39 | 1992

Apart from the independence achieved from FORUM STADTPARK artists, one of the essential qualities of this house is its being, now as ever, a place of production. Like all its activities, the production of its magazines- “manuscript” and CAMERA AUSTRIA- has greatly profited from the confrontation with positions and debates going on in on´there disciplines. Issue no. 39 appears to be a good demonstration of this context- the connection between by Julian Schutting’s textual contribution and Wladimir Kuprijanow’s work, for one, has been a result of the confrontation of  artists working in varied disciplines. When Kuprijanow uses lines of a poem by Pushkin as captions for his portraits of woman factory workers in Russia, he is aiming at a twofold redaction : the aesthetic norm of the female portrait- recognizable, in a Soviet everyday context, as the typical image of plaques of honor for valiant working woman- demonstrates the use of a collective image and its individualization by each corresponding line of poetry. By its lines being elated to the portraits, Pushkin’s work, a collective possession in another sense and an expression of individual desire, is gauge against a reality other than the one described. The write Julain Schutting hast approached this work from the textual side without a priori including the context of the image genre. His analysis first grants the pictures their power of illustration, second to which comes verbal appropriation.

The family- the factory: these two concepts have served as brackets for putting together the contributions to his issue. In the same measure as these terms describe interrelated conditions of same measure as these terms describe interrelated conditions of production, insight into which is offered by these works, we are justified to use them in sense of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Numéro Deux”: Nan Golding describes her positions an individual producing photographs and recording memories; Jeff Koons puts his work and his persona on a level with the mechanisms of a market that recognizes production and consumerism as its only authorities; Jean-Louis Schellkopf is dealing with serial production methods when he calls his sequences “Typologies”; Wladimir Kuprijanow has chosen the destruction of the image unit as his method in an attempt to grant a new valid message to the collective image. Perhaps it is Jeff Koons’ work- “Made in Heaven”- that can best call into question the established “natural” order into which our notions of family, relationships and physical awareness are inscribed. As Sylvére Lotringer has put it, Jeff Koons never needed to go back to deconstruction to clarify his position – “the culture industry has done that for him. … He is the playboy and the playtoy for the Western world, all in one.” Hildegund Amandshauser’s essay deals with the topical borderline between art, kitsch and pornography, the constituting element in Jeff Koons’ work.

Nan Goldin has designated as her family the group of friends, of daily contacts, of people sharing her preference . This sense of belonging shows in her portraits: The photographer has changed sided. She is not on one level with the viewer but with the persons portrayed. Rather than perpetuating the traditional situation, it is them who look at us: Our demanding voyeur’s gaze comes back at us.

With Herta Wolf’s essay on Kurt Talos, the Viennese artist who has died young, we continue our series on important postions in Austrian photography. In formal terms it is the staged approach to the medium of photography that seemed iterating enough for a new (or, internationally, a first) look at his work. Regarding the contend of Talos’ work it is his exploration of images and symbols of power that would have deserved closer attention at the time of their creation – a subject that demands our attention even anew.

Christine Frisinghelli