CHRISTINA NATLACEN

Viktoria Binschtok: On Searching for and Finding Images

Yet with her “Cluster Series”, Viktoria Binschtok fosters conceptual space for the beholder on many levels at once, giving rise to questions related to the nature, function, and circulation of photographic images in our digital world. One plane of reflection relates to the logic and the system of the archive. Pictures are liberated from an existing archival whole in a dual sense: first, a photograph from the artist’s own archive, and then, a photograph from the Internet discovered through the preceding image search. Both steps necessitate a radical act of decontextualisation, during which process the original source, the intention, and the context within the archive are all lost. What solely remains is the aesthetic value of the picture.¹ The motifs applied in the “Cluster Series” and their aesthetics in turn play into the hands of the decontextualisation process. In fact, their most important characteristic is a pronounced openness to meaning. Any indicators that would facilitate clear temporal or spatial localisation are avoided, as is a clear stylistic imprint. Binschtok favours photographs devoid of people that for the most part simply show facets of reality. Such aesthetic qualities are reminiscent of the category of stock photography, those pictures provided by commercial image databases that are designed to be applied to as many different contexts as possible. Wolfgang Ullrich presumes that these are “the ‘most pure images’ conceivable”, which first become codified themselves when placed together with words or in an already coded environment.²

¹Allan Sekula points to the two broad fields of discourse on photography, which bring the respective contextualisation of the images to bear: the field of science, which considers archival photos to be historical documents, versus art and
subjective experience, where photographs are viewed as aesthetic objects. See
Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive”, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 443–52.
² Wolfgang Ullrich, “Bilder zum Vergessen: Die globalisierte Industrie der ‘Stock Photography’”, in Andreas Baur and Ludwig Seyfarth (eds.), Recherche – entdeckt! Bildarchive der Unsichtbarkeiten, exh. cat. 6th International Photo
Triennial Esslingen (Frankfurt/Main: Revolver, 2004), pp. 49–55, esp. p. 51.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 128/2014, pp. 9–22.

DAVID BALZER

Luis Jacob: Looking at the Museum – “Show Your Wound”

In Luis Jacob’s series “Show Your Wound” (2010–12), twenty-six chromogenic prints are presented in consummate modernist-exhibition-design fashion. Images are evenly spaced out in one horizontal eye-level line in a White Cube room, their clean framing an exaggerated version of the Photo-Secession’s, with generous white matting around small, rectangular images. The viewer is forced to come and peer. There is a heightened seriousness, yet upon closer examination the images are revealed to be snapshots the artist has taken at museums and galleries around the world. In three images, one of a Helen Levitt work, one of a series of Sherry Levine blue mirrors, and one of Daan van Golden’s “Youth Is an Art” (1988), you can see the artist, reflected, holding his smartphone. The images might function as readymades, metonyms of a low-culture relationship with art— i.e., taking pictures of art at a museum—that are presented as high- culture art objects.
But the images are not isolated; they work as a teem, dependent on the strengths and resonances of their clinical exhibition context. They are not ironic deconstructions or critiques of museums, as Dadaist readymades were, but rather intent inquiries into them, and into the nature of looking.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 128/2014, pp. 23–36.

PABLO LARIOS

Roman Schramm: The Detachable Collar

Schramm’s most recent “Satellite City” is a series of photographs, incorporating visual elements from photographs taken in Mexico City, extending Schramm’s experiments in rendering and framing. Here, the focus on an interplay or conflict between the organic and the artificial is acutely on stage: trees, tripe, a cityscape, and a pear squash are framed behind illusionistic, digital boxes, or a near trick-backdrop that seems to displace several perspectives at once. The organic photographs are quasi-sexually charged, although never explicitly so, daring the viewer to project onto them a near-pornographic import; the status of such import as projection (and illusion) is thus heightened, or by the absurd cartoon eyes that, in one photograph, stare at a heap of coins and seeds from within a black plane in the image. In another one, a cube is overlaid onto a photograph of a city—the cube contains a picture of a girl. The extreme formal devices of framing the photograph and the hypostasis of the organic by the artificial makes the series seem like an exercise less in documentation than in memory. The vague, often beautiful, though loose or arbitrary arrangement of visual motifs, and the way they recur across panels, copy-and-paste, recalls the plane of memory, or a vague dreamworld where the same objects can recur, yet with a wholly different meaning. More accurately, though, this is the plane of déjà vu, with its imaginary, though non-real referent of memory. The “already-seeing” of déjà vu is a condition of possibility from the network of icons and products in capitalism, and its techniques of advertising and psychology: nothing—not a city, or a relation, or even the self—is ever new. It is simply recombined, creating the illusionistic surface of the new along the axis of that which is always already recognised.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 128/2014, pp. 37–44.

ALANNA LOCKWARD

Decolonising the (White) Gaze 4 / 4. Where Is (De)Coloniality?

In the first column of this series dedicated to the decolonisation of Aesthetics and the liberation of Aesthesis,1 one of my proposed thinking and sensing paths of unlearning conferred a secondary role to the decolonisation of “the” gaze. After my recent visit to the Caribbean, I realised that the incompleteness of this argument was the result of writing for a hegemonic white audience instead of a Global South one. I shall approach the decolonial self-awareness that led to this realisation by way of three anecdotes.

The first one happened when a colleague tried to explain the painful moment she experienced in Jamaica after presenting a paper on Caribbean artists. After her session, someone in the audience approached her and demanded an explanation on her “rights” as a white Cuban art historian to talk about Black Jamaican artists. When she told me this, I was rushing out. So it was impossible to explain to her that anti-white racism is an oxymoron, an impossibility, and also that in Europe her Caribbean whiteness would be found lacking. Thanks to this episode, I understood that the opening argument of my first column was oblivious to a fundamental aspect of the decolonization of the white gaze, namely, the internal dynamics of othering. My colleague’s role as a colonised subject was invisible to her since her whiteness has secured her social privileges in Cuba’s extremely segregated society. If she had told this story to a white German, for example, her status as colonised subject would have become clear to her, since in Europe whiteness is also a geopolitical category.

1 Through the concept of Aesthetics, Western philosophy colonised Aesthesis in the name of modernity, establishing norms to distinguish, within its own history, the concept of “art” from other “similar and different” expressions (popular art, folklore, arts and crafts); this distinction played the role of a deflected mirror image towards the non-European world. If Western philosophy colonised Aesthesis (sensing), and “art” was the instrument to carry on this goal, then decolonising Aesthetics means to liberate Aesthesis. Walter D. Mignolo, “Decolonial Aisthesis and Other Options Related to Aesthetics”, in Alanna Lockward and Walter D. Mignolo (eds.), BE.BOP 2012: Black Europe Body Politics (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2012), pp. 5–8, esp. p. 7, http://blackeuropebodypolitics.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/be-bop-2012interaktiv.pdf, accessed 20 October 2014.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 128/2014, pp. 65–66.