118 | 2012

JENS ASTHOFF

Natalie Czech: Readings of Images

Czech investigates language as a space of contingency, probes boundaries of meaning, experiments with word-image relations, and encourages stratifications of intertextuality to intersect with and permeate one another.Her textual imagery is based on concise, pictorial poems of selected authors—recent favourites include Robert Creeley (1926–2005), Frank O’Hara (1926–66), Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940–75), E. E. Cummings (1894–62), Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), among several others. Czech’s interest is trained on texts that contain a special visuality in terms of language and/or typography, frequently paired with a penchant for pictorial abstraction and text- or writing-related self-referentiality, as becomes apparent in more recent series like “A small bouquet by Frank O’Hara” (2011) or “Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire” (2012). The source texts already visually evoke, through a particular arrangement of the letters, an image that then enters into a thematic relationship with the text content and the act of reading. Such literary text-image associations offer Czech the material and inspiration upon which she seizes in her conceptual photography, rendering fluid the boundaries between the text and image character of the linguistic material. This is what so often makes her work readable as a mixture of genres, both in a literary sense (along the lines of concrete poetry or surrealist poetry) and, at the same time, a visual one (along the lines of conceptual and object photography). Her photography operates with precisely the dualism or ambivalence that is already inherent to the source texts: meaning, for one, that a text is always a “written image” in and of itself and, moreover, that while a photographed poem may be a pictorial object, it nevertheless remains text, remains readable. Often other media are also relevant to the pictorial process, such as computer programs or printing methods, which play a role in the content and form of Czech’s artwork. Yet the various text and image planes end up converging in the photographic image and are frequently formalised even more through acts of sequencing or colour assignment.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 118/2012, pp. 11–15.

BARRY SCHWABSKY

Natalie Czech: A Lover's Discourse

When someone writes you a love letter, how do you read it?
Or rather, can you read it at all?
It could be that if you have enough sense to read the letter through from beginning to end, then the letter has failed to reach its destination. Because the addressee is not exactly the person whose name is written on the envelope, or at least not what we might call the empirical individual whose legal identity is conjured by the name the postman has succeeded in finding on the mailbox at a given address. The addressee is a phantasm, the imaginary being whom the writer has tried to conjure into existence through the text: the one and only reader, he or she who can understand what has been written and is prepared to be addressed in this manner which shakes us to the core of our being. “This doorway was meant only for you,” the gatekeeper told the dying man from the country in Kafka’s parable, as he was about to close it forever. In the same way, “This letter was meant only for you” is the entire message of the true love letter that one reads, expiring, as a new self is born. But such a letter is too powerful to read from beginning to end; instead, the astonished eye can only peck at it like a frenzied bird, half-starved yet afraid to burst with the fullness of even a single seed. Logic and even time are confounded as desire suddenly finds its instance of meaning all the time and everywhere.
For me—and perhaps only for me?—the art of Natalie Czech consists of just such a reading and just such a writing: enamored. It is possible to see her work as one enormous love letter: a billet-doux to poetry. Her art is smitten with poetry and wants to get as close to it as possible. And this love, I further believe, is requited. Poetry lets this art get very close indeed. Think of one of those couples whose identities become so entangled that they even begin to look alike, and finish each other’s sentences. When I look at Czech’s work—or as I could just as well say, when I read Czech’s work—I am no longer sure that I should call it art and not poetry. The two start to become one—to reunite like lovers who have found the “other half” who completes them, as in the myth that Plato puts into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium: “the desire and pursuit of the whole is what is called love,” the playwright tells us.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 118/2012, pp. 19–22.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH

Erica Baum: Closed Captions

Although photography, I consider Erica Baum’s works to be literary, perhaps best exemplifying the complex interchange of text, image and indexical systems that I have been referring to. Her elements are never discretely specific—this is an image, this is a caption, this is body text—rather equal weight is lent to all, permitting interplay and interpretation between them. Words become images; images become text; and indexing systems’ functionality is jammed, détourning them into more free-floating elements.
And yet specific orders, rhythms, and hierarchies assert themselves when I attempt to read her work. But unlike traditional narrative, the unfolding of these systems don’t add up to a tidy resolution, rather they continue to function as discrete, interchangeable elements. For instance, reading her work “Irma”, from her “Naked Eye” series, several semiotic systems are at play at once, unraveling in a particular order. My first attempt to decode her work is read though the signs of the literary: an open book with its attendant textuality. Next, I see several images of film stills. I try to make sense of them narratively which gets me nowhere: These are discrete and disconnected images. This type of investigation—stringing a series of black and white images together—lands me square into the realm of the cinematic. My next level of engagement is visual as I note the strong geometrical vertical borders and their subsequent divisions, repetitions, and weights that hold the images in place. Now my referents are those from the art world: The regularly paced, striped geometry reminds me of the work of Daniel Buren, the textuality of Joseph Kosuth, and the use of film stills of John Baldessari. Stepping back from these elements, I view the entirety of the image as a photograph and begin to consider all its attendant histories (documentary, artistic, journalistic, and so forth).

