142 | 2018

ADAM SZYMCZYK

Olga Chernysheva: Sheer Presence

The Meeting

Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought some Polish white bread, was heading back home where he came from.

And that’s it, more or less.
(Daniil Kharms)¹

Writing comes from drawing, from reality that was tangible first and then became distant as an abstract sign. Ideas (as in: idealism) may well have their source in mark-making, not the other way around. Photography is a form of writing too—not only in the etymology of the term. Photography is considered capable of an accurate rendition of reality at hand, and so is painting—both realist or abstract. All of those activities are forms of mediation—between object and image, between the subject matter and its representation. This movement, common to all forms of representation, happens in between. It is the movement of metaphors, the essential poetic operation of carrying things over, bringing them forth, moving things with words and images. Olga Chernysheva is a writer who makes photographs, a photographer who makes drawings, a draughtswoman who makes paintings, and a painter who makes films. Her work—a form of transfer—is about bearing and carrying over freely and precisely, without staying fixated on one particular medium. The work does stay, however, within a specific repertoire of genres. This can be described as scenes from life—or pictures at an exhibition. A tradition of realism is at work here that is hard to overlook, yet elsewhere it has become something of an endangered species in our era of images emerging and fading, morphing and multiplying without beginning and end, at once superfluous and vanishing in the blink of an eye. Perhaps the rendition that is capable of outlasting the accelerating economy of this pictorial and textual storm—certainly a progress, but at what cost?—could be a bare phrase, formed by the associative work of memory, selecting and deselecting parts of surroundings, configuring and reconfiguring words and images into a minimum of meaning. More than exhausting itself in the self-effacing pleasure of substituting things with ever new names, such rendition formulates an ethics by reiterating names for what had once been near, comprehensible, and specific, and what got violently readjusted, slated for demolition, displaced, erased: people, buildings, forms of social organization, and words, languages, ways of speaking.

¹ Neil Carrick, Daniil Kharms: Theologian of the Absurd (Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1998), p. 32 (Trans. A. S.).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 142/2018, pp. 9–20.

MATTHEW RANA

“Memory”: The Expanded Cinema of Bernadette Mayer

It’s a sunny afternoon on the first day of July in 1971. A young woman sits inside a cluttered Manhattan studio, her back turned to an upper-storey window overlooking Times Square. She reclines casually, legs crossed, seemingly indifferent to the large metal apparatus that looms to her right. Among its clusters of dials, knobs, and spools, a reel is mounted, crisscrossed by what appear to be lengths of film or magnetic tape. The machine’s function is ambiguous, as is the woman’s relationship to it. Although her face is silhouetted, the angle of her head suggests that she is reading, eyes trained on a stack of papers balanced on her knee. At some point she will note that, while the machine is running, the lights are turned out and she is enveloped “in an image sound.”1 Here, in a room not far from “the deuce,” a once notorious district of movie palaces and adult-film theaters, a series of cinematic operations are clearly at work; an assemblage of sound and image, light and text, human and machine, is beginning to take shape.
The woman in the photograph just described is American poet Bernadette Mayer, who in later years would come to be known as one of the defining figures of the second wave of the New York School of Poets. She is pictured here embarking on the first day of her project “Memory” (1971), a “film diary of still pictures”2 comprising 1,116 photographs and nearly eight hours of audio, as well as a long poem of approximately 130 pages. During the month of July, Mayer shot one 35mm roll of Kodachrome slide film each day, an activity that she supplemented by keeping a journal detailing her activities. The following year, the photographs were presented in the form of an 11 × 1.2 meter grid at Holly Solomon’s 98 Greene Street loft in New York, where they were accompanied by the recording of Mayer reading aloud a draft of the text that would eventually become her book Memory (1976).

¹ Bernadette Mayer, Memory (Plainfield: North Atlantic Books, 1976), p. 1.
² Bernadette Mayer, typescript, proposal to Holly Solomon (no date), Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California San Diego.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 142/2018, pp. 21–32.

