KIRSTY BELL

Hilary Lloyd: Paying Attention

In an essay mapping tendencies in 1970s art, “Notes on the Index, Part 1”, Rosalind E. Krauss discusses the term “shifter” as a category of the linguistic sign waiting to be filled with signification: the word “this”, for example, or the personal pronouns “I” and “you”.1 The ambiguity of position in Lloyd’s work, in which the identity of the viewer seems to shift between “I” and “you”, exemplifies exactly the complicated “gymnastics of the ‘empty’ pronominal sign”2  discussed by Krauss. The fragments of imagery in the films are similarly shifting, not specific or locked into referentiality, as the vague titles of the works here suggest—“Shard”, “Moon”, “Tower Block”, “Shirt”—but nevertheless they insistently indicate a “this” that ­demands full attention. The identity of the building in “Canada Square” is not significant, nor is the location of the piece of pavement, but neither are they symbolic absolutes. The relentlessly swinging double self-portrait, and the barely focused-on high rise sketch out two possible perceptual poles of an individual’s (a body’s?) urban experience. While these may be analytical, examining the hardware of the city, they are also physical, corporeal events. The subject—body or building—is also an object, but perhaps more in the sense of the German word “Gegenstand”, literally translated as “that which stands against”. These objects are to be perceived in spatial terms, with their meaning determined by the surroundings to which they are intimately connected; they are not absolutes but thoroughly contingent entities.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 115/2011, pp. 11–22.

CHRISTIAN HÖLLER

Martin Beck: Isolated, Scattered, Broken. Martin Beck’s Engagement with US-­American Commune Culture

Martin Beck, who has repeatedly engaged with seeking out historical cases and how they might be translated into the present,3 initially approaches the community paradox analytically. His concern is not to evoke a chronotopically situated cohesion that no longer exists as such today; nor is he interested in a representation as ­authentic as possible or a mimesis of what it must have meant to be part of a newly instituted collective self at that time, in the mid-1960s. Although Beck naturally approaches the paradigms of community-founding through the documents and testimonies available today, this approach never condenses into a holistic representation, a kind of “closure”, in which the issue asserts its historical value virtually from within itself and melts into a whole. Beck relativises or distrusts the means of representation and “referencing” too much to leave it up to them to reconstruct what once was. His method is more that of “blasting” historical artefacts and fragments out of a larger continuum perceived as coherent, so that the fragments ­appear more like prisms or lenses, through which our projections onto the past can pass and be refracted. Although these methods undertake to bundle manifold meanings and attributions, they are less of a focus that allows looking at one object constituted in a certain way and no other. Consequently, what Beck shifts with his methods into the centre with historical conjunctions and “primal scenes” is the isolation and refraction of such unambiguously constituted situations. In terms of past community formations, this is interesting as it takes up the aforementioned paradoxes and makes them productive.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 115/2011, pp. 23–34.

JENS ASTHOFF

Walead Beshty: Sensitive Material. How Walead Beshty Pushes the Boundaries of the Image

Beshty’s output, at least in Europe, has primarily been perceived through his large-format photograms. Yet the numerous and very different forms within which he works are more closely interrelated than they at first appear. The “FedEx®” sculptures in particular are perhaps the most “direct indirect route” to Beshty’s ­approach to photography. The aforementioned aspect of “concrete” rather than representational recording is probably the most important point of comparison. For Beshty image production operates within formalised aesthetic processes that literally and materially inscribe themselves into a respective image or object. This ­applies as much to the various types of photograms as to his pictorial-sculptural series—the “Copper Surrogates” (2009–), the “Selected Works” (1998/2008), and the “Make-Ready” works (2010–)—in addition to groups of works that are more obviously tied to the medium of photography, such as the “Travel Pictures” (2006/08) or the “Transparencies” (2006–). “I’m more concerned”, says ­Beshty, “with how the material traffic of an image—the contingencies produced by this traffic, whether the work is on photographic paper or exists in a digital file, or as an object in transit—might generate other possibilities for aesthetic production.” As such, he is neither a photographic artist nor a sculptor, but works reflexively across various media. “The reflexivity of my work has never really been ‘about photography’ or ‘about the digital’, but a response to the specific conditions related to their use.” His contribution to this magazine is consistent with this approach. By “hanging” the reproductions of his works in the “style manual” which was drawn up for Camera Austria International by the typographer and book designer Till Gathmann, and which underlies the magazine like an invisible grid, Beshty exposes the formal substructure of the medium—while also integrating it by using it as an image-generating tool, and presenting reproductions which are shown as reproductions literally “within the framework” of the magazine.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 115/2011, pp. 35–47.

