125 | 2014

TOBIAS ZIELONY

Nan Goldin: A Conversation

Zielony How is it for you? It is a bit like documentary work, because you go there, you have limited time …
Goldin I went back to the same people over and over. But for a week, not for years, and not for months. In the beginning, they wanted us to just cover all the categories in the whole country …
Zielony … in a journalistic way.
Goldin Yes. I want to go back to Kiev. There are a few people I still want to interview and photograph. We also plan to go to Odessa. But I like the piece we made. At Pinchuk I am showing an earlier slide show on AIDS, the “Cookie Portfolio” (1976–89), and we made this new four-minute piece that I think is beautiful—and they are still pressuring me to make more. But anyway, we do want to make more.
Zielony Because you think it is important to do that?
Goldin Yes. Not for them, but for the people in the Ukraine. But the point is: How many people go to this gallery? How many of the people actually in the situation go to this gallery? They try to tell me that they have thousands of people a day. But how many of the people that it is really pertinent to are going to see it in a gallery? That is the problem.
Zielony I know—this is something that I think about all the time. On the other hand, remember what you did in New York. You curated the first show about AIDS in 1989.¹ 15,000 people came to the opening.
Goldin The Red Ribbon came from that, and Day Without Art came from that.
Zielony That was amazing! But I understand this kind of feeling.

¹ “Witnesses: Against our Vanishing”, Artists Space, New York City, 16.11.1989 – 6.1.1990.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 125/2014, pp. 11–22.

 

MAREN LÜBBKE-TIDOW

Seiichi Furuya: Border

“At what point does a state face its border?”¹ It is this rhetorically ambiguous figure that Seiichi Furuya purposefully employs to describe the motivation behind his work “Staatsgrenze / Border”, which was created between 1981 and 1983 in Austria. Detecting the borders of a state—this sounds like a utopian undertaking. Yet with a simple conceptual approach, Furuya has penetrated the unequivocally fragile core of nation-state regimes like those that sought to take root in Europe after the two world wars. The artist frequented the border regions of his adopted country of Austria, paced them out and questioned both their institutional bodies—customs officials or border police—and the nearby populace about their experiences. Black-and-white photographs of sites along the Austrian border to the former so-called Eastern Bloc countries of Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were created in this way, along with several related written sentences penned by Seiichi Furuya, together with a map and an epilogue—all of which were compiled to form a twenty-three-part series, which was later expanded. A second epilogue on the work was developed in 1990 after the fall of the Iron Curtain. “Staatsgrenze / Border” was exhibited in Berlin for the first time in 2013,² and in 2014 the work will be available for the first time in book form and will be expanded to include photographs of six further sites.³

¹ Seiichi Furuya in conversation with the author.
² In the Galerie Thomas Fischer, “Seiichi Furuya – I prefer to be on this side”, Berlin, 16.11.2013 – 18.1.2014.
³ Staatsgrenze  / Border. 1981–1983 will be published to accompany the exhibition at the Heidelberger Kunstverein (opening: 29 August 2014) by Spector Books, Leipzig, and the Izu Photo Museum, Shizuoka.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 125/2014, pp. 23–34.

KAUCYILA BROOKE

Allan Sekula (January 15, 1951 – August 10, 2013)

His pictures show how restlessly he travelled to get images of the ocean, the boats moving through it, toting the goods manufactured in Korea, California, China, Poland, Portugal, and Japan. Often he makes the images themselves oscillate. He shows us two images of almost the same scene just seconds apart. As in “Untitled Slide Sequence”, the image is unstable and the meaning changes from one moment to the next. In “Fish Story” (1989–95), pipe fitters finish the engine room of a tuna-fishing boat, their movements gracefully choreographed in a mise-en-scène of hoses and metal pipes; their long arms extend in port de bras from one frame to the next. A worker cuts steel in the Hyundai shipyard. In the next image, as she moves her saw to get ready for the next cut, the worker pauses to acknowledge the photographer, her eyes glancing sideways through her safety goggles and on, into his camera lens. Another worker positions a large drill on his shoulder and, in the next frame, shifts his body to support the weight of the machine. In the shift from one exposure to another, these paired photographs show us a detail of his encounter with these subjects. Against the monumentality of iconic worker images made famous by Lewis Hine or Margaret Bourke-White, these pictures insist upon the social moment of the photographic encounter, the particularity of each subject, the practised deftness of the actions observed.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 125/2014, pp. 35–46.

DAN BYERS

Joachim Koester: Some Boarded Up Houses

They are alone but deeply embedded in a social system. Set apart but almost always threatened by the encroachment of nature, Joachim Koester’s foreclosed, boarded up houses contain a deadpan, sad magic: plain-spoken, totemic underdogs lacking even the romance of ruins. While Koester’s ongoing series “Some Boarded Up Houses” (2009–14) creates an intended and evocative dialogue with Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic typologies of industry, the haunted lineage of Koester’s practice—and an almost ghostly quality that may even inhabit the images themselves—imbues his photographs with a kind of uncanny that is absent from the Bechers’ serial programme.
Koester’s project tracks down houses in American cities that have been foreclosed. In doing so, he locates precise sites at the intersection of predatory lending practices, speculative capitalism, and a particularly American approach to the buying, selling, and accep-tance of debt. The subject of countless news stories, the fate of these homes—and the debt, banking, and social failings they represent—conjure many of the problems facing the US in the past decade. The “American Dream”, which absolutely includes home ownership, almost at any cost, is here set against subtle intimation of nightmare and haunting.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 125/2014, pp. 47–58.

ALANNA LOCKWARD

Decolonising the (White) Gaze 1/4
Who is Whipping?

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions.”¹

In the opening statement of her first documentary, “Reassemblage” (1981), Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts: “Scarcely twenty years were enough to make two billion people define themselves as underdeveloped.” Notably, in this statement the historical continuities between the notion of “development” and its predecessor, the European “civilising mission” of modernity, are absent. It is precisely on such epistemic continuities that the analyses of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze and Walter Mignolo have made significant contributions to our understanding of decolonial thinking, sensing, and doing as inseparable from a historical and ancestral context. Both of them delve deeply into Immanuel Kant’s simultaneous invention of anthropology and aesthetics, respectively, and help us to understand why the inauguration of whiteness (and other colourful distinctions based on the fallacy of “race”) has permeated the hyphenation of art globally until today.

¹ Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 281.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 125/2014, pp. 73–74.