HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Total Work of Art

HUO What are you showing at Belmacz¹ in your first solo exhibition in London?
JLK In addition to the soft sculptures there is a large wallpaper, a big collage, in which I stage myself as a figure by Richard Lindner, which is painted with pictograms from the film Yellow Submarine (GB, 1968). On a second wallpaper, I show my muse. I find hypermasculinity combined with lingerie for men fascinating.
HUO And who is your muse?
JLK The Brazilian artist Ymo 09. I studied design with Raf Simons and sculpture with Heimo Zobernig; in my installations, I interleave art and design, the history of art and design. For my exhibition at the Galerie Georg Kargl in Vienna in January 2020, I’m examining various aesthetics and handcraft techniques, an occupation that will surely have an impact on me as a person. The concept of an artisan is incredibly appealing to me. The exhibition will deal intensively with handcraft, and even includes an activities book for aesthetics from the 1970s. I also find aesthetics that challenge me fascinating again and again, or things where people say: Mmh, that doesn’t work yet.
HUO So it brings those fields together, but the work is articulated in the field of art rather than in fashion?
JLK Yes, definitely. For the Lyon Biennial, there will be a collaborative work with Ashley Hans Scheirl.
HUO So, there are then individual works and collaborative works?
JLK Exactly, yes. I work solo as well as in collaborations. It’s important to develop your own artistic language and then bring it into collaborative projects. For the Lyon Biennial, Ashley Hans Scheirl and me will develop a large scenography. There will also be a collection in cooperation with the fashion label “House of the very island’s  . . . ,” in which we develop printed fabrics based on Ashley’s paintings, which BROCHIER prints on silk for us. Pictures leave the art space and go out onto the street. There will also be a video work, a scene with a reenactment from Oscar (FR, 1967) with Luis de Funès. Humor is very important. I enjoy promulgating challenging topics with the help of aesthetics and humor. The mainstream can be a fascinating place. The title for the exhibition in London is a quote from a Beatles song, “I am he as you are he as you are me. And we are all together,” a reminder of a time when pop culture was also experimental. So, in the past, when I got to know someone I always asked: Do you like the Beatles? If the person said, no, I thought to myself: Well, goodbye . . . I’m now a bit milder.

¹ “Jakob Lena Knebl. I am he as you are he as you are me. And we are all together,” May 17 – July 6, 2019.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 147/2019, pp. 7–20.

MATEUSZ KOZIERADZKI

Art, Body, Sexuality

In this review, I will present the perception of sexuality in the work of the artist created in the 1960s and 1970s. On November 4, 1972, she wrote a manifesto called “Transformative Attitude,” which defines her artistic interests: “Art is in the process of becoming in every instant of reality: to the individual, every fact, every second, is fleeting and unique. That is why I record common and trivial events like eating, sleeping, copulation, resting, speaking, etc. Moreover each activity of a man being a component of his reality is absolutely equal in evoking a mental reaction in a man who watches the notation. That is why I can transform a registration of one activity into another one. It is not substance and a formal appearance which are essential, but an effect that is meaning.”¹

This text is strongly associated with conceptual art, of which Natalia LL was one of the pioneers in Poland. The interest in registering simple activities was not only related to the blunt presentation of the existing reality as in the case of the video “Permanent Registration Every 1 km of the E22 Motorway” (1970), which documents space at a specific distance from the road. It was an attempt to draw attention to significant elements of human life, which could be considered so trivial that they were neglected in everyday life and underestimated as a subject in visual arts. Relatively early, in 1968–69, Natalia LL began her first research into the sphere of “erotic photography” while at the same time reading Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. These photographs (e.g., the series “Mix,” 1968, or “Intimate Sphere,” 1969) depicting naked hugging bodies or sexual acts were an attempt by the artist to search for her own artistic self. On the one hand, stop-motion recordings of scenes refer to later conceptual registrations, or even announce them; on the other hand, Natalia LL detached herself from widely popular trends in art, such as lyrical abstraction or figurativism. ome scenes depict people from the artist’s environment, but Natalia LL and her husband (since 1964) Andrzej Lachowicz performed most themselves. Both artists, together with Zbigniew Dłubak and Antoni Dzieduszycki, established the PERMAFO Gallery in 1970—operating in Wrocław until 1981.

¹ Natalia LL, “Transformative attitude,” TEXTY (Bielsko-Biała: Bielska Gallery BWA, 2004), p. 279.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 147/2019, pp. 21–34.

JUNE DREVET

Tinfoil Dreams

The general nature of the present may be described as a state of transition—political, technological, and social. This thought runs through my mind daily, while traveling up and down the arterial roads of the metropolis of Berlin. Sailing past countless construction sites, seemingly fenced in for all time, more the orphaned incipiencies of large-scale initiatives for change than forward-looking investments. In between, there are creatures—people, animals, plants. Here, those who are accelerating the transition; there, those who are trying to keep pace. When looking at Paul Hutchinson’s photographs, I notice that the focus is never on fixed positions, but rather on fragile relations comprising attitudes toward the external reality of a contemporary metropolis. As such, the motifs of his pictures are entirely familiar from my own direct experience on the one hand, but they still continually foster a sense of irritation on the other. The Berlin-based photographer sets this transition at the motivic center of his artistic work, but not only that: he also positions it on technical and formal levels, so that we are ultimately faced with a nexus of diverse motifs, a melding of photographic genres, of exposure techniques and lyrical texts. His artistic intention: raising awareness of one’s own time.

Paul Hutchinson’s biography was shaped by numerous sojourns in metropolises in various regions of the world, before he returned to Berlin—to the place where he grew up during the post-reunification period, as a child of a family of German-Irish descent. During his youth, he spent his time on the streets and in the public space of Berlin’s Schöneberg district facing a context of immigration, precariat, and hip-hop. Following the principle “the city as a stateless mind,”¹ Hutchinson traces the energetic vigor of big cities in his photographic practice, energy that arises at the borderlands between asperity and poetry.

¹ This was the name given to the first issue of the street-art magazine Arts of the Working Class in 2018.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 147/2019, pp. 35–48.

REGINE EHLEITER

Groups (1969/70)

In November 1969, the American art critic Lucy R. Lippard organized a small exhibition with serial photo-text works in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts in New York. The title she gave it, “Groups,” is a reference to the motif of the approximately twenty works shown: prior to the exhibit, Lippard had asked the artists to take one photograph each day for a week of a group of people in a similar arrangement and to then describe these images in detail. A few months later, in March of 1970, she presented half the works again in the form of a “magazine exhibition” in the British journal Studio International.¹ It was the first project of its kind in a mainstream art magazine, and it brings to mind by way of example efforts among the new generation of independent curators to bypass the established institutions of the art system and, through alternative exhibition practices, to make art accessible to the largest audience possible.

Lippard conceived of her exhibition as an “experiment.”² She was interested in confronting all participating artists with an identical situation and task. The photographs and texts on a common theme produced specifically for the show were meant to demonstrate, through comparison, how verbal and visual statements differ from one another. At the time, Lippard was already working on an early version of her experimental novel I See / You Mean, which was based on descriptions of photographs. The questions the book addressed, such as the relationship between text and image, the subjectivity of perception, and the variety of ways to interpret a text also played an important role in a writing seminar she offered students of the School of Visual Arts in her Lower East Side apartment in 1969. During the course of the writing exercises, she passed around partially concealed objects or pointed to items in the room that participants were supposed to then describe.

A few of the seminar students took part in “Groups.” The majority of the participants, however, were artists from Lippard’s circle of friends and acquaintances who didn’t generally work with photography, including the New York painters Robert Huot, Alex Katz, Sylvia Mangold, and Kestutis Zapkus, as well as conceptual artists such as Robert Barry, Ingrid and Iain Baxter (N.E. Thing Co.), Douglas Huebler, Adrian Piper, and Lawrence Weiner, who also didn’t see themselves strictly as photographers.

¹ Lucy R. Lippard, letter to Peter Townsend, 1/1/1970, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
² Lucy R. Lippard, “Groups,” in Six Years (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 120.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 147/2019, pp. 49–52.

LUCY R. LIPPARD