FLORIAN EBNER

Stefanie Seufert: Chance and Construct

Stefanie Seufert’s  “blind” pictures are not intended to be a nostalgic reminiscence of an analogue image culture that has vanished. Instead they are expressions of an artistic stance that grasps what is photographic about her pictures as a space to be constantly redefined, between construction and chance, transparency and hermeneutics, concrete visibility and open significance.

In this respect, it is more than a happy coincidence that the theoretical and artistic photography discourse of our times is interested in the concepts of the contingent and the unintentional as well as in generated and constructed images. Bilder aus Versehen (Images by Accident), as Peter Geimer called his study on the mediality of analogue photography,1 which first become recognisable as such through their imperfection, are confronted with the more controllable images of a digital culture, which the artist Adrian Sauer, in analogy to Geimer’s study and in an ambiguous sense, has called Bilder aus Berechnung (Images by Calculation). So it seems today as though the real difference between the digital and the analogue image is not the question of the representation of reality and relation to the world, but rather the disappearance of the chance, unsuccessful and defective photo from digital image culture. What is contingent and accidental seems, in comparison, to be something “primarily photographic”, an attraction that eludes every pre-visualisation.

The photograms of the series “blind” are also based less on a concrete idea of form, but rather an experimental arrangement that seeks to capture what is specifically unintentional as a form, a kind of photographic light trap in a post-photographic era. In this sense, Stefanie Seufert conducts her own variation of what Rosalind E. Krauss called a “reinvention of photography”, namely developing an artistic alternative from the seemingly antiquated practices of a medium that has become obsolete.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 115/2011, pp. 48–56.

WALID SADEK

A Time to See 3/4 The Next of Survivor Eyes

During civil war, faces recoil. Those of combatants hide behind cagoules, thick beards and code names. Their faces never appear except in pictures hung high on lampposts or posted on walls; pictures of tranquil faces exuding calm confidence, having at last dispatched their dismembered bodies to other worlds. During civil war, faces of non-combatants also recoil as they retreat to the relative safety of narrow corridors and poorly lit recesses of makeshift shelters, where crammed bodies wait in fear of hate and in fear of hope. They return to the company fold and there dig deep towards a common root. Complying with the rule of company, these faces do more than nestle. They bury their individual features to look alike in the embracing trait of fear. Of that fear is born a war’s interiority; the company’s viscous thickness, to which faces surrender and in it deflate like the protuberance of an added spoonful of honey into a honey jar: such is the exorbitant cost of a sameness that promises safety.

During civil war faces part with visibility, a retreat from which they never recover; for the aftermath, while incurious about the fading serenity of posted martyrs’ faces, is purposefully involved in retiring the faces of survivors into floating and preferably forgettable signs. Incomparable to the photogenic levity of martyred faces, they seem to bear the embarrassment of survival. Like uninvited returnees who have not only outlived civil war but also the miraculous act of ending it, they are countless idle Lazaruses, who remind of just how miraculous that ending was. That is why the tenuous truce of the aftermath imposes strict regulations on all surviving faces and requires that they come forth with evidence of impartiality and justifications for their continued presence. Prohibited from visibly grappling with the difficulty of resuming living and of recommencing what has been shattered, faces strain to fix features and reign in expressions: appear insipid or else be suspect. The violence of the aftermath of civil war lies in part in the call for faces to come forth as if new, intimating no hatred accrued or grief interminable; new faces that ambulate in mutual disregard in cities deeply suspicious of visible grief. Coerced to leave behind traces of a life lived in the intimacy of fear, these new faces try to furtively look back, without turning around, in search of the survivors they have become.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 115/2011, pp. 71–72.