136 | 2016

E.C. FEISS

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz: Militante Figuren und veränderliche Substanzen

One is always somewhere—positioned, cornered, on a pedestal, backed up against the wall, surrounded by plants, or flanked by drapery—when in front of a film by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. Their use of display, and its control of the viewer, can be subtle. In one presentation of “Toxic” (2012), there was a single glass-topped table with a few photographs at one end of the gallery and a hanging projection screen at the other. The screen was positioned perpendicularly to the entrance, forcing viewers to walk around its exposed back and side to see the projection. Initially, the screen’s skewed orientation didn’t announce itself, but it became apparent as a choice once the film began to roll. “Toxic” restages a 1985 BBC interview with Jean Genet, played by the performer Werner Hirsch, wherein Genet calls on the camera and sound technicians to revolt. He gestures beyond the camera as he searches for compatriots in his indictment of the film’s gaze: the viewers of “Toxic,” due to their walk around, are already occupiers of this space in excess of the image. Likening the BBC interview to one he had experienced with the police, Genet reminds us that filmic representation is tied to the construction and violent maintenance of social norms. Film is no passive actor, its environs far from incidental, in Boudry and Lorenz’s oeuvre.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 136/2016, pp. 9–16.

GONÇALO PENA

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva: Der Knaben Wundertüte!

In Komodo, the island of love, one can access the multiverse cave: parthenogenesis, mineral mitosis, androgynous worms, radioactive neon fish, explosive beetles, a chemical arsenal of mass destruction and biodiversity. Here, in exotic Aljubarrota’s brick oven, they make dragons like hot buns, each one with six fingers, following good old Portuguese baking tradition. This gastronomic experience is replicated in several parts of the world. If, up until now, access to the essence was conditioned by the scientific method, then the cavernous opening proves to be even darker, thicker, and more sombre. Among us, neophytes of contemporary art, emerges the amused benevolence of the heterodox power of João and Pedro’s work. Emerging unscathed from the perils of the paradox, we stand incredulous before this work: another world is possible, but it appears to be slower and more alien! Summoned from various corners of the earth, meteorites, twilights, cassowaries, spectres, hippos, and primates evoke the shapes of old laboratories, founding the archaeology of the unknown. Once inside the darkness of the rooms, in the blind chamber of the eye, we recognize clear concepts, translated into figures of speech, which encourage free association and autonomy. These projections belong to the world of phenomena. They are projections created by a deferred vision which constantly plays the Western symbolic apparatus against the regimen of its own production of alterity and meaning: the sex of the bronze duck or the bronze sex of the duck, the obstetric cloaca of the tortoise, the blind afro who scoffs the scrumptious papaya, the platonic solids manifested in good fruit. How they break protocol! For they are hostile interferences, truncated translations of the concept and the purpose of an enlightenment encyclopedia. But hold on … wasn’t this history of knowledge supposed to be the book of the books, the famous history of the progress of the human spirit? Some encyclopedia! Pages and pages and pages, all male, all white, all Western. In any case, Hegel’s interest in polygamy on shores other than Berlin’s is widely known.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 136/2016, pp. 17–24.

ANDREAS PRINZING

Maya Schweizer: Von Präsenzen und Überlagerungen

Maya Schweizer’s film works revolve around questions of history, identity, and memory connected to spaces and how we perceive them. One of the main interests of the artist, who also works with photography and collage, is urban space as the interface between individual and collective action. This is where social realities and temporal stratifications occur, which are captured and set in relation to one another in montages. Observations of situations and found footage serve as springboards for an artistic read of everyday spaces and merge with other elements to tell new stories. Public space serves as a historical image that can be entered into, one whose textures can be read, but also reformulated from an individual perspective. The respective visual language used and the degree of blurring between documentation and orchestration are always in service of specific aims. These vary in the twenty-five film works to date, which articulate a subtle position and approach their subjects with a certain “distanced proximity,” a sensibility of the kind to be found in the works of Chantal Akerman.
Reflect on social relations and contradictions on the basis of what are ostensibly minor locations, acts, and phenomena brings Siegfried Kracauer’s cultural essays, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, and Marguerite Duras’s Les Yeux verts to mind—the latter collection of texts forming an important reference point for the artist. Whereas description and interpretation follow upon one another in the works of these authors, Maya Schweizer weaves image, sound, and writing to create subtle analyses of the present situation that emphasize their object all the more clearly through a constructive shift in perspective. One key term that is illuminating here in terms of content, but that also holds central importance as a formal process, is the concept of superimposition.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 136/2016, pp. 25–32.

