HELMUT DRAXLER

Katja Eydel: The Formation of Habit

In terms of content, Katja Eydel’s works usually thematise times of upheaval and the realignment of circumstances: the “Invention of Turkey” with its Kemalist institutions; the new Berlin after the reunification of Germany, and especially its peri-urban manifestations; the Belgrade caught between various fronts during the NATO bombardment. New institutional, urbanist, and quotidian codes are constantly overlying the old ones, yet the fault lines remain discernible while the organisational forms of transition, the interim usages, the act of pausing in a transitory flux emerge forth. Even press conferences, openings, official visitor programmes, along with everyday work scenarios might be considered to reflect such temporary states of transition.
Here, very literally, it is usually the waiting, the pause, or the interruption—the imminent event—which fills the image. Usually something is arranged to lend a place plausibility regarding this event, by means of enhancement or adding jewellery, barriers, technical equipment, or a special seating arrangement. Yet these minor matters or subplots take charge and bring to bear the social vocabulary of labour division and gender differences.
It is precisely when looking past the “essentials” that the gaze focuses on the ways reality itself is structured: on those moments where its composition becomes visible as an isolated staging of an event, and as a ritualisation of its processes. These are the moments when everything could be different but in actuality is not. For such scenarios presuppose a power of assertion related to the practicing of habits, the reproduction of the habitus, and the distribution of social positions—which has always included the position of perception. Even so, power and reality are only palpable in the scenario itself; there is no such thing as a truth behind it, not in Belgrade where people were becoming accustomed to the unaccustomed, nor in the pictures of unfamiliar working situations showing the unaccustomed facets of becoming accustomed. So if this means that reality has always been staged—and the perception of this staged scenario is without doubt involved—then reality would actually have to be restaged in order to be made perceptible at all. Therefore, the topic of staging must be linked to staging as a method.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 119/2012, pp. 15–26.

KRZYSTOF PIJARSKI

G.R.A.M.: Gestures of Ironic Profanation

It is also here that one can already understand their specific strategy of image-making, which—in my view—is better described by the verb “redo” than “reenact”. To support this claim I would say that those images have nothing to do with acting or staging; rather, they are pure (or profane) constellations of gestures. This will take some explaining. In all of the “Reenactment” pictures we will find the artists themselves, with other possible “positions” in the image taken by people cast especially for this occasion, but never professional actors; there is not the slightest attempt to project oneself empathically into the “role”, something that is most pronounced in their faces, which are always slightly out of sync with what is happening in the picture, suggesting that they are knowingly taking part in some kind of play. It is as if they had found themselves assuming this or that position, its sense foreign to them. A second distancing device is related to the mise-en-scène itself, which is never accurate (no attempt at veracity here), but only structurally resembles the “original”, just enough for the beholder to recognise the source. What is most interesting here is that the structure of this recognition is such that the desire to see the original never arises, or is postponed. All of this deprives the beholder—us—of nearly all contingent detail (there’s nothing there to seduce us, to lure us into the image), leaving us to take in mostly the bare structure of the image, the gestures of their protagonists. This is why I would be inclined to claim that it is not photography, or video, or performance that is the medium of choice for G.R.A.M., but gesture.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 119/2012, pp. 27–38.

GISLIND NABAKOWSKI

Stefan Panhans: Unsecurable Things

Since the video grotesque fractionally skews “down” social spaces according to class, as it were, it comes back down to earth with a bang. It confronts us with altered mechanisms of social spaces “precariously”6 immersed in a process of upheaval. In pursuing the term “habitus”—with which Pierre Bourdieu first became familiar in the realism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel, in the narratives of Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal, before nurturing it through the social events of the twentieth century—we will note that the word indeed implies, in addition to precepts imposed from the outside, boundaries “on the inside” of a person: habitus assumes, in multiple respects, not only consciousness but, in equal turn, always also the “generative principle of the unconscious”. Accessible to consciousness “only very partially”7 are the habitus and the socially concealing facets of life-styles. In capitalism, the driving forces that are at times subconscious yield gains in distinction, which are engendered by contention between the life-styles (symbolic power). Since the suppressed class problems re-emerge here, the image production pursued by Stefan Panhans is an arresting one, whereby the term “surreal” is imbued with social life. At this point let it be noted: Stefan Panhans crafts videos/photographs with the utmost diligence. He is an artist who endeavours to achieve clarity.
Much has been written about the ambiguous nature of the art of Stefan Panhans, analogue to “écriture automatique”. Nevertheless, the combinatorial flotsam of semantic symbols within photographic, object, and material collages is stranger than the “fortuitous encounter upon a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, as noted by poet Comte de Lautréamont. The Surrealists adopted this metaphor. My first question reads: Is this ambiguity also founded in the habitus of the figures in the video and in the “precarious signs”? Yes, I think it is. The term “precariousness” reminds of the petite bourgeoisie. Now things are really getting quite complicated. For this “populist class” precisely represents the place that the “broad middle class” fears falling into. Yes, they are caught in a permanent cycle of upward and downward mobility.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 119/2012, pp. 39–52.

PETER HEIN

Dokument zu Kassel

JAN VERWOERT

Image as Witness 3/4 Witnessing Work. Witnessing Action

“You’re drunk. Just listen to yourself!”
“And even if I were. I know exactly what I’m saying. And doing.”
Two people bickering or one person immersed in self-conflict? It’s all the same in the end: you experience truth differently when inebriated than with a sober head. You might apologise later for the things that you said and did at the time: I wasn’t myself, I didn’t mean it that way, and so forth. But that is simply not true. You did mean it that way. All of it. For in that moment it felt right, and necessary. Even though your vis-à-vis is sober, and the voice of your inner reason is telling you to “stop it, lay off”, duking it out to the bitter end is still quite unavoidable. In this very moment, all of your pride is tied up with not giving in, not now, not ever, on no account, not even if you have to turn night into day, and no peace will come until someone or other just yields and agrees that you’re right. Because you are right!
Is this how you are still feeling the next morning? When you fall out of bed, beg for aspirin, make coffee or have the person make you coffee who just last night was your opponent, the one you didn’t want to give in to, or couldn’t? Was it all just a haunting? One that has dissipated after the sleep of truth removed the thorn that was all too present when intoxicated?
“Was I really that bad?”
“Well, like always …”
But if you are always that way, does it mean that you are always wrong—or always right? And who is capable of deciding? Not you, since you were inebriated in the middle of it all. And the sober person (or voice of reason) who was present all night and could bear witness to the circumstances is precisely the one who can be trusted least. For he (or she) will only try to convince you of what holds true for him (or her). And what is more blasé than people who think they know everything better just because they stayed sober? The voice of reason is nothing more than a nocturnal ghost who spreads fear of spontaneous decisions based on free will. And whatnot. Good reasons can always be found to spite rationality. But also to counter self-righteousness when intoxicated. The next day, your body is passing judgement on you and handing out a sentence: headache and nausea as punishment for pie-eyed cantankerousness.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 119/2012, pp. 69–70.