108 | 2009

CHRIS SHARP

Jochen Lempert

Although Lempert has been working as a professional artist for a couple of decades, it wasn’t until recently that he had his first survey exhibition outside of Germany, which took place at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal (cf. Camera Austria 107/2009), and then travelled to Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France in 2009, and began to register a bit more internationally. One is inclined to chalk up his slow-rising star to his unusual trajectory – having originally trained as an entomologist (and studied and practiced experimental cinema), Lempert is still known to occasionally moonlight as an ornithologist on research vessels in the North Sea – but it probably has more to do with the ebb and flow of fashions, questions of subject matter, and technology. Indeed, in describing in conversation Lempert’s work, the chips are always already against you: the moment you conjoin the words nature and photography, eyes generally glaze over and you can almost hear your distracted interlocutor wondering what HBO series they’ll download that night. It can be quite an uphill battle from there, dogged by a prejudice as trite as it is merited (besides, no one sincerely makes images anymore – what could be more démodé? – they merely appropriate them, reconfigure them, manipulate them). But the word nature, even at its most evocative, hardly begins to convey the complexity and unrelenting pulchritude of what Lempert does.
Technically speaking, Lempert is an anachronism. He works with an analogue 35mm camera, shoots exclusively in black-and-white and develops his own silver gelatin prints himself on a variety of different, generally thick baritate papers. Due to deliberately neglecting to flatten the papers as they dry, they tend to buckle and bend, taking on a misshapen and incidental character that both invests them with an antique patina and a sense of negligible importance, as if they were imperfectly printed proofs (even if quality often varies from middling to great). Combine this heightened materiality with the fact that he presents them unframed, and you begin to get a sense of their atypical object-ness (not to be confused with objecthood). And this, it should be noted, is no mere question of nostalgia for analogue forms of art making.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 108/2009, pp. 11–22.

JOCHEN LEMPERT

HILDEGUND AMANSHAUSER

A conversation with Zhao Liang

In summer 2009, following the film festivals in Cannes and Locarno, Zhao Liang also presented his video documentary film “Petition” (2009) during his course at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg. He had been shooting this film for more than ten years, editing 500 hours of footage for one year. The photographer, video artist and documentary film-maker observed and accompanied people from all over China travelling to Beijing, living there in a slum, the “Petitioners’ Village”, to present their case to the Petitions Office, to complain about wrongs done to them at work or in private, and to demand justice, an undertaking that would often last several years. The interview conducted by Hildegund Amanshauser together with Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann focuses on the methodology and historical, social and art historical background of the various productions of the artist, who was born in Dandong in Liaoning province in 1971 and lives in Beijing. (…)

HA: With the aid of the different formats, you reach different audiences, the Chinese and the international public, the film public and the art public. What role do these different audiences play for you?

ZL: First and foremost, I address the Chinese audience. My work focuses on social reality in China and I would like it to improve something in this society, that’s the crucial thing for me. I hope that the Western public get an idea of circumstances in which people are living at the same time in a different place.
I want to make people think. When my work “Petition” was showing in Songzhuang, the audience was upset, many of them didn’t even know that people lived in such poor conditions in China. But what happened to these people could happen to anyone, everyone has to realise that. The problems I portrayed in “Petition” are big problems facing Chinese society, problems that will have to be solved in the near future. The important thing for me is that as many people as possible see my film so that they learn the truth. Also, it would be important for “higher levels” to see the film too, maybe it would help them get to know our society better and implement reforms. I even considered sending the film to the chairman or the minister, but I didn’t. I cannot imagine them really watching the film, perhaps they know about the situation and don’t want to change it, or perhaps they can’t. When ordinary people see my film, they find it very exciting, and perhaps that can ultimately sway the government.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 108/2009, pp. 23–34.