VOLKER PANTENBURG

Matthias Müller: Unschärfe-Studien

“What we call a place / is often only a chair”—two verses by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann from his poetry anthology Standphotos (Stills), published in 1980. Stills, set individually and in rows or grids, are also a main part of Matthias Müller’s new cycle of works “While You Were Out” (2016). This includes a large-scale plate with 17 × 13 single images, arranged like a periodic table or a diagrammic colour fan of two hundred twenty-one empty, seemingly functional office chairs, usually in plain rooms with only rudimentary signs of individualization. Revolving around these swivel chairs are the other moving and stationary images of the ensemble, finding their centre of gravity in the chairs. We are accustomed to interpreting Matthias Müller’s work as ongoing research on affect and motifs in the archive of film history. Here, too—in the chairs and orphaned rooms, but especially in the one hundred postcards of the multiple “You Are Here” with its geographical maps, city maps, and atlases on the walls of the room—the cinematic imaginary seems to be making an appearance: potentialities of a narrative, promises of departure or return. Something will happen in these rooms. Something has just happened. Silence.
Yet in this case, the source material that Müller has condensed to motivic catena and series of narrative latency originates from the online streams of private chat rooms. Normally, these pictures would not be taken seriously as images but merely serve as an avenue for fostering intimacy. Accordingly, they do not even try to satisfy particular aesthetic aspirations. In terms of background they are “poor images”, but in contrast to Hito Steyerl, these images, in the eyes of Matthias Müller, are not partisans in the class struggle of the society of imagery, but rather a raw aesthetic material in a stronger sense, whose narrative and art-historical resonance beg fathoming.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 136/2016, pp. 33–40.

ADAM KLEINMAN

Amie Siegel: Kritische Relationen

Deep within the bowels of Vermont’s Dorset Mountain, industrial machines cleave gargantuan slabs of white stone from the walls of an underground cave bathed in crepuscular electric candlelight. Further, apparently automated, machines later cut and polish these rocks into immaculate marble. Like the totality of Amie Siegel’s “Quarry”—a 2015 film that traces the extraction of high-end marble from this site and its later installation into New York luxury apartments as kitchen countertops and so forth—the scene remains depopulated as the camera continues to sweep across the production line. Steel-bladed saws hum in the background, gears engage, and winches wail. Generally cacophonous, these tools seem more like harmonious instruments ceaselessly toiling away in a well-regulated infrastructure. But which one? And to what end?
Fading in from black, the subterranean pit is first spied, as “Neptune, the Mystic” from Gustav Holst’s Planets is heard and lends the opening a kind of atmospheric, if not creation-myth-like feel. The music later drops—in favour of the sound of the machines, and ambient nature recordings from around the mine—yet returns as the film tracks the movements of the rock to its ultimate destination: marketing displays for luxury condo sales. Joining the two sections as pendants, the recurrent score imbues the showrooms themselves with magical, if not cosmological powers. Unlike the finite mineral deposits, though, the proposed building stock presents an entirely different economic order, namely the means of the real-estate and finance sectors—as before, no inhabitants are presented, and thus the audience is left to infer that these properties are for speculative, and not domestic, use.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 136/2016, pp. 41–50.

OMAR KHOLEIF

Broken Flags. Versuch einen Traum zu träumen

I sit here watching America. I am an émigré who has accepted being indoctrinated into this system, even though I am disempowered from any will, or right, to be a part of this machine. I am in America—the United States, to be precise—but I may only watch this milieu from a distance. Watch it from screens: TVs in semi-discreet locations such as gyms, coffee studios, or storefronts, or in pop-up slide banners that appear at the edge of my web browser—news from CNN: “Hillary has been transparent all along!”, a news headline reads, or does it? Am I simply imagining that as an Arab, as a brown, non-Latino, non-Black, non-White, demographically disoriented individual that I will be able to survive here if this country is to fall in the fall?

I am reminded of the time when George W. Bush was running for president. My intellectual American friends would profess: “we shall move to Canada!” Canada, that non-specific polyglot place that performs acceptance with its handsome, movie-star-style leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This man is your friend. This man is acceptance: his profile picture will subsume you with ingratiating desire. Yet over across the Great Lakes, there is another type of star (a reality TV star), an angry, guttural-spewing, chauvinistic bigot, who has neither the looks nor the rhyme or reason.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 136/2016, pp. 63–64.