67 | 1999

MARTIN PRINZHORN

Some preliminaries on aspects of cognitive psychology in the works of Jörg Schlick

(…) 2. Levels of visual perception.
Another fundamental issue in visual perception is the influence of other systems of knowledge. Here again we see two rivalling models: High-level vision means that we bring our entire knowledge to bear in the process of perception. Perception of a plate is influenced directly by our knowledge of this object, its significance, its purpose, etc. In low-level vision it is assumed that visual processing occurs autonomously and without recourse to other systems of knowledge. For example, a plate is perceived by individual visual subsystems concerning outline, three-dimensionality or colour totally regardless of its significance which is only constructed in a different process separate from perception. In the first case, what we are dealing with is thus an integrated approach spread across the various domains, while the counter-model is based upon specific, modular subsystems which only process certain aspects of vision.
This was first postulated by Bela Julesz (“Binocular depth perception of computer-generated patterns”. Journal of the Optical Society of America 30, 1960, p. 2 – 32) in the sixties in the field of three-dimensional perception. Under certain conditions, pattern diagrams generated randomly by computer can generate three-dimensionality without being able to connect it to any object “significance”. Optical illusions such as the Necker cube or the Muller-Lyer illusion are also seen as indications of autonomous visual processing independent of significance as knowing that this is in fact an illusion does not cancel out its effect. Researchers on these models are also always searching for neurological evidence, for example, the absence of specific visual abilities as a result of brain damage is seen as an argument in favour of a modular model. For example, the ability to recognise faces may be selectively impaired (prosopagnosia) or the ability to perceive printed writing (word blindness or alexia). However, such impairments sometimes also affect categories such as animate versus inanimate objects, and in such cases neuronal localisation is at best an extremely complex affair.
As in the first section, a principle distinction between approaches is a methodical advantage, although in practice they are probably never completely mutually exclusive. Another complication is posed by tests in which it has been proved that in some cases of impairment, visual information has not simply disappeared but is rather simply no longer accessible to our consciousness and only exists in a covert form. For example, it was proved in studies on prosopagnosia that although test subjects cannot (re-)identify the faces of famous people any more than faces of randomly chosen, unknown people, when viewing the former, however, they do display different electrophysiological reactions (see Bauer, R. M. (1984), “Autonomic recognition of names and faces in prosopagnosia: A neurophysiological application of the guilty knowledge test”. Neuropsychologica 22, 1984, p. 457 – 469) and more accurate results in trained allocation of images and names (Bruyer, R. et al., “A case of prosopagnosia with some preserved covert remembrance of familiar faces”. Brain and Cognition 2, 1983, p. 257 – 284).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 67/1999, pp. 7–17.

JUTTA KOETHER

Cindy Sherman: Old Witnesses

We must assume that a process that has been used many times before can nevertheless create something new. The selected method, screening a new film that is not a film but rather consists of a series of umpteen black-and-white photographs. The actors are dolls. Not human bodies, but a material that has today already left behind the catchment sphere of post-gender, post-identity politics, or – as Jan Avgikos put it when the series of sex pictures was published in 1997– ”post-apocalyptic ontology”. Now an onward and backward movement is taking place. Sherman’s special trick is to keep herself physically out of the action so as to open up a possibility of emotionally charged artistic work that turns its back completely on post-pop strategies.
The dolls, the pictures, are all old witnesses of this turning point. What can pictures of dolls trigger off? Fuzzy rigidity or / and the possibilities of knowledge in image production. A memory of the power of memory of images. There were a number of reasons for me to look at Cindy Sherman’s latest image production. In this article I would like to focus on the reasons I feel are most urgent. Investigating methods of perception, creating memory of images, the concept of the original, detached from the “authentic” copy. I was particularly touched by the closeness produced by these pictures. A closeness that can only be created by pictures that stay in our minds, longer than actual viewing.
Stop it! Cindy Sherman’s new pictures look more maltreated than ever before. Maltreated with regard to their content and surfaces. Somewhat vexing and yet touching. Like stills from a film that you know from somewhere, but perhaps you’d rather not. Like memory, bad dreams, nasty games. Manifested in the greyness and coarse grain in which she makes objects act. She has not maltreated her own body this time but rather the bodies of many different dolls. The reference is clear to the old terrains of surrealism in other works and in her own work, and the simultaneous shift of these possibilities. By cleverly employing details from the pasts of other artists, specifically from the pasts of other surrealists (from Claude Cahun, Man Ray, to Hans Bellmer), she plays the riffs of body, identity and other politics – perhaps on behalf of many others.
What has taken place here is also the dissection of an “American Dream” (her proverbial dream career as the post-feminist photo-artist, the name as a trade mark). She had built and realised this dream by means of deconstructive use of her own body. In contrast, she has used various construction codes in the new series, codes familiar from the history of modernism: expression, existence, documentation, anonymity. The surface of these picture, too, suggests something »old-fashioned« or a “flair”, but this is soon followed by a shudder. The shudder is caused by two doubly produced memories: the fact that this is an “authentic copy” of something that has no original, similar to Cindy Sherman’s principle of the “Untitled Film Stills” series created in 1978-80, with which she forged the foundation of her artistic presence. She poses gender questions of the third kind. Horror is caused by fetishes, monsters, chimeras, bastards. The artist’s work involved invoking them and playing a violent game with them. Despite all hybridities, the corporeal element is still there.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 67/1999, pp. 18–29.

