157 | 2022

JENELLE PORTER

Projectionist

The following is a survey of the oeuvre of Pierre Leguillon, a humble attempt to summarize, with just 13 images and 1,500 words, an artist whose practice is the accumulation of images. To look at Leguillon’s work, which is tethered to photography, is to look at dozens, hundreds, of images, collected, classified, arranged, and juxtaposed. And so, we must proceed with every economy but sans hierarchy, linearity, or an assumption that what follows is the complete story.

Vitrine
This is a photograph of an uninhabited vivarium. Leguillon’s subject is the image beyond the glass; the constructed, composed, or found display. When he made it, in 1989 in Prague, he was an aspiring professional photographer who often photographed shop window displays. Here, he equates vivarium to camera: the absented object (the animal) transfigures vivarium to vitrine in the same way a camera captures a subject. In 1999, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Leguillon took photos of artworks to make artworks. A photo of two “identical” slides of Claes Oldenburg’s Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag (1966) shows different exposures. This arranged doubled portrait invites us to compare and contrast, following the Western art-historical method. But are we seeing a mistake, and if so, are there others? The blue seamless background, the too small pedestal, the tight crop? Because Leguillon considered these stylings a misappropriation of advertising photography, he made this photograph a kind of investigation. Furthermore, it was only because Oldenburg’s sculpture was on view during his visit that he identified these parti­cular discrepancies between object and photographed object. As of this writing, the Walker’s website hosts a different image of Shoestring Potatoes. The subject of Leguillon’s photograph—that is, the reproduction—is no longer representative of the museum’s reproductive dominion of the sculpture. The artist explains that his interest in Oldenburg and Carl Andre is specific to how both artists have used scale and gravity, elements very difficult to capture in reproduction. Leguillon points to such attempts with Flying Carpets (1999), a series of photos of book pages that feature silhouetted floor sculpture by Andre rendered boundless, and placeless; a parallelogram very much unrestrained by gravity. Furthering his investigation of the ways photographs interpret artworks, Leguillon presented Survival (flat stuff) (1999), an arrangement of his photographs of artworks and reproductions of artworks in the Walker library vitrine, with five additional images affixed to the adjacent wall. The vitrine was mostly empty, the photos arranged upon an interior flat surface made visible by a strategically tilted mirror.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 157/2022, pp. 9–18.

R. H. LOSSIN

Capitalism and Psychoanalysis

“Man,” observed Sigmund Freud, “has . . . become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent.”¹ Civilization and Its Discontents was published in 1930, between two world wars and a decade after Freud had introduced the still controversial death drive into psychoanalysis. The book is, among other things, an indictment of progress. All of the comforts and conveniences of modern civilization—heat, running water, the ability to communicate with loved ones over impossible distances—seemed to be producing increasingly miserable people. For all of the power bestowed by these apparatuses, there remains a distressing gap between their functional potential to “master excitations” and their user’s psychic state. The prostheses do not quite fit: having “not grown on to him . . . they still give him much trouble at times.”²

Freud is unconcerned with capitalism as an economic system, but symptoms cannot help but point toward the disease and the civilization that he was observing was capitalist. What was particularly distressing to Freud (and revelatory in terms of the psychic effects of capitalism) was that the symptoms seemed to be pointing toward the cure. With every civilizational advance toward what Freud had long thought to be the organizing principle of the human psyche—pleasure or at least a lack of pain—the disease seemed to be progressing.

The centerpiece of Marge Monko’s recent installation I Don’t Know You, So I Can’t Love You (2018) is a pair of Google Home Assistants. Like small but precious objects in an elaborate department store display, they sit atop pedestals surrounded by sensuous drapery and female body parts. The bots talk to each other about love, while a photographic reproduction of Michelangelo’s hands of God and Adam adorn the printed fabric panels behind them. Mirrors on the floor suggest the role of the copy, reflection, or reproduction in even the most original act of creation. Google Home Assistants chatting to another about love are not only examples of the most advanced mechanism for the instant satisfaction of consumer desire to date; they offer us a condensed disquisition on the very mechanics of late capitalist desire. Fed a few words by their human user (Monko), they generate an almost recognizable but distorted discourse on intimacy that alternates between proper nouns, words that would in other contexts signify human subjects, and objects of unknown use. Desire is, by definition, unfulfilled and not necessarily synonymous with consumption. But the steady stream of products made almost instantly available through a spoken command changes the nature of desire in fundamental ways.

¹ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 66.
² Ibid.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 157/2022, pp. 19–28.

MARCUS CIVIN

Mirage

Pacifico Silano works almost exclusively with an archive of late seventies and early eighties images from magazines like Blueboy, Honcho, and Torso. One of his early works, Denim Selection (2013), shows only the jeans and jean jacket worn by the porn star Al Parker who died from complications of HIV/AIDS. In this photograph, Parker’s body is missing. His clothes float like ghostly religious shrouds against a black background. Similarly, in Silano’s recent book I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine (Loose Joints, 2021), a man poses on a beach in bulging red shorts and a wet shirt. A photograph of the ocean partly covers him, suggesting he could merge with the frothy ocean tide. He could be both man and water: thighs, crotch, shoulder, arm, foam, and waves.

