BOAZ LEVIN

I Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or to Cry. On Humor, Violence, and Vulnerable Bodies in Hadi Fallahpisheh’s Photographic Drawings

In the topsy-turvy world of slapstick, the appearance of pain is met with laughter; bodies are hit with sticks, fall into trapdoors, trip, slip, and crash. Often, this happens in an elaborate repetitive sequence. Timing is key. Our unwitting protagonist might be clubbed with a bat and fall down some steps, only to land on a skateboard, which will then roll . . . ever so slowly . . . into an inexplicably tall—inconveniently placed—column, bringing a vase crashing down on his/ her/their head.

Lol.

But why is this funny? Why do we laugh rather than cry? Henri Bergson, in his book on laughter, argues that it is “the deflection of life towards the mechanical,” as expressed through both repetition and artifice, that causes laughter: the body seems to turn into a machine, it appears lifeless, and it is such “absentmindedness” which cracks us up.¹ Perhaps. For Freud, humor masks aggression, allowing the joker and the audience to overcome inhibitions and repression.² Bataille, too, perceives laughter as functioning within a psychic economy of sorts, but for him it represents a moment of excess that is essential to thought (“to laugh is to think,” he notes) in that it “draws a heightened consciousness of being.”³ This is also the reason we “laugh to tears”: there is something tragic about laughter, and for Bataille this speaks of its proximity to—and momentary “rising above of”—a sense of physical finitude, of death.4 Yet for all their insight, theoretical attempts to come to terms with laughter have long struggled with their own formal inadequacy. As they all point out, laughter is fundamentally—inextricably—bodily. It is performative, in the sense that it can’t be reduced to semantic content alone: knowing what a joke means, or why something is funny, isn’t the same as getting it, as laughing, or making someone laugh. Our reaction to such gags is compulsive: as bodily as the blows executed in a sequence of slapstick. Hadi Fallahpisheh’s work is funny. There are giant bespectacled rats, sadistic art-critical cats, awkward sex, and deadpan titles. But its humor, Bataille-like, is tinged with a menacing quality, conveying a sense of physical vulnerability.

¹ Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 34.
² Glenda R. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 5.
³ Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1973), p. 50.
4 Troy M. Bordun, “Georges Bataille, Philosopher of Laughter” (2013), Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference 1, https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=mllgradconference.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 154/2021, pp. 11–20.

MORITZ SCHEPER

Tactics

Following his visit to Hamburg on 2 August 2018, greville_w posted a single photo, accompanied by the following caption and hashtags: Hamburg Kunsthalle: my kids and Cady Noland #cadynoland #hamburg

It was with these lines beneath a photo grabbed from Instagram that Olivier Foulon announced SHARE, his exhibition in 2019 at VIS, a space in Hamburg, followed by the remark that positioned opposite Cady Noland’s Not Yet Titled (1994)—but not pictured—was Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (1990). With this as his basis, he offered two proposals for his exhibition. Plan A would be to transfer Untitled sheet by sheet from the Kunsthalle to the VIS space during the course of the exhibition, but this would not be possible because the work had already been removed from view. Plan B was limited to the information that the aforementioned work by Noland could currently be seen in her retrospective at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt. Foulon’s exhibition at VIS was correspondingly reduced to one DIN A4 sheet of paper with this content next to a print of the aforementioned photo. It is an aesthetically generic image, just like thousands of photos that are uploaded to social media each day, but a photo in which an incredible amount of information is compressed. In it the British art collector Greville Worthington photographed his three juvenile children, with two of them displaying the shabby-chic, self-assured attitude of future art students at the Städelschule. With Noland’s wire mesh fence as a backdrop.¹ It adheres to the banal syntax of a social photo, whose existence as a media object is subordinate to its communicative function,² but the parts do not really fit together. Since, in connection with Noland’s excluding and incarnating structure, the posing of the young people “in front of a fence,” and in particular the two of them looking fiercely at the camera, puts these well-situated kids in an ugly context.³

