JAN VERWOERT

Bas Jan Ader: The Conceptuality of the Grand Emotions

Bas Jan Ader cries. In close-up. For a single long shot in his 16mm silent film “I’m Too Sad To Tell You” (1970). His crying is not like a sudden emotional outburst. Rather, it creates the impression that he is tormented by some profound grief. A feeling of mourning that is not simply released but which persists: an elementary emotional state – not just a momentary stir of emotion. Ader uses expressive gestures and facial expressions to display this emotional state: he screws up his face, clenches his teeth, closes his eyes, his eyelids tremble, he tears his hair and brushes his tongue over his lips. He lowers his head and holds it in his hands. For a moment he fights back the tears, and then they course down his cheeks once more. Ader does not explain why he is crying. Rather, in the title “I’m Too Sad To Tell You”, he expressly tells us of his intention to withhold the reason for his sadness. The only thing he shows is his facial expressions. Lacking any psychological motives, there is no way to interpret his behaviour. Formally, then, his show of emotions is clearly defined, while, in substance, it is intentionally undefined. This formalisation lends the film what is almost the feel of a detached behaviourist study: it presents examples of facial expressions and gestures used by people to indicate that they are sad. Nevertheless, the show of emotion is distressing. His crying is moving. Ader’s sadness is convincing. (…)
This aesthetics of a strictly formalised portrayal of emotion runs like a thread through Ader’s oeuvre. The photographic work “All My Clothes” (1970), for instance, shows Ader’s house in California, numerous garments strewn across the roof – as if they had fallen from the sky. Exhibiting one’s own clothes like this, as if they were the last traces of someone who has mysteriously disappeared, is again a highly emotional and yet, at the same time, an extremely clear and simple way of depicting a loss that cannot be described in greater detail. The photographic work “Farewell To Faraway Friends” (1971) also conveys a similarly intense sense of melancholy: against the backdrop of a wonderful sunset, Ader poses lonely on the shore of a Scandinavian fjord – in true Caspar David Friedrich style. The photo displays its sentimental effect 1:1, but at the same time, it can also be seen as a reproduction of a standard motif of romantic sentimentality (not to say as a conventional kitschy postcard).
Unexpectedly, the intensity of the effect of the image and the fabricated make-up of the image language are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary – because Ader conceptually reduces his image language to simple forms or common media stereotypes, his works are immediately accessible. An accessibility of emotional address that usually only works in films or novels because of their narrative structure. Ader’s works, in contrast, (or at least the majority of them) neither tell a story nor do they describe the psychological development of an individual. They accomplish their emotional effect solely by means of the isolated portrayal of a superpersonal emotional state – the idea or concept of an emotion.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 71/2000, pp. 3–14.

HEIKE MUNDER

Yayoi Kusama: Body and Representation Strategies

There have always been artists in history who belong to the group of so-called artist-artists. What this refers to is positions that fulfil an important function in the art discourse, particularly for subsequent generations of art producers, and which thus set an “example”. Exponents of such positions include Paul Thek and John Miller, Eva Hesse or Mary Beth Edelson – and equally the Japanese-born Yayoi Kusama. She lived in New York from 1958 to the early seventies – today she is living in Tokyo once again – working there in/with different media, ranging from painting, installations and happenings to fashion and literature. Both in terms of form and content, the results of her work testify to an exploration of issues which were not to become relevant to the discourse until much later, both in inherent contexts of art production and in terms of art-historical reception.
Kusama is above all a pioneer in the world of art as she began investigating into gender-specific issues at a very early stage. Kusama broached the sexualisation of everyday life and the emotional tensions this entailed. She adapted subjects such as sexuality or bulimia which were not discussed in public, but which have now become firmly entrenched in the vocabulary of many artists. As a result of gender and postcolonial studies, the contemporary reception of art has found new premises of evaluation, whereas reception in the 60s and 70s was prevalently strictly formal and whose dictum was not overcome until feminist theories were incorporated – however hesitantly – into the repertoire of methods of art history.
However, Kusama’s approach to certain issues of art, also in terms of content, became apparent before the conclusive advent of feminist work methods, both in theory and in the production of art. With this in mind, it is small wonder that Kusama belongs to the generation of artists who, in the heyday of their production in the sixties and early seventies, were subject to a very one-sided reception, at a time in which the necessary vocabulary had not yet been developed. Reception via the psyche was an essential constitutive element of the way in which people received the works of female artists who did not fit into the formal dogma. This interpretation lingered long in the classical perception of art history and, in many cases, is still adopted today without due reflection when people not only cater to the formal dogma once again but, what is more, make the typical psychologising allocations above all displayed towards female artists, allocations which are also often used to carry Kusama’s alleged mental weakness into the debate about her work. Works such as Kusama’s are interpreted by way of all diagnoses and cases of psychosomatic disorders most often manifested in neuroses, hysteria and obsessions. This one-sided critique depreciates the works as it negates an autonomous, responsible practice.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 71/2000, pp. 15–26.

MARTIN PRINZHORN

Dean Sameshima: Conceptualism with a Splash of Cranberry. Full and empty, public and private

When I first met Dean Sameshima a few years ago, he had just finished a cycle