the midst of a distinctly romantic cloud formation, an airplane can just barely be discerned, the pilot of which is marking the flight path, as is customary in stunt flying, with a trail of smoke. In contrast to other familiar airplane images (such as those by Wolfgang Tillmans) made while observing regular air traffic, this image portrays an intervention on 16 May 2008 “Schall und Rauch, die Vertikale und der freie Fall” (Sound and Smoke, the Plumb Line and the Free Fall) by Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch. The airplane was circling above a square in Wiener Neustadt before subsequently returning to the airport – an intervention in public space, for the flight path only becomes intelligible through its coupling with an urban cartograph. The only “documentation” of this event is the photograph that appears to be depicting the airplane in a manner of dramatic ascent. Yet it fails to establish a connection between the action, its respective locality, and its related experience.
This incongruence between artistic scope of agency and representation fields several questions about the fundamental constitution of Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch’s works; not only because in this way the context of that which can be designated as artistic intervention is barely identifiable, but rather because here it also very specifically involves the interplay of reality, intervention, knowledge, perception, body, and space – the representation of these interrelations in the system of art, or the questioning of the art system itself. This querying can be described as a critical updating of the critique of modernism, which is why it isn’t surprising that Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch in their projects repeatedly resort analytically to those artistic strategies that had already been involved in discourse formations of the critique of modernism, namely conceptual strategies from the 1960s and 1970s.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 36–42.

MICHAEL PONSTINGL

Sissi Farassat: Experiencing Posing, Living Posing

The two latest complexes of works by Iranian-Austrian artist Sissi Farassat are a consistent further development in terms of content and form of her previous work, that revolves around (female) identity, its media and social condition, and constitutive dispositifs of gaze. The source material for the first series is a collection of about two hundred 35 mm slides from the 1960s that she bought at a flea market The pictures are private photos of an unknown family of three, presumably from Vienna. After copying them onto photographic paper, the artist begins to process the pictures systematically by tracing the outlines of the people in the pictures or, to be more precise, embroidering them with neon-yellow thread. However, the artist does not merely emphasise, in this case literally pick out specific aspects but rather takes a decisive step towards conceptual abstraction. The work is presented back to front in public: the back of the photo becomes the “right side”, i.e. the side used to display the image. To begin with, the artist demonstrates once how the sign regime works by presenting the front and back at the same time. Afterwards, that which the majority of viewers long to see once they make out even the smallest corner of a photo is denied to them throughout: to get to see its front side, that is usually glossy and polychrome.
In exchange, as it were, for the (supposed) promise of photographic pictures to provide concrete, vivid pictures and, what is more, if you will, the indexical shiver, the artist “promises” a different indexical sign relation, namely the relationship between the thread and the picture on the other side. Of course, whether the thread always represents the actual silhouette of that which is photo-graphically given is another matter, as there is no opportunity to check, and ultimately of no consequence. Immediate visual evidence alone, if it existed at all, is not enough to identify something as an “imprint”, an indexical trace (and not, for instance, as symbolic or iconic code). This requires an insight into the mechanisms of signification, and thus specific knowledge, that in our case is not conclusively available. Counter to any kind of naturalisation of the relations that exist between reality and signs, the work insists on the theoretic-constructual aspect of these descriptions/explanations, that is often “repressed” in everyday (scientific) routine. Not so much the “trace” as such but rather the authenticating value that has for decades generally been assigned to it, also in many theoretical models of the photography medium, is up for consideration.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 43–48.