I remember buying porn magazines before the Internet. Back then, I felt like I had to commit there in the store and quickly decide what I wanted. Silano shows us one way desire functions. For example, he selects only an oval from a man for the meticulously cropped work When I’m Down On My Knees, You’re How I Pray (2021). It’s a sample—his pecs and a crucifix dangling into a tuft of chest hair on a chain. Here, Silano seems to be telling us that we sometimes fall for smaller parts, not necessarily for the whole person all at once. While we might be overwhelmed at some point by everything we know about someone, we can also be captivated by a forearm, obsessed and intoxicated by the way a muscle flexes in the shower.

Even when Silano first got a computer and started looking at porn online, he told me he would still print it out, fold it up, and store it under his mattress. That’s how much he loves the physicality of paper. In his rephotographed images, we often see the margins of magazine pages, the slight rips around the staples, and the patterning of printing dots. Half of the dusty green truck in Rear View Mirror (2022) comes from one side of a two-page spread, half from the other. The junction where the pages meet helps to define Silano’s photograph. The seam makes the truck flexible. Once, it was steel. Now it can be easily transformed, flattened, and hidden away.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 157/2022, pp. 29–38.

SABETH BUCHMANN

One Image After the Next: Observations on Michele Abeles’s Photographic Work

In Loretta Fahrenholz’s film A Decade That Exploded (2021), New York artists Michele Abeles and Emily Sundblad play two friends named Sally and Harry in a reference to Rob Reiner’s famous romantic comedy shot in New York in 1989. Compiled from photos and film footage that Abeles and Sundblad recorded with their mobile phones, they’re telling each another what they’re doing, thinking, and feeling. The quirky thing is that they’re pretending to be talking on the phone by holding various high-heeled shoes to their ears—wearing and sometimes not wearing underwear and getting off erotically on their YouTube-style, dating-site-like selfie performances mimicking soft porn models. Which brings to mind that famous scene in Katz’s Delicatessen where the original Sally, played by Meg Ryan, feigns a convincing orgasm for her friend Harry, upon which an elderly lady at the next table, when asked for her order, tells the waiter “I’ll have what she’s having.” Likewise, for Abeles alias Sally and Sundblad alias Harry, the older like-minded companion played by the New York art consultant and collector Thea Westreich Wagner represents the defining voice of someone who fought for what artists “have” today. Modelled off Reiner’s jump-cut dramaturgy, A Decade That Exploded links the years 2012 and 2020 and transplants the changes that Sally and Harry experience during their time into the decade that begins with Obama and ends in Trump: eight years later, two thirty-somethings’ exuberant spirit of optimism gives way to a sense of disillusionment and idle paranoia, mixed with melancholy musings over their own growing older.

I’ve begun my piece on Abeles’s photographic work with Fahren­holz’s filmic essay because the artist plays a role that also speaks through her photographs: that of a contemporary portraitist rife with “female perversions.” What I mean by that is her view of the genres, styles, and looks people use to stage themselves and their surroundings, through which they in turn are coded and interpreted. This principle of reciprocity is particularly evident in Abeles’s pictorial models, constructed as analogies to virtual reality’s three-dimensional representational structure, that alternate between close-up and long-shot views and allow for alternating perspectives on the (im)material nature of contemporary affective economies. One work that’s an excellent example of this is the triptych Coaches (2013), in which a cat lies facing the camera on a carpet bordered by a wooden frame sitting on a lawn.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 157/2022, pp. 39–48.

STANTON TAYLOR

Petro-Surrealism

It has always been hard to know what you’re looking at. Ever since the birth of photography, the medium’s much touted accuracy has only undermined our faith in images’ ability to represent the world. Already in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht famously noted that “less than ever does a simple ‘reproduction of reality’ tell us anything about reality . . . For whoever reproduces those aspects of reality that can be experienced does not reproduce reality. For some time reality has no longer been experienceable as a totality.”¹ Like many artists of his time, Brecht found himself struggling to wrap his head around an increasingly industrialized and financialized world, its complexity threatening to outpace the capacity for human understanding, much less representation. For Brecht, this wasn’t just a political problem, but also inevitably a formal one, and a choice example of his was the so-called “petroleum complex.” By then, the international oil industry had already achieved a scale and integration paralleled by few other commodities of the time, not to mention that it also came to play a key role in coal-mining Germany’s strategy for the First World War, culminating, among other things, in the invasion of Romania. Epic in scope, it was impossible to put a single story, let alone a face, to something so impersonal: “Petroleum resists the five-act form; today’s catastrophes do not progress in a straight line but in cyclical crises; the ‘heroes’ change with the different phases, are interchangeable, etc.”²

Fast forward a century later to the age of cryptocurrencies and deep fakes, and it is hard not to read Lucie Stahl’s recent work in light of Brecht’s petrochemical problematic. Over the last years, Stahl has been developing a body of sculptures and photographs that revolves around some of the most recognizable manifestations of the oil industry. But unlike many twentieth-century artists who turned to montage as a way of bringing narrative back into photographic images, Stahl doesn’t seem so much interested in explaining her subjects as she is in their inherent inscrutability.

1 Translated from Bertolt Brecht, “Der Dreigroschenprozeß: Ein soziologisches Experiment” (1931), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), pp. 139–209, esp. p. 161.
2 Translated from Bertolt Brecht, “Über Stoffe und Form” (1929), in Brecht, Ge­sammelte Werke, vol. 15, pp. 196–97, esp. p. 197..

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 157/2022, pp. 49–58.