133 | 2016

HANS-JÜRGEN BONACK, JULIA KLEMENT
ANDREAS PRINZING
KATHRIN PETERS
KITO NEDO
HANNES BÖHRINGER
TATJANA TURANSKYJ
DOREEN MENDE
OLAF NICOLAI

Twenty-First of February, Two Thousand Sixteen—On the runway, a whiff of burning wood from the dispersed villages envelops him. The permeating echo of another time. Like every arrival, this, too, is like touching a new world. Billions of microtongues on his skin reach out to palpate the unfamiliar contours. He doesn’t feel like experiencing the insularity of a taxi. In the rapid transit bus, he clings to an absurd plastic gibbet. The blue, half-synthetic outfit of a stewardess is rubbing against the light-grey woollen material of his jacket. Powder-covered, almost intrusively buoyant facial features, a cupid’s bow of lip liner, and heels that were not designed for resisting in-flight turbulence. His eyes absorb forms and colours, leading to the billowing mechanism that disperses them into seawater-green particles of yearning. “Snippet” by Nils Frahm trickles through the headphones into his auditory canal. His fantasy throws subtitles into the scene. The bus driver is assigned the voice of Jean-Paul Belmondo in “Le Doulos”. The young couple near the front exit—she’s blond, he’s drifting off—recites passages from a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. The material qualities of her shimmering green knitted miniskirt lose their purpose in view of her openly exhibited grief. The brittle material scratches against the velvet of her naked legs. On the path to the hotel, he opens up his palms and extends his lips and forehead up towards the warm, densely falling rain, which seeps into the few gaps in his clothes. In the room, he falls onto the bed after having opened all windows to let in the dusk. The sacral choral music from one of the many churches occupying this city blend with the rhythmic moaning of the woman next door. Added to this is the gentle clinking of a loose window pane, accentuated by the throb of the radiators in extended beats, along with the aroma of red coral from the bathroom and the flickering light of the sky that would await him the next morning. (Hans-Jürgen Bonack, Julia Klement)

“The Affair”, TV-Serie
US since 2014, Idea: Hagai Levi, Sarah Treem

Two or Three Things That I Know About Her—Several years before I happened to move in across the way from Heidi Specker, I had encountered one of her editions. The close-up of the church Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay shows gradations of grey, structured by traces of formwork that had been preserved in the concrete of the bunker-like structure. Wooden fingerprints. Ever since, our paths
have crossed on occasion—she points out squirrels to me on the balcony, wall panels in the subway, or a book. Now studio portraits, a detail view of her generation. Yet were not “Concrete” (2002) and “Sankt Anna” (2012) already portraits, even if architectural structures were orbited and shifting perspectives palpated? The juxtaposition of built environment and urban flora, so familiar to us from “Im Garten” (In the Garden, 2005), is granted a new chapter by the artist with “In Front Of” (2015). Like the metal cup in one of her photographs, she captures her artistic surroundings through stances, gazes, and isolated gestures, reflecting it with an objectifying gaze in a reduced setting. … (Andreas Prinzing)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 133/2016, pp. 11–22.

JENS ASTHOFF

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili: Analogue Iridescence

A photo like an abstract composition. The brownish violet rectangle easily takes up half of the surface. To the top, it is flanked by a green-grey stripe that also delimits the image along its entire width. A slight sense of perspectival foreshortening is apparent in both. Situated off-centre inside the rectangle are two lighter fields, structurally detailed; a gestural trail above, self-contained with a roughly jagged progression. The dark surface is framed in a diffuse milky white to the outside, lending it clear contours. Thinly bordered from the sides, a mottled white gapes downward, like an open void. In this structure, visual emphases are shifted counter-intuitively: the optical gravity, similar in motif to a kind of image within the image, hovers above airy nothingness, vaguely held from above.
Actually, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s “Negative” (2013) is any-thing but non-representational. It is de facto object photography, even if it clearly evokes abstract visual formulae and, most especially, fosters multilayered interplay between object and representation. To the beholder, the aspect of representational nature is quickly evident as well—yet without immediately realising how layers of representation intervolve here. Although everything is laid bare, the objectivity engages in a special kind of arrangement and is constructed from varied subjects related to photography. The brief title is indicative of this, for “Negative” shows a negative, that is, an exposed 8×10-inch large-format negative. It is hanging on a windowpane, faintly illuminated, with the background dissolving in bright blurriness. The photograph has been taken from below, just to one side, and then turned upside down. In Alexi-Meskhishvili’s work, various planes of representation, pictorial reality, and their contingency are typically woven through the photographic material visually, often in a way that is not immediately decipherable. These planes are layered, faded, collaged, intertwined—generally melded into something new with its own texture, something that is neither mere representation nor non-representational construction. Alexi-Meskhishvili, who combines both analogue and digital photographic techniques, experimentally researching interstitial spaces, thus also makes the conditions of photographic representation aesthetically productive, not merely exposing them but also, in turn, staging them as poetic material and visual narrative.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 133/2016, pp. 23–34.

