105 | 2009

KIRSTY BELL

Susanne Winterling

The androgynous figure, Weimar-esque with cropped hair and masculine clothing, occurs repeatedly in Winterling’s work. For Winterling, who has spoken of her interest in “power structures”, these figures, such as Gray, Berenice Abbot or Annemarie Schwarzenbach, represent a gendered struggle for autonomy and creative freedom within a male-dominated society. As most of the examples she chooses are drawn from the early twentieth century or before, however, they locate the discourse within a pre-feminist context, to scratch at the bastions of male-owned modernist mythology. But the adolescent female, poised at the brink of self-realisation, is also a motive that recurs in photographic works, films or performances (which she calls “living sculptures”). The potential for self-fulfillment that the state of adolescence suggests is both stimulating and, given the dismal examples of their historical precedents, tinged with regret. Whereas Le Corbusier and Van der Rohe, were able to engage with a true transparency in architecture, untroubled by “glass ceilings”, metaphorical or otherwise, such transparency could not be counted on by their female counterparts

Text feature in Camera Austria International 105/2009, pp. 11–22.

JOSEF STRAU

Susanne Winterling

The ability to formulate these seemingly exaggerated or grotesque moments also fundamentally sets her work apart from the “reference art” of recent years. What is more, the frequent references are not always only literary, but in fact more generally defined in terms of culture, as, for example, in her work for Berlin’s Biennial, together with the architect Eileen Gray. Nor are her frequent crossings between various media interdisciplinary manoeuvres but rather the result of her specific interest in the examples of historical artists, attempts to create an identification, both for herself and for the observers, attempts to fade her own situation as an artist into the situation of other artists. In performing these cross-fades of identity she is particularly interested in investigating how these artists were able to come to terms with their lives despite difficult social circumstances and identity crises in various social spheres.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 105/2009, pp. 11–22.

GüNTHER HOLLER-SCHUSTER

Travelling Images. Ernst Koslitsch's Photography as a Model of the Becoming-Image of the World

“Ich lebe in einer Wohnung voller Häuser” (I live in a flat full of houses) is the title that Ernst Koslitsch gives to a series of black-and-white photos of architectural models in combination with furniture. In the photo, the contents of the countless books on architecture, that the artist collects in his flat, strangely become reality. The fact that proportions and other external features are shifted in the picture is not surprising. Houses sit on sofas and standard lamps are incorporated into building ensembles. The spheres of the inner literally mingle with those of the outer. Images of perception and imaginary situations overlie each other here to create a surreal scene. One is reminded of Lautreamont’s incidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. But Koslitsch’s surreal situations are also deceptive. As an additional element here we may follow the construction of images. If you will, he deconstructs the photographic process. Even the performative aspect becomes palpable, where performative means the nature of images as actions and performances. Images may also be regarded as enactments and arrangements. We may take this one step further and underline the general processual nature of images. Images – inner and outer – emerge, are transformed, disseminated and received. In the course of this process they change.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 105/2009, pp. 23–28.

FRITS GIERSTBERG

Hans van der Meer. Work and Play

When a paradigm shift actually took place in contemporary photography in the second half of the 1980s, and the primacy of the instantaneous photograph yielded to that of the spatial, the Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer underwent a development unique to himself within it. The shift in emphasis from the photograph as the ultimate “slice of life” (as in the famous and influential dictum of Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952 with regard to the “decisive moment”) to its being a meaningful rendering of place and space squared nicely, for instance, with the rise of the New Topographics in the US (already in 1975, but with their greatest influence in the 1980s) and the Becher school in Germany in the period in question. Theories about location and territory, the meaning of non-places and wastelands, and the photograph as a reflection of the experience of a place became increasingly significant in those years. Landscape re-emerged as a genre in artistic photography, but also as a locus for experimentation with the photographic gaze, and its deconstruction. The debates would henceforth be over the relation between landscape, place and identity, place and history and, finally, the political significance of place. Serenity (in portrait photography too), protracted observation, a certain slowness in photographing (for instance, the creation of a typological series over a long period) and the use of medium and large format cameras (at the expense of the 35mm camera) all fit with this revolution. Distance became a crucial concept. So too in the work of Hans van der Meer.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 105/2009, pp. 29–41.

ALICE CREISCHER, ANDREAS SIEKMANN

The General Spectre. On the Relationship of Image Production, Hegemony and Violence II

There are two events that we wish to address here. One is the press conference mentioned at the end of the first instalment involving the cooperation between the museums of Prussian Cultural Heritage from Berlin, the painting collections in Munich, and the Dresden State Art Collections with the Cultural Arts Authority in Dubai respecting the conceptualisation of a universal museum in Dubai, to be completed in 2012. The conference was extended on the same evening in Dresden to include a discussion event on the occasion of »Humanism in China«, a large-scale exhibition of documentary photography from the twentieth century in China prefacing the Olympics media spectacle.¹ The exhibition serves as an example for a further collaboration: a side wing in the new National Museum in Peking is being dedicated to the European cultures and will first be endowed by these three museums. It goes without saying that both cases comprehend extraordinary dimensions as far as space and sums of money are concerned.

The events focus on these co-operations as one matter in which all three museums unite on one »subject«. Its appearance is highly celebrated by its respective directors, who have designated themselves as generals. It is a revenant born in the nineteenth century that has now been reanimated. It deals with the »cultural involvement of the German Nation of Culture overseas«² The spectre is the answer to the question: »Being that, due to the federal structure of the museum-related and cultural landscape, perception of the Federal Republic [of Germany] always tends to be a bit difficult. Who supports Germany? Where is Germany in this international concert of the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the British Museum?«³

¹ The exhibition was organised by the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, and travelled to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart,Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt, and to the Dresden State Art Collections.

² Joint press release (May 2007): Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

³ Peter Klaus Schuster (Direktor of Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin), press conference in Berlin (28 May 2008): »Expanded Horizons. Museums Create a New International Public«.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 105/2009, pp. 58–59.