MERCEDES VICENTE

Darcy Lange

Lange made parallel use of photography, film and video in his early “Work Studies” engaging at times in comparative formal exercises such as in “A Documentation of Bradford Working Life”, 1974. His restless experimentation with the structural possibilities of both moving and still images was ultimately not aesthetically driven but was rather a positivist attempt at recording reality and conveying it with a degree of truth and objectivity, fully aware of its limitations. Likewise, he devised ways of depicting his subject by providing a structure or external skeleton, an overall composition to the work that would provide points of reference for comparative analysis. In “A Documentation of Bradford Working Life”, Lange selected with diagrammatic care four factories (which he termed “situations”) and in each of them chose to record only three to five workmen (which he termed “studies”). Each of the 15 studies was then recorded by video takes of 10 minutes each, two takes of 16mm film (of the first and last half-minute of the videotaped study), and one black and white still photograph per study. All shared the same composition, with different camera and sound techniques adapted to the rhythm of the work of each subject, alternating between hand-held camera and fixed tripod shots, and camera and location microphones. He aimed at rendering reality with the least intervention, which may explain the use of all three media, simultaneously shot and sharing the same framing, with systematic precision.
Without montage or the use of dramatic sequencing, multiple takes or camera angles, Lange’s videos give a semblance of reality. They rely exclusively on a process of slow observation facilitated by long takes recording the actions of their subjects in real time as they perform daily work. The absence of electronic editing equipment in the early days of video prevented Lange from post-producing tapes into a finished “product” and contributed to his engagement with the “process” aesthetic that was ascendant in the 1970s. It also set his work in a contrasted critical distance with the medium of television.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 108/2009, pp. 35–45.

HELEN LEGG

Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools

Filmed exploratively in three Birmingham schools in 1976, and more systematically in four Oxfordshire schools the following year, “Work Studies in Schools” contrasts state and private schools across a range of subjects. Ostensibly a continuation of his ongoing documentation of manual labour, the project sees Lange shift his attention to the professional practice of teaching, though the issue of class remains the central axis around which the work turns. His ethnographic-style studies cast educational establishments as complex societal mechanisms engaged in the production and reproduction of class identity. (…)
Lange’s positioning of himself within an institution might be seen as akin to the work of the Artist’s Placement Group (APG), which, through the late 1960s and early 1970s organised placements for artists within industry and government. However, while the APG’s philosophy proposed the artist as an inherently creative being, whose insight might impact in a socially progressive way upon the processes of production, Lange was sceptical about the very notions of art and the artist, preferring the idea that creativity was not “located” within certain privileged beings or forms, but rather something to be practiced, by everyone, across all fields. “Creativity in schools is not necessarily confined just to the art class … art is important because of its observation of material life. Creativity when applied through music, poetry, art, to life and work could become a protection against object worship, beyond functionalism. It might help to re-create involvement and creativity within manual work or build non-object recreational expression”. Indeed in all of the “Work Studies”, Lange shows an absolute respect for the labour of individuals, seeking out creativity inherent within peoples’ daily activity and aligning himself alongside others, rather than in a hierarchical relationship. It is in this radical scepticism and his subsequent positioning of himself – which was to lead him further away and ultimately beyond art’s institutions – that demands Lange’s serious reconsideration.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 108/2009, pp. 46–49.

JEFF DERKSEN

Art and Cities during Mega-Events. On the Intersection of Culture, Everyday Live, and the Olympics in Vancouver and Beyond. Part I

On the plywood cladding that encloses one of the many stalled construction sites in the city centre of Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.), a spectral figure speaks from a block of posters. This ghost from the recent past, identified as Premier Bill Bennett, addresses urbanites and tourists as citizens who have a pride of place and a civic duty. While this address would be familiar only to those who recall the devastating days of B.C.’s Thatcherite 1980s period, the poster bears the familiar blue logo of Expo 86, the World Fair held on what became the largest waterfront development in North America that miraculously produced no public profit for the city, but was passed off to developer Li-Ka-shing to embed Vancouver into global capital by using land and space as a raw exportable resource.
This Expo poster, one in a series of reproductions from the archive of Expo 86 and part of artist Jeremy Shaw’s project, “Something’s Happening Here”, reiterates a government statement that coaxes citizens into the excitement of a world’s fair; but the address comes from a beleaguered position of a city that images itself on the edges of global capital, and a city that desperately wants to bring that capital in through this “unmatched opportunity, a once in a lifetime chance, to showcase our province to the world.” Ironically, this excited view of capitalist opportunity – which has its eyes set firmly on the present as the exceptional moment that can not be missed, as a moment that all stops must be pulled out for – is exactly, and uncannily, the moment that the city, and its now more wary citizens, find themselves in as the 2010 Winter Olympics descend, literally, on Vancouver as the next big opportunity, as the big opportunity that is the exception. (…)
But, these mega-events open the situated example of Vancouver beyond the global-local boosterism and city-to-city competition that neoliberalism breeds. More tellingly, these events spark Vancouver as a volatile node in the global-urban nexus in three ways. Firstly, history and the present collide in an over-determined manner: the still unsettled colonial past of Vancouver haunts the very notion of land and, crucially, of ownership (that bedrock of neoliberalism) through the land claims of the First Nations people.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 108/2009, pp. 66–67.