SYLVERE LOTRINGER

Iris Klein: Phantom Gestures

Iris Klein’s “Women” (1998 – 2005) are photographic negatives, but only negative in appearance. It is darkness at noon. Reminiscent of silver-coated plates, these mostly small (12,7 cm x 17,8 cm) ghostly images hark back to an early stage when photography still had the power to mesmerise, or was still trying to match painting. Klein’s black photographs are translucent, but the chiaroscuro emanates from the bodies themselves, or rather from their clothes. The bodies are black, and the background is dark, but the clothes are spectral white with soft grey folds that give them a painterly look. It is the clothes that irradiate the entire photograph, floating in darkness around phantom limbs. (Klein admits that she shot empty clothes first; bodies were introduced later.) All the edges are slightly blurred, and this further intensifies the spatial ambiguity with their surroundings. Everything else, including the face, is black, dense and velvety, so delicately textured that it is tempting to touch. In our era of mechanical reproduction and digital manipulation, the aim of these photographs is to reclaim the idea of an original.
[…] The dummy was made by crude means, and its male partner in the following series will prove even cruder, to the point of dissolving under our very eyes. So there’s something more than the body that counts. Roland Barthes superbly called it: “a pose”. When I pose, “I instantaneously make another body for myself”, he remarked. […] It also makes perfect sense that this “doubling effect” would be the very essence of photography. For what is photography, if not the pose that makes another body of oneself?
[…] Closing the cycle inaugurated by the dark gothic photographs, the last series (this time a digital one) re-enacts theatrically the twilight of the ghosts and the agony of the analogue. Clothed in white and practically indistinguishable from her own dummy, the photographer-actor vainly keeps pumping life in her dwindling creature. […] The fake doppelgangers are not dancing in step anymore, their dialogue has ended, and so has the era of the analogue. The world has now definitely lost its shadow.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 49–54.

MAREN LÜBBKE-TIDOW

Prinz Gholam

Prinz Gholam opened their exhibition in Graz in spring this year with the performance “Ein Ding mehr” (One more thing), that was then shown at the exhibition as a video recording. The prologue was a re-enactment of a shot from Pasolini’s film “Salò”: a couple facing each other touch, a pose whose compulsion and brutality in the film original was no longer visible, with the scene context left out in Prinz Gholam’s tableau vivant. The artists’ motionless pose, before transitioning seamlessly into other double-figure representations, opened up a space for new narratives: The viewer realised, for example, that these are two men acting in relation to each other. It is insightful that in their re-enactments in “Ein Ding mehr” Prinz Gholam referred almost exclusively to art works that follow a largely idealistic interpretation. But the portrayal of genders, that was unambiguously depicted as difference in the original pictures – works by Baldung-Grien, Titian, Legozzi, Rodin, etc. – congeals into something totally different and new in the meticulous re-enactments by Prinz Gholam: The difference of genders as an aspect of viewing images recedes into the background, and a traditional principle of identification is upset – for the social relationships and conventions inscribed in the original images begin to shift. At the same time, (for many people) Prinz Gholam operate at the limits of what is acceptable in their performances: For the viewer must endure the intensity and intimacy of the affectionate gestures and poses of the two men, lovingly facing each other. In any case, however, their conception (of the image) and new realisation is divorced from traditional sexual connotations. Something else comes to the fore, beyond traditional principles of identification. Prinz Gholam suggest a new interpretation of images: Both the photographs and their performances can be seen as an attempt to demonstrate the ideality of painting in a credible and realistic way and to provoke an anarchy of genres and their traditional themes and interpretations.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 55–67.

MONIKA FABER

Caroline Heider: The Folded Girl

Pictures of fragmented bodies as allegories of self-confidence founded in outwardness and yet disrupted have featured in the canon of expression of critical artists at least since Surrealism. This was usually linked to an assault on traditional concepts of femininity and its representation in everyday life, advertising or art. Caroline Heider’s series entitled “Like Models” (2008) can also be classified thus at first sight. As if cut apart by a knife and then put together again incorrectly, the figures appear damaged in terms of their physical inviolability, malproportioned and out of balance. In some pictures they are mutilated beyond recognition and visibly divorced from the laws of gravity.
However, Caroline Heider’s concept of fragmentation differs fundamentally from the practice of the artists whom we could list as a kind of imaginary ancestral line from Hans Bellmer to Annegret Soltau, from Imre Kertesz to Candice Breitz, who, with mannequins or pictures, actually separated and “incorrectly” re-assembled body parts. It is not the cut, with the final separation it entails, and the implicated possibilities of arbitrarily re-grouping body parts or images of them that Heider inflicts on the photograph. Instead, she folds the photograph, nothing is actually severed. Part of the picture (and thus of the body depicted in it) simply disappears in the fold, is withdrawn from view as if behind a protruding wall – and one key aspect is this resulting three-dimensionality, the shadow that lodges itself between photographic paper and photographic paper and that thus programmatically places the materiality of the photographic representation alongside its reproductive function (disrupted by the fold). Or perhaps in the literal sense: that causes these two ever-latent possibilities of photography to overlap, to coincide. Fold and counter-fold inevitably affect both, the photographic material and the photographic representation. The accustomed continuum of the surface is not only interrupted but also separated into a front and back layer. The motif is split into visible and non-visible. Caroline Heider herself put it thus in a recent interview with Ruth Horak: “I put the image and the support into a new tension with each other. Haptic and hierarchical.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 68–73.

