SVEN LÜTTICKEN

Daan van Golden: Between The Images

(…) In reference to Van Golden’s work, Karel Schampers used the term epiphany, which is indeed very useful to describe the procedure developed by Van Golden in “Youth is an Art”. At the beginning of the century, James Joyce and his alter ego Stephen Daedalus modified the meaning of the concept epiphany, shifting it away from the revelation of God towards a revelation of a personal nature that could have quite banal, everyday causes. It is indeed a profane epiphany, a small revelation, when a girl, or more likely a woman, glides past on a swing in the background – behind Diana and another child in the foreground of a picture taken in Rotterdam in 1989. This impression is all the stronger since there is nothing in the background of the other picture: the swing is not in the field of view. Like Van Golden’s paintings, such photographic epiphanies are attempts to save the commonplace and the transitory. The ephemeral, that which cannot be caught – or only with great difficulty, is at least implicitly present in such a pair of pictures – in the space between the images. But the “individual” photos are not self-contained either, as they are part of the series “Youth is an Art”, and this series explicitly focuses on the passage of time (of childhood).
Van Golden’s paintings appear at first glance to be more contained, more independent than the Diana photos. But ever since his exhibition in Tokyo in 1964, Van Golden has also seen his paintings as chess pieces that may be arranged in any number of new constellations and that establish diverse relations with each other. He always rearranges his works (paintings, screen prints, photos) in exhibitions and publications (in catalogues and also in this issue of CAMERA AUSTRIA) to create new associations. Various types of works can be brought together in exhibitions, for example because they match in terms of colour, or because they depict birds, or because they have something to do with Japan. The artist is constantly experimenting with new combinations: the book “Youth is an Art”, for example, is different from the exhibition of the same name. Just as Van Golden initiates a dialogue between painting and photography, he is also continuously launching his individual pieces into new constellations. As modest as they may be in number, the different combinations always show his works from new angles.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 3–14.

YILMAZ DZIEWIOR

Gregor Schneider: Bottomless

Even in the first few minutes of my meeting with Mrs Reuen, the old lady seemed to me to be rather strange. I met her on the way to see Gregor Schneider, or to be more precise, just as I was ringing at his door. Hannelore Reuen, as her full name was, opened the door and asked me into the narrow hallway of the three-storey apartment house in Unterheydener Straße in the small Lower Rhine town of Rheydt. She said she didn’t think, that Mr Schneider was at home, but I was welcome to wait in her flat for the young man – as she referred to Schneider. Quite suddenly she told me, that she had known him since he was sixteen years old. As an adolescent, just going through puberty (as she put it with a pinched, slightly disgusted expression), he had moved into the house, that she had been living in for many years. She said she remembered very well, that it had been shortly after the death of her husband when Schneider had turned up at the house at the edge of the Lower Rhine lead works. The lead works, including the house, she said, had already belonged to his parents who had had trouble finding any new tenants owing to the fact that the house was situated right next to the lead works. To begin with the young man had only dropped by to paint his large-format pictures. He had painted young girls, she said, always completely naked, it had always reminded her of a picture by Edvard Munch, that she had seen at the National Gallery in Oslo in her honeymoon. She had noticed the unpleasant combination of death and sexuality, not unusual in the work of the Norwegian painter, in Schneider’s early pictures, too. After some time, the young man had moved in proper, albeit without actually ever having arrived with a furniture van or the like. More and more often, he had taken to not leaving the house for days on end. At other times he would cart large lead panels, vast amounts of building debris, wood and other materials into the house.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 15–26.