GUSTAV METZGER

Killing fields: Sketch for an exhibition

There is a short time span in viewing photographs. More time can be given to viewing these works, than to viewing photographs. There is a contradiction involved. One aim of the series “Historic Photographs” is to put photography down. To indicate that we do not need its all-pervasive presence. The series gives photography a new significance, another lease of life. It is just another indication that within an advanced technical society one ceaselessly comes up against no-win situations. With everything so enmeshed, there is no way of reaching the clear resolutions possible in earlier times. We are now trapped in conditions that remove elements of choice. Whichever way we turn, we are up against given conditions that allow no leeway.
(…) Their meaning is hidden, their significance has to be teased forth. This has implications for the arranger as well as the viewer. An exhibition is arranged on the basis of relationships and/or of contrast. This way of organization can apply here. But since the reality of each object is obscured, how is one to convey this to the viewer? In other words, the “normal” patterns of presentation won’t fit.
A viewer moving through an exhibition will constantly come across “blank” spaces where uncertainty prevails – these gaps in consciousness are inescapable. From the point of the view of the organizer, these “gaps” are key points in the assembly. They will be used instructuring the display. They are like echo sounders: invisible and not palpable, but serving a crucial purpose. The “gaps” will occur regardless of intention. The point is to be aware of them and incorporate these into a programme, so that punctuation takes place. People go into exhibitions with certainty and looking for certainty, and reassurance. Here much of this is abandoned.
In moving from one work to another, the relationship between works is a crucial feature of the progress. Here, elements of uncertainty are structured into the experience. One goes from one to another with a haze of uncertainty a feature of the progression. Both, the work just passed, and the next to be confronted, are part of that haze. These are the “gaps”. Being inevitable, they need to be considered in planning, in the design of the exhibits, and the overall layout of the show. It calls for a new look at exhibition design, and clearly demands a certain amount of space to play with.
Uncertainty, the inevitability of it arising in this context, is seen as a positive element. Everyone knows photography, has seen exhibitions where small or large prints are shown. Here a new start is available. We cannot be sure what we are looking at. Memory and recall are in action, but what certainties are there?
Here we come to a central aspect of the experience. The experience throws open these questions. The “gaps” punctuating the construction of the exhibiton are intentional, since they assist in the creation of a psychic space, where uncertainty and the unknown, are given freedom to range. The bafflement in confronting the works has its correspondence in so many experiences faced in daily life. Bafflement, uncertainty, a sense of loss. The exhibits, their alignment in an exhibition space, stand in for a multitude of experiences perceived elsewhere.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 67/1999, pp. 30–37.

MARTIN HERBERT

Darren Almond

Darren Almond’s video installation “Traction” (1999) is an uncanny viewing experience. On a formal level it is straightforward, its dominant aspect being a real-time dialogue between the artist (off-camera) and his father – the latter framed, talking-head style, on one of three large video-projections – concerning the various injuries the elder Mr. Almond has suffered through his life. Yet as it progresses, the freewheeling dialogue causes all kinds of phantasmic side-issues to steam up through its structure, until the work’s inferences and associations seem to have overtaken its avowed theme, like footnotes colonising an entire volume. Darren Almond’s opening question, “So when was the first time you saw your own blood?” cues Mr. Almond to talk about cutting his toe on a rock while swimming; from this convenient base-point, the two men work up the interviewee’s body, discussing the numerous stigmata upon and within it. In the process, they lay bare Mr. Almond?s past, the social structures he has moved through, and his relationships with individuals.
It is as rich and complicated as life itself; one individual’s history, told through life’s effects on his body, comes to appear as an unmoored chunk of universal experience, free-floating with all its attendant complexities. If the recognised methods of biography aim at manageability, at comprehensible thematics, causes and effects, Almond’s ad-hoc oral biography of his father does the opposite – it erects a virtual portrait of the man which is by definition flawed (indeed, is defined by cosmetic flaws) but in which the body is primarily the sum of the effects of exterior forces. Throughout this historical narrative, something is constantly happening to Almond’s father – outside conditions are acting upon him. At its most politicised, this reads as the narrative of the working class as expendable pawns in a capitalist game (something suggested overtly by Mr. Almond’s remembrance of being brained by a swinging girder, and hearing his works bosses deny their culpability in court). But mostly it is a human story, one of the everyday leaping up and throwing an unpredicted punch. (…)
Inferred, but undelineated here are all kinds of issues; harsh working conditions, the relationship between Almond and his father, and the pair’s attitude to these remembrances (Almond appears alternately compelled and horrified by the violence done to a loved one; his father is consistently, almost defensively philosophical). Most strongly, there is the position of Almond’s mother. Running simultaneously, two other video screens sit to the left of the one displaying Almond’s father. The nearest one runs slow-motion monochrome footage of a digger churning up a road, a poetic metaphor for excavation and an analogue of thd’s father has evidently experienced. The other screen shows Almond’s mother, listening to the conversation, which was played back to her after the event. At times, she laughs; at Darren Almond’s last comment “And mum’s seen it all go on (…)” she bursts into tears, and one realises what a large shadow she casts over the discussion. And so, The End. (…)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 67/1999, pp. 38–49.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur Fotografie

Text feature in Camera Austria International 67/1999, pp. 50–53.

WOLFGANG VOLLMER

Referenzen

Text feature in Camera Austria International 67/1999, pp. 54–55.