137 | 2017

SUMESH SHARMA

Aurélien Froment: Artist of a Vocabulary

Aurélien Froment is now based in Scotland, in Edinburgh. The French scene claims him, but it has been a decade that he has missed out on that geography. Only to return for exhibitions that range from large-scale institutional solos to gallery presentations in France and around the world, but a practice that is not associated with any selection of aesthetic or trope of definition. He is an artist who uses the medium of videography and photography as systematic drawings that can then lend themselves to architecture and sculpture using those assemblages of photos and movies. We should describe them as movies, for they are edited down to cinematic quality, allowing the viewer a snippet of experience that is witnessed whilst watching one. Now this is architectural as it transforms the space where the movie is projected into a cinema using the memory of experience that the viewer retains, having obviously been to a cinema. The question here is not of genre, for one can argue that genres differ and that individual choice changes one’s perception of moving images. But the craft of Froment is one which is detailed in producing the vision of others: sometimes eccentric architects, a postman building an ideal palace, an Indian cyclist promoting Bollywood in the suburbs of Dakar, and the conceptual iterations of the kindergarten among others. What comes out of a part-time job during university years where he worked as a projectionist and an usher becomes an autodidactical relationship with cinema and image even though Froment went to formal art school. This essay explores an aesthetic in conceptual practice that is peculiar to Froment, that takes on elements of a retrospective process and a travelogue between the artist and the curator.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 137/2017, pp. 9–20.

SUSANNE HOLSCHBACH

Erin Shirreff: Passagen

Shirreff, who earned her MFA in sculpture at Yale University School of Art and still continues to see herself mainly as a sculptor,¹ takes the two-dimensional rendering of sculpture as her point of departure in her photographic (and some of her filmic) artwork, which is largely determinative for our perception of the canon of recent sculptural work. The relationship between sculpture and her photographic renderings is highly specific: in contrast to the reproduction of paintings or graphic works, which may not be an exact copy but still promises to approximate the original with precision for the most part, the photograph of a three-dimensional object is always staged, is already an interpretation. In The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot spoke of an infinite variability in representing “statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture” through their lighting and distance from the camera respectively, which “are susceptible of an almost unlimited variety”,² and he evidenced this with a “Bust of Patroclus” from two different perspectives. Art historians would soon discuss which view is most appropriate for the documentation of a sculpture. And Edward Steichen, with his chiaroscuro stagings of the “Thinker” or the Balzac statue, was paying his respects to the sculptor Auguste Rodin in the late nineteenth century, but he was also placing himself on the same level as the “maker” of the photographs. So it is a resolute step that sculptors like Medardo Rosso, whose wax sculpture “Madame X” (1869) was the subject of a filmic composition by Shirreff in 2013, or Constantin Brâncuși ultimately became photographers themselves. This allowed them not only to control the visual interpretation of their sculptural pieces, but also to integrate them as material into the independent photographic works.³

¹ See Erin Shirreff in conversation with Jenifer Papararo: “I guess I think of myself as a sculptor because things and our relationship to them are so primary to my work.” Published in Erin Shirreff, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Available Light”, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa, 2013), p. 64.
² William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844), pp. 23–24.
³ On this, see the chapter “Der fotografische Raum” in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Raum: Orte der Kunst, edited by Matthias Flügge, Robert Kudielka, and Angela Lammert for the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, published by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg, 2007, pp. 105–29.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 137/2017, pp. 21–32.

BENJAMIN HIRTE

Christian Kosmas Mayer: Bekanntschaften

A pleasant aspect of Christian Kosmas Mayer’s works of art is that they correlate with the gesture of the contemporary, yet without taking on the many related codifications. The logic of utilization originates from outside the art context. In his installations, there is always an opportunity to siphon off unequivocal information and images. The mediation framework makes this easy for the beholder. I don’t mean to say that it is a simple matter. Certainly, there are irritations found in Mayer’s work. But initially we come upon a situation that is ostensibly readable like text. And then the appendix is opened up. Although the components are relationally positioned, there are always also moments of the grotesque, of the enigmatic, in which a kind of sub-ego of the order of things flares up.
In an installation—or, better, an intervention—at the Prunkstall of the Belvedere in Vienna, Mayer displayed sharpened logs (in the framework of the solo exhibition “Musis et Mulis”, 2013), which as wooden piles supported the foundation of the City Palace in Berlin for 300 years (and later also the Palace of the Republic). In 2013, the piles were removed when reconstruction work started on the City Palace. In addition to the poignant moment of standing next to part of the substructure of a no-longer-extant building so broadly discussed in the German media, this intervention, for me, possesses another caricatural, almost slapstick-like facet in interaction with dimensions and the mode of display. Mayer associates the logs with the medieval panel paintings that are on permanent show in the Prunkstall, many of which are former altarpieces that are painted on both sides. In the late nineteenth century, some of these paintings had to bow to museal logic and be divided in half in a rather unorthodox way, so as to be able to exhibit both the front and back sides of the panels at the same time. This left two very thin boards, which in turn had to be reinforced by a wooden support on the reverse side. Mayer, taking a modern, enlightened approach, turned some of these paintings around in order to exhibit the constructions and the back alongside the fronts of the other panels in the collection.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 137/2017, pp. 33–44.

AURÉLIE VERDIER

Haris Epaminonda: Zonen der Erinnerung

The works of Haris Epaminonda are neither strictly minimalist nor thoroughly conceptual. However, if her works leave the question of method very much open, we can still say that her multimedia work is considerably more intuitive. Her methods revolve around the migrant nature of images—and essentially also around that of symbols. Her tools are installation, sculpture, film, found images, books, and collage; and her formal lexicon, established from her earliest exhibitions in the first decade of this century, is made up of a rather limited number of objects. These include metallic structures (plinths, frames, display cases), gold leaf, fragments of pastellone (a mixture of marble powder and lime) placed on the floor or the wall, exotic artifacts (vases, sculptures, miniature pieces of architecture), pedestals or podiums that punctuate the space, and collages of found pages that are remounted and framed. Epaminonda often includes living beings—plant, animal, human—in her installations, and from these there emerges a specific ritual quality, perhaps a certain insistent form of the sacred. Like paintings that await their colour, Epaminonda’s images carry within themselves their own future inscription. They are the locus of reinterpretations to come of a history whose code or meaning she has deliberately abolished. Her objects, tied together by invisible links that are active in their very disappearance, are, to take and redirect one of Georges Didi-Huberman’s fine expressions, crystals of historical unreadability.²

² Georges Didi-Huberman speaks of “cristaux de ‘lisibilité historique’ (crystals of historical readability)” when he discusses the status of the image in an atlas. See, by the same author, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet: L’œil de l’histoire, 3 (Paris: Minuit, 2011), p. 15.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 137/2017, pp. 45–56.