JERRY TARTAGLIA

The Legacy of Jack Smith. That's The Way The Roachcrust Crumbles

Late last June, Jack Smith’s sister, Mrs. Susan Slater, sold the entirety of her brother’s estate to the Gladstone Gallery in New York City. The ownership of the photographs, paintings, slides, films, etc. has been transferred. The Plaster Foundation no longer has custody nor custodianship of the work.
No doubt there are many who have already rushed to their phones to begin their personal campaigns for the fame and gain that lies ahead. Stories will be concocted about their participation in the Lucky Landlord performances, old snapshots of seventy year old ex-hippies with Jack will surface, endless tales will be retold mimicking Jack’s falsetto voice, and each new version is intended to add to the marketability of the work and drive the Smith stock value (NY Art Exchange symbol: SMIT) through the roof.
It was a predictable conclusion, really, for anyone who actually knew Jack. Anything connected to Jack Smith always took place with melodrama, infectious hysteria, and always, always, ended in »failure«. That was his aesthetic. So the fact that his work finds itself in the hands of a commercial art gallery makes sense to me. For me personally, except for the troublesome discovery of who my friends really are, the last seventeen years of restoring and preserving Jack’s film legacy has been an amazingly positive experience. Jim Hoberman, Penny Arcade and Mary Dorman behaved with the utmost integrity and dedication to genuinely preserving Jack’s work. I sincerely thank them and all of my friends and colleagues who supported the preservation of Jack Smith’s work. Whether or not we were in some instances able to produce tangible results, your support remains valuable.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, p. 90.

ALICE CREISCHER, ANDREAS SIEKMANN

Angels of Censorship. On the Relationsip of Image Production, Hegemony and Violence I

In the Baroque section of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville there is a picture by Lucas de Valdés. A painter is lying on the floor of his studio. He must have fainted. He has fallen off his chair, his pallet still in his hand. An angel has taken his place at the easel. Behind him on the windowsill a print, from which he is painting, is leaning against the recess of the window. It is the portrait of the founder of the Order of the Minims, Francis of Paola. Is the painter merely a copyist, overcome by his own state of mind, by inspiration? That was the nineteenth-century interpretation. What we think is that he has just been visited by an officer summoned by the government of heaven to supervise the truth of the portrait and correct the work. What does this picture have to do with the topic to be dealt with here and in the three following instalments of this column? The aim is to reflect on the conditions of artistic production in the new metropolises of power of the globalised world. Authors in Berlin who are following the development of centres of art in Beijing, Dubai or Moscow (or who could also be part of their programme) will engage in this reflection. The motive for this reflection could therefore be the fear of losing cultural hegemony. And indeed, we are concerned with losing something that we shall call criticality here and that is linked to the particular political freedom granted to post-war western society in the ranking of the “better state”. It is the attribution to artistic production to react critically to its own power relations. Defining this attribution becomes all the more difficult the more the attribution itself becomes the legitimisation of both the customers and the contractors. By installing a western art system, the customers lay claim to freedom of opinion, while the contractors believe themselves to be subversive and engage in touting enlightenment. These arguments may weigh almost as nothing in the gravitas of the vast building volumes and the exorbitant sums that change hands and cause both parties to become intoxicated with their own importance and the availability of world. They only become heavier when we consider the social circumstances that they accompany.
In this first instalment we will describe a historical example of global image production and its direct link to violence. We will maintain that hegemony is not an abstract function but rather implies this violence. We cannot take this to create any straightforward continuity up to the conditionalities of cultural hegemony, ideology-bearing nature, and today’s globalised creations of value. We can, however, maintain that there are parallels and links between the “ideological function of colonial painting (painting of the Counter-Reformation, A.C.) and the function now assumed by art in order to furnish the new elites of globalisation with legitimacy”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 103-104/2008, pp. 91–93.