MAREN LÜBBKE

Gottfried Bechtold / Hans Schabus

The contributions by Hans Schabus and Gottfried Bechtold follow on from their joint exhibition held at the Galerie CAMERA AUSTRIA in September 1999. The aim of the exhibition – and also of this extensive section of texts and pictures – was to present two artistic positions which, on the one hand, stand for different generations in contemporary Austrian art production – Gottfried Bechtold was born in 1947, Hans Schabus in 1970 – whereas their works are characterised by an approach to art that visualises spheres of influence and continuities.
Both follow a conception of sculpture according to which the work need not be manifested as a local entity. Rather, what is more important is the experience of space as an experience of time and the general questioning of our perception of reality and the production of different levels of reality. This approach leads to the cross-discipline use of artistic means; among other things, both artists work with the media of photography, film and video. Other reasons to invite these artists to take part in this project – in addition to their conceptual methodology – included their comparable documentary approach and their enhanced awareness of the materials they use, whose haptic qualities are always underlined in the work.
Whereas the joint exhibition focused on a few examples of directly correlated works, which also formed a starting point for the dialogue between the two artists, Bechtold and Schabus have gone their own ways in setting out their pictorial contributions, pursuing different interests and strategies

Text feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 27–42.

GOTTFRIED BECHTOLD

Artist feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 27–42.

A conversation between Gottfried Bechtold and Hans Schabus

Hans Schabus: … Someone else will have to pull the trailer now … It’s like a rucksack. What I really wanted to do was send a film through the trailer. The rear window is like real cinemascope. The projector at the front in the wall, the loading space as a cinema without any viewers (because they are out in the rain), and the rear window as the projection screen. A travelling cinema. Meanwhile, “Anton” is enough for me.

Gottfried Bechtold: Yes, the window in a car is of course great because the landscape passes by; that’s all you need for a perfectly good film.

Schabus: Being drawn away – to wherever – seemingly without any motivation. In the sense of an appendage. There is a making of “Anton” too. I recorded the process of incarnation in a Turkish garage on super 8. A festival of the makeshift: from a cut from the cab to the loading space, driving with half a car (James Bond Turkish-style), right up to the underseal. “Anton” got better and better. Later, Franz Reisecker did the music for the film, too.

Bechtold: Do you see the car as a sculpture? I always used to see the car as a sculpture, but I don’t think about it much any more. My “Betonporsche” (“Concrete Porsche”) is a kind of comment on this, in a blasphemous sense.

Schabus: Motion, acceleration and speed and – in contrast – sculpture. Static, heavy, bulky. As a sculptor you dream of a lightness and four wheels are a great help.

(…) Bechtold: Paolozzi was one of those guys who used to drive around in England in World War II jeeps, and once he wrote an article on the shape of this jeep that the Americans shot back with. And he claimed that the jeep had everything you need to move a static object, namely the right angle and the wheel. What he meant was the axis that the wheel turns around: in perfect centre and balanced. And this manifestation is important because the right angle and the wheel, beyond all electronics, are the most important components of this thing. And these are the key primal characteristics because this is the link to the Egyptian cart, for example, or other things that have been around for ages and that serve the purpose of transportation. I like the profane, banal aspect of the car. That’s also the reason why I focus on this in my work: because it isn’t really an artistic starting point. Not like a tree or a lake or a landscape. These things are so weighed down, they are almost automatically art. The car, on the other hand, seems to be bound to a particular purpose, it is utilitarian.

Schabus: A car is a perfect inward space. Every centimetre is defined and the field of action is clear-cut. Five centimetres pedal distance and easy movement of the steering-wheel make the physical effort required for movement extremely easy. From the outside, traffic is incredibly brutal and aggressive.

Bechtold: When you consider that you can do so much, go straight from 0 to 200 kph just by pushing the pedal or moving the steering-wheel, i. e. with a minimum of physical effort. That?s so extremely artificial. A former manager of Ford once wrote a pretty good piece about my works, although he found it completely absurd to take the car as an artistic motif. Experts in the car production sector often don?t realise what an incredible object they are making and they absolutely refuse to see it as art.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 43–47.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur Fotografie

Text feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 48–49.

WOLFGANG VOLLMER

Referenzen

Text feature in Camera Austria International 68/1999, pp. 50–51.