¹ “The geometric austerity suggests functionality; the reflected light of the metallic surfaces creates distance. The shape, shine and hardness of the resistant materials testify to their strength and power, endowing the objects with immediate brutality,” as Noland’s material aesthetics of aggression are aptly summarized in the booklet from the MMK. (MMK website, https://www.mmk.art/de/whats-on/cady-noland/)
² This is the core message of Nathan Jurgenson’s otherwise less than instructive book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London and New York: Verso, 2019).
³ Or in Noland’s own words: “There is a meta-game available for use in the United States. The rules of the game, or even that there is a game at all, are hidden to some. The uninitiated are called naive or provincial, liars or suckers. To those unabused by an awareness of back door maneuvering, a whole world of deceit remains opaque. Those in the dark are still ripe for exploitation.” In Cady Noland, Towards a Metalanguage of Evil / Zu einer Metasprache des Bösen (1987/1992) Kassel: documenta IX (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992), p. 5.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 154/2021, pp. 21–30.

CANDICE HOPKINS

Evolutionary Images and the Embodied Archive

In Laurie Kang’s exhibition Eidetic Tides, she suspended long sheets of photo emulsion paper from snaking tracks of aluminum framing, their ends still curled from the roll.¹ On the floor nearby she stacked dozens of woven onion sacks, their weave a rich blush hue. And resting atop the sacks like paperweights were a series of cast aluminum objects—items that one might find at the market: clusters of dried anchovies, Asian pears still in their wraps, single leaves of Korean cabbage. Through their casting, the food items can no longer be consumed or even decay; as though suspended in a single moment in time, their new form has interrupted their usual life cycle. Running along the top of the gallery space were four vaulted windows, their light cascading across the floor and reflecting on the skins of continually sensitive unfixed film, the sheets of film themselves reflecting back imprints of the windows of the space. The films captured perfect traces of the lighted windows, creating new exposures with each passing day. For Kang, the aluminum framing functioned like an “endoskeleton”—that is, a structure made for the images to respond to light.

While light and environmental changes are often captured and documented in her images, in Kang’s practice, time is a medium. It is documented, manipulated, suspended, and stretched, particularly in her photographs. And her photographs don’t look like photographs at first. What tips them off is their smell; the pungency of their chemical reaction. These images aren’t produced by capturing single or even multiple exposures: instead, they rely on continuously sensitive darkroom chemicals to produce an evolving image for the length of time that they are exposed. With enough of a span—be it weeks or months—they produce what might be considered evolutionary images: images that are embedded with time. These are images concerned with temporality as a process, rather than its representation. What happens when time cycles are embedded into the very materiality of the images? Is this akin to memory or is it something else? I remember the first time that I visited Laurie Kang’s studio. It was a large windowed space overlooking Toronto’s Don River with a view to the city center. It felt like everything inside her studio was in a state of transformation. Heaped along the wall were those same onion bags; I realized then that their color, whether intentional or not, mimicked the ruddy brown of their ripe skins. Unrolled on the floor were long sheets of emulsion paper, its color, lines, marks, and outlines becoming alchemical documents of the environment and the exposures of their previous installation. Now they were responding to the diffuse light in Kang’s studio, and to its changing conditions.

¹ Eidetic Tides was on view from December 7, 2019, to February 16, 2020, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta, and curated by Kristy Trinier.
² Vilém Flusser, “Photography and History,” in Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 126–31, esp. pp. 127–28.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 154/2021, pp. 31–40.