STEPHEN ZEPKE

Post-conceptual analogue: Mladen Bizumic’s Kodak Photographs

Mladen Bizumic’s work begins from a deceptively simple question: “What is photography?” While not the first to ask it, Bizumic will offer an original and complex answer that unfolds in three dimensions; first, between analogue and digital photography; second, between modernist and conceptual artistic practice; and third, as a reflection on the social implications of globalisation and corporate capitalism.
Bizumic’s recent work focuses on the rise and fall of the Eastman Kodak Company. Founded in 1880, responsible for popularising photography at the turn of the twentieth century, achieving a 90 per cent US market share in 1976, inventing the digital camera in 1975, but failing to put it into production and consequently filing for bankruptcy in 2012 after digital photography took away its market. As the statement accompanying Bizumic’s recent exhibition “Kodak: Reorganization Plan” (Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna, 2015) puts it: “Kodak invented its own ‘death’.” It is this death that Bizumic brings to life, exploring the cadaver of Kodak with a morbid and sometimes violent interest. On the one hand, he turns it into a contemporary morality tale, a memento mori marking the fleeting vanity of corporate success, and on the other he re-engineers its corpse, Frankensteining it into a new and artistic form.
The exhibition “Kodak: Reorganization Plan” documents the metaphorical dimensions of this shift, drawing attention to the psychological and social dimensions of the capitalist rhythm: market domination—bankruptcy—restructuring. According to Steven Sasson, the Kodak engineer who invented the first digital camera, Kodak executives suppressed his invention because they understood what its impact would be on their highly profitable business, a case of conserving the past against the unknown benefits of a future technology. If this story illustrates the short-sighted logic of capitalist “growth”, then the trajectory of restructuring that came after is a “happy ending” that obscures the jobs lost and the lives damaged as inevitably resulted amongst workers. The walls of the exhibition were lined with sheets of paper that Bizumic had collected in the bankrupt ZNTK (Railway Rolling Stock Repair Company) in Poznań, Poland, where this exhibition had originally been held. Redundancy means restructuring, which means job loss and the technologisation of the production process in the name of greater “efficiency” (i. e., the protection of profit). Bizumic places this story as the background of his work in the exhibition, encompassing it in the quiet, melancholic testimony of these yellowed pages. Thus the “real” world frames Bizumic’s more artistic project, which is to take the materials of analogue photography and “restructure” them, this time not in the name of some euphemistic “efficiency” but rather to explore the potentials of their material.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 133/2016, S. 35–46.

TACO HIDDE BAKKER

Stephan Keppel: Overtones of Motion

The City as Book
The cliché goes that everything is bound to end up as a story, a movie, a book. Nowadays, for sure, everything flows into pictures. And New York is perhaps the most photographed city in the world. It is also very inviting to photography, with its lines, grids, patterns, the generally vivid light, but of sufficient diffusion. Not to forget the rough beauty of its elegant and sturdy bridges.
Life in New York City and its boroughs has inspired the publication of many great (photo)books, ranging from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), a passionate charge against the poverty of slum life; Helen Levitt’s magical world of children playing in the streets and empty lots of Harlem in A Way of Seeing (1965); William Klein’s frantic Life is Good & Good for You in New York (1956); and Ken Schles’s Invisible City (1988), a moving portrait of the partying underbelly of the rowdy East Village of the 1980s.
But if there’s any image book on the Capital of the Twentieth Century that comes close to Keppel’s way of observing and processing the constructed and weather-beaten surfaces of a city, it’s the relatively unknown New York, New York (1972) by the Hungarian György Lőrinczy. A love song to Manhattan in gritty high contrast.

The City as Text
“The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines”, wrote E. B. White in his famous essay Here is New York (1949).² The city is not only written about; the city writes itself. So vast and various, so dense, that it can never be read by one person alone.
Keppel prints images like one would print text. He converts image files into bitmap. “It opens up the texture”, he says, “and makes the images more graphical, avoiding the all too photographic”. The black ink powder of his laser printer burns deep into glossy, Chromolux paper—paradoxically creating a matte surface.
Text, subtext, metatext, intertext, texture. Text analyses and synthesises, evokes and describes. Architectural surfaces are tightly woven interfaces: to be read, interpreted, understood, or creatively misunderstood.
The city speaks history in four dimensions.

² E. B. White, Here is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 21.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 133/2016, S. 47–58.

OMAR KHOLEIF

What Is an Internet Aesthetic?

I’ve been grappling with the context of what an Internet aesthetic is to an image for many years now. Is it an image that is networked, easily distributable? Is it a picture that is hacked, open to appropriation, and has been tampered with? Or rather, is it a doppelgänger that holds its aesthetic and formal autonomy despite being transferred across multiple, cross-embedded media? The World Wide Web, and mobile telephony software applications in particular, have led to a kind of image circulation that is unparalleled to anything that we may have ever seen before: a photo taken at a party can within minutes be whatsapped halfway across a continent, cropped, loaded onto Instagram, regrammed, saved, and uploaded onto another platform, and so forth. With each layer added to the image—a filter, a crop, or even with the continued quality dissolution, the pixellation of the image—a new formal makeup is being produced, removing the image further away from the original context and aesthetic created by its primary author.
This dispersed authorship has led to a division of camps: the image anarchist, the image neo-liberal, and the image fundamentalist. As the qualifying descriptors suggest, the anarchist is someone who reflects a generational indifference to any form of intellectual property, having developed his or her relationship to image-making through the “share” culture of social media. The neo-liberal is a hybrid individual who believes that the image, if it is “art”, should be free to travel, emerge, and respond to different virtual and physical contexts, while the fundamentalist appositionally believes that the meaning of the image, and indeed its aesthetic, is inseparably tied to the context by which it was produced and its original author. Once separated, it loses not only its meaning, but also any sense of value.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 133/2016, S. 73–74.