But ultimately, I must reckon with the fact that this is not and never was a photograph. It is a digital image made up of pixels that refer to analog media. I am fooled into thinking that it is a photograph, when in fact it is the most fluid of entities: as I write this on my laptop, “Irma” is a PDF; in the gallery, it will be an ink jet print; and in the magazine that you’re holding in your hands, it will be a Ben-Day or halftone reproduction—that is, if you’re holding a paper version in your hands. Most likely you will be seeing this as a webpage, with “Irma” as a downloadable image, one that will be emailed, blogged and reblogged, tweeted and retweeted, without any authoritative source or attribution.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 118/2012, pp. 23–34.

VANESSA JOAN MÜLLER

Shannon Ebner: Non-Verbal Residuals

When language—in its literal representation, as writing-turned-image—meets photography, two obviously different systems intersect. As a visual medium, photography is not really intending to say something in an explicit way, or to inscribe itself. Yet when it depicts letters or words, photography takes on meaning in a dual sense of content and relevance. The image then becomes a unique form of drawing that exhibits language as a substantive signifier; though it can be read, in its exposed visibility a peculiar abstraction appears. Once a carrier of meaning has become overly charged with distinguishable meaning, the alphabet suddenly stops solely functioning as a bearer of substance.Occupying this ambivalent realm of linguistic representation and optical presence is the photography of Shannon Ebner, who localises words like sculptures in landscapes and abstract pictorial spaces, develops her own alphabets, or even stages letters as surreally embedded objects trouvés in everyday life. The act of arranging that frequently goes hand in hand with these photographs—for which letters crafted from cardboard, wood, or bricks are assembled into words to be photographed—underscores the character of citation that subtly indwells her works. It is a manner of speech that is not authentic but borrowed, one that repeats what has already been said somewhere else. By implementing existing material into a new context, Ebner alters how it is perceived.

Indeed, the artist, who resides in Los Angeles, is especially concerned with language’s way of becoming alienated from its ability to make accessible reality and lived experience, and also from its ability to speak between the lines. Its material is the language of our present time, which is characterised by instability and which is, especially in the United States, permeated by an appellative rhetoric of political and social themes. This is an ingrained rhetoric that operates through repetition and forms catchy word clusters devoid of semantic vagueness. Ebner’s black-and-white photographs long showed words that had become victim to this verbal process of alienation.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 118/2012, pp. 35–46.

SUSANNE HOLSCHBACH

Sven Johne: The Illusion of Eternal Summer

This reference to the newspaper media system suggests a tie to the context of Sven Johne’s working approach. “Like an investigative reporter he takes on new phenomena, researches the information behind media reports and found images, goes in search of the places mentioned, and begins to document them,”¹ as Lilian Engelmann and Holger Kube Ventura note in the preface to Johne’s artist’s book Reports from the Crack of Dawn, its cover mirroring a dated issue of The New York Times. The texts that Johne uses in his series of works are undoubtedly to be localised in the genre of reporting—in a factual style with laconic tendencies. These documentary photographs are classified according to the sober style of topographers. Yet the way in which photograph, caption, and narration are associated, in terms of both content and form, translates the relay function between text and image into an aesthetic configuration that no longer fosters reduction of meaning but rather equivocation on another level. Like in “Roses from Africa”, Johne usually prefers a serial approach, that is, he works with series of kindred pictorial motifs and compositions.

¹ Lilian Engelmann und Holger Kube Ventura, »Geleitwort«, in: Frankfurter Kunstverein (Hg.), Sven Johne: Berichte zwischen Morgen und Grauen, Reports from the Crack of Dawn, Kat., Berlin: Revolver Verlag 2010, S. 101.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 118/2012, pp. 47–54.

JAN VERWOERT

Image as Witness 2/4 How to Go About the Haunting?

Are you haunted by a memory? What about it is haunting you? That you don’t know where to put it. Should you keep it to yourself or tell others? Often, neither one nor the other helps. For you don’t find a place in which to lay the memory to rest. Not in the stories you tell. Not in the explanations you concoct. What remains is your version of what happened. And someday only the narrator will be gazing back at you in the mirror of your stories. Who is you yourself. Which tells you that everything could have just as well been totally different. If only someone came and said: “That’s the way it was. You’re not just imagining it. I experienced the same thing.” That would resolve everything. For this acknowledgement would give the memory a place in the reality of shared experience. Or so you hope. Whether that can actually come to pass remains to be seen. Speaking against this is how practically all of humanity has been talking about haunting memories from time immemorial. Does a culture even exist on this planet where no ghost stories circulate? And what do spectres allegorise if not precisely that which makes certain memories so agonising? The fact that they will not rest in peace! Something unresolved from the former life of the deceased causes its ghost to awaken nightly to restlessly prowl about. In their own way, spectres are allegorical for the special way (the modality or ontological mode) in which certain memories make themselves known: for the form of the restless, the discontented, the unlocalisable, and the inner strife of that which has been kept in circulation.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 118/2012, pp. 71–72.