JUSTIN HOFFMANN

Oliver Laric and His Archive of 3D Scans

It is not so easy to describe the essence of the artistic “product” of Oliver Laric, or how his artistic working approach might be defined. What is clear, however, is that many of his exhibited works—shown, for instance, at the Secession in Vienna (2016) or at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin (2017)—were made using a 3D printing method and are based on 3D scans made by the artist. Yet for Laric, the presentation of sculptures is only one facet of his artistic activity, which also includes various levels of research, publication, and distribution. In many cases, his 3D scans provide a foundation for the cultural products of others who access his data. So he seems to be an artist who functions as a mediator of material for other cultural producers.

Finding, Selecting, Recording – It was in the town of Lincoln in England, once occupied by Romans, that Oliver Laric first had the opportunity to scan a series of three-dimensional works. And it was there, in the year 2012, that he first started to compile a freely accessible digital 3D archive of sculptures and other spatial bodies. The curator of the Usher Gallery in Lincoln, Ashley Gallant, invited the Austrian artist to conceptualize a project for the Annual Award for Museums of the Contemporary Art Society, which was ultimately brought to fruition in cooperation with The Collection and its archaeological finds in Lincoln. With the 3D scanner, Laric captured numerous sculptures, reliefs, and other pieces within the The Collection and then published the compiled data on the website www.lincoln3dscans.co.uk. The spectrum of objects spans from the Roman and Anglo-Saxon epoch to Nigerian art and also includes artwork from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following on the heels of this much-noticed project were requests to other collections and sculpture galleries by the artist to digitalize more works of art so they may become widely accessible. Laric’s website, www.threedscans.com, has meanwhile become a comprehensive archive for 3D scans.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 144/2018, pp. 11–18.

JENS ASTHOFF

Fossilized Foliage, Liquefied Time: On Motifs and Methods in Johanna Jaeger’s Photography

Two photographs show horizontally streaked gray with a linden leaf couple on top. The brief, incidental scenario with autumn foliage that had fallen to the footpath, captured by Johanna Jaeger’s “sidewalk fossil (brooklyn)” (2017), is conceived as a sequence of images: the photos reveal the same detail view again—and apparently, evident in the contours, also the same leaves. One is lying there, having just fallen from the tree, and the other is present as a negative—as a pale impression of a leaf that had apparently fallen onto the fresh concrete before being blown away. The motif may harbor a photographic subtext, considering that leaf green represents a light-filtering, photoactive material (chlorophyll), while wilted leaves lose this capacity, having already been “exposed,” as it were. Moreover, the imprint of the leaf rendered here might be interpreted as a kind of analogue snapshot. The leaves are of the very same kind, but with a different form, so that the first leaf cannot be the trace of the second. Shown here instead are the modi of presence and likeness. Yet upon closer consideration a paradox arises: in the first photo the upper leaf is presented as “real” and the one below as a “fossilized” impression, while in the second photo the opposite seems to be the case. While the one depiction contradicts the other, in terms of temporal and visual logic, both together keep the contradiction irresolvable. So “sidewalk fossil (brooklyn)” all of a sudden is readable in a circular rather than serial way. Here, Jaeger plays on photographic categories and methods through pictorial interpretation, a frequent approach taken in her work, with aspects like image/subject or negative/positive.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 144/2018, pp. 19–26.

FRANCESCO ZANOT

Family Ghosts

The Canadian director Sarah Polley lost her mother in 1990 when she was eleven years old. In the 2012 film “Stories We Tell,” she investigates her own family history through a series of interviews with her father, her half-siblings, and a number of family friends. Different details emerge every time, right up to the shocking revelation of her birth following an extramarital relationship. Polley intersperses the documentary materials with a series of fake home videos, produced especially for the occasion on Super 8, which punctuate the development of the film, adding a further level of narrative. The result is inevitable: we no longer understand where the truth lies. Or rather, we no longer understand whether there is a truth or, like in a court of law, whether this corresponds to a fictitious reconstruction obtained through the sum and comparison of the available evidence. A paradox thus emerges: the representation/copy—here consisting of fake home movies—appears to be truer than the truth.

The work of Lebohang Kganye unfolds along similar lines. Since 2013 she has focused on the theme of family memory, using photography as her main means of investigation. Despite the testimonial value of her imagery, she does not come to any overall conclusion, but only to more or less credible hypotheses unleashed by fragmentary pieces of information. The family relationships and the photographic language are overlaid and explored together starting from a number of common points: their rooting in the past, the challenge to the passing of time through a surrogate form of immortality (be it genetic or epidermal), and an irremediable instability (be it affective or semantic). For this latter reason, both represent a trigger for countless possible stories.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 144/2018, pp. 27–34.

E. C. FEISS

Photography as Support System

Confronted with the weight, texture, surface, and various densities of Hana Miletić’s art, the question of photography seems obscure or, at best, a secondary consideration. Why is photography a consistent referent for the artist when her practice is dominated by a catalogue of things and events? Like large swaths of striped woven sheet, gauzy dark linen blends, or a dense wool patch that alludes to some utility (potholder?), it cannot fulfill in its delicate grain. These textile objects do not suggest a photographic referent in their threaded abstraction, nor in their unstandardized sizes (some stretching to mural dimensions, others smaller than A4). Where a photograph lurks behind the textile, as is the case with both major series “Materials” (2015–ongoing) and “Dependencies” (2017–18), the statement of this fact alone serves only to lock the works’ meaning into a narrative about process, confined to a linear trajectory from image to textile copy. Beyond exposing their root composition, this explanation cannot account for why the artist turns toward textile, burying the photographic source beneath its folds. Rather than a basis, photography is both a tool and a problem for Miletić: it is the suppression of the photograph in service to material that constitutes both the statement of the work’s politics and its critique of photography. Miletić’s works continue to reference the photographic in order to displace it as a method of representation; to narrate away from it as a viable practice of artistic exchange with the social world. In fact, the engagement with several representational strategies in Miletić’s practice stages a confrontation between representational politics (visible identitarian difference like race, class, and gender) and a politics of reproduction (the recognition of raced and gendered labor which underlies the visible world).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 144/2018, pp. 35–42.