MAREN LÜBBKE-TIDOW

Andrzej Steinbach: Dissonances

The figure slips away and keeps coming back.    (Anne Imhof)¹

I
In a conversation about the portraits on which Andrzej Steinbach has worked over the past four years and which he has compiled into a trilogy of books—Figur I, Figur II (Figure I, Figure II, 2015), Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei (Society Starts at Three, 2017), and Der Apparat (The Apparatus, 2018, forthcoming)—the artist Eiko Grimberg noted that Steinbach’s figures reference an “outside.” That they refer to something that is not actually in the image or negotiated directly there—or even: to violence.
In actuality, we hardly learn anything about the protagonists of his photographic series that could be concretely tangible. Steinbach works with variables and takes a very targeted approach to having his protagonists assume various poses.2 With his sequence of images, the artist builds up a dramaturgically sophisticated process, with the figures minimally shifting their stances and gazes, changing or swapping clothes. The impression that scenes are being specifically directed here is reinforced by the fact that perspectival views of the people or the spatial environment are subtly and precisely altered, just as details are added or removed. So instead of working on a constative description of his protagonists—or even arriving at a picture in collaboration with them, as is quite common in the genre of portrait photography—he negates a kind of visual manifestation of their existence, gainsaying a form of representation with which clear conclusions could be drawn with regard to the individuals involved and to the social space in which they might each be precisely localized. Instead, he pursues a performative approach and develops series of portraits where something like, yes, political stances may be suggested or ascriptions repeatedly established anew, which, however, become incongruous again and again due to the subsequent image(s), if not imploding altogether. Within this dramaturgical scene, it is equally striking and disconcerting how each individual image, each individual pose, each individual detail—be it a piece of clothing or a thing—appears to be just as charged as it is null and void. His protagonists captivate with their uniqueness as demonstrated in every single picture—and yet they also stand for something universal.

¹ “Anne Imhof and Susanne Pfeffer in Conversation,” in Anne Imhof: FAUST, ed. Susanne Pfeffer (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017),
pp. 13–24, esp. p. 16.
² Here, Steinbach is referencing Marianne Wex’s project “‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures” from the year 1979, which serves for him as a kind of “building-block system” for developing his figures and their poses.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 142/2018, pp. 33–44.

ORIT GAT

Sophie Thun: The Body and the Image

Eight minutes after Sophie Thun and I began a Skype conversation to talk about her work, she starts sending me images via the program’s file share. The first few are of her early photographs, but soon after, she shifts and begins to send me images of art-historical works. The Flemish Renaissance painter Catharina van Hemessen’s “Self-Portrait at the Easel” from 1548, which is one of the first self-portraits by a woman: she sits in front of a just-started panel wearing a lush velvet dress and looking out of the frame, her signature and the date on the pictorial wall; Vincent van Gogh’s “Self Portrait as an Artist” (1888, a blue-tinted representation of the famous painter at the easel, palette in hand); and Diego Velázquez’s °“Las Meninas” of 1656. In the case of the latter, the artist is painting a portrait of King Philip IV of Spain and his wife the Queen, their daughter the infanta standing in the middle of the canvas, but the viewer’s eye wanders to look at the painter, positioned in front of his work in process, his gaze directed at the viewer.
Thun’s art-historical references go beyond these self-portraits. She also sends me Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), an Artemisia Gentileschi, and a Lucas Cranach. She sends me Italian Renaissance paintings and discusses the seamless insertion of the architecture of the painting’s future setting into the picture itself. The relationship between these examples and her current work is plain to see, but I would never have thought about these paintings had she not sent me this series of JPEGs. And then Thun tells me that she was trained as a painter.
It’s kind of a funny story. I ask Thun, who was raised in Poland, how she ended up in Vienna, where she is currently based. Her answer begins in Paris: she was working a summer job in France and went to see a painting exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. There she saw a painting by Daniel Richter—and was so impressed with the German artist’s work that she checked where he taught (at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), and so she applied for an Erasmus exchange to go and study with Richter.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 142/2018, pp. 45–56.