MONA SCHUBERT

Intertwined Conditions, or The Pitfalls of Networked Existence

The multimedia installation Intertwined Conditions (2020–ongoing) by the artist Katarína Dubovská (born 1989) resembles a deserted construction site. A scaffolding of steel and wood elements becomes the frame for numerous photographic objects scattered around it as if at random: extracted inkjet and pigment inks collected in plastic canisters, modelable material made of analogue and digital imagery, and a transfer print applied to the wall in haste. Completely detached from their context and form, solely four screen-based works affixed near the floor make it possible to speculate about the origin of the individual elements, which actually consist of found footage material like prints, magazines, screenshots, as well as excerpts from Dubovská’s artistic process like digital photos, test prints, sketches, and even of parts of earlier works.

The partially obstructed view, fragmented materials, and technoid sounds, encourage observers to immerse themselves in the traces left behind; in the visual culture of the twenty-first century, which is increasingly unfolding without any indexical or material anchoring,¹ and thus into the difficulties of our networked existence. What Dubovská succeeds in making visible through its becoming-an-object is the transition of the photographic, from the analogue to the (post-)digital, and from fixed to multiple manifestations, which, accor­ding to Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, can also be described as an “algorithmic turn” and, in connection with this, as a “crisis of representation.” It is no longer the traditional photographic print in the sense of a “frozen slice of the past” that is central to her artistic examination, but rather the “inherent undecidability” of the networked image and the socioeconomic, political, and ecological implications connected with it.²

Dubovská’s approach undoubtedly shows parallels to the works of conceptual artists and to media-critical works of the 1960s and 1970s, for which a look at the US-American artist Artie Vierkant comes to mind. In his essay “The Image Object Post-Internet,” which was published in 2010, Vierkant traces a line of continuity from conceptual art to post-internet art based on the example of Joseph Kosuth’s work One and Three Chairs (1965).

¹ Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, “A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image,” in Photographies 1, 1 (March 2008), pp. 9–28, esp. p. 12f.
² Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, “The Digital Image in Photographic Culture: Algorithmic Photography and the Crisis of Representation,” in Martin Lister (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 22–40, esp. pp. 27 and 31.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 154/2021, pp. 41–50.

MARTHA KIRSZENBAUM

“The Click of My Heels”: On Attitudes and Decolonial Empowerment

Born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1995 to French-Belgian parents, Aïda Bruyère grew up in Bamako, Mali. Her primary raw material of study is her surroundings—the Malian society—and the first tools she’s using are images that fill her everyday life—pictures, posters, flyers. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, installations, archives, and print material, interlacing references to globalized popular culture (music, reality TV, fashion) with the traditional vernacular representation of the culture and visual aesthetics of her native Mali.

In her video Bakou (2017/19), inspired by reality TV shows and MTV Cribs in particular—a legendary documentary program from the early 2000s that featured tours of private homes of celebrities, particularly rappers—Bruyère uses her cell phone to film the interiors of the palace of her acquaintance Bakou, the son of a prominent Malian businessman. With a dress code that openly refers to American hip-hop videos, he strolls around his family’s classical French-inspired castle as we discover lush marble floors, golden stairs, painted frescos, precious swords, and even a meteorite bought at an auction. When Bakou starts to openly discuss his wealth or to evoke the narcissism of his family, his position seems to break the Western taboo of money and to challenge our representations of contemporary African societies.

Similarly, in her work L’argent de ma mère (My Mother’s Money) from 2018, Bruyère produced eight black-and-white photograms that question the use and the representation of money in a country where most of the transactions are completed in cash. As a young girl, she would witness her parents, who owned a neighborhood bar in Bamako, counting bills every night; and then she started to photograph the bag of cash her mother was bringing to a forwarding agent. . . .

Aïda Bruyère’s practice is deeply rooted in the artist’s identity, that of a young white woman who grew up in a mixed-race family, attending the prestigious Lycée Français with many children from the Malian upper class. Yet her work bears a consciousness of her white privilege, if not gaze, and conveys a strong feeling of being an inside-outer—in Mali, she was a young white girl raised within a postcolonial African society. As many young women of her generation, she seems to be interested not only in traditional feminism, but in what can be named intersectional feminism.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 154/2021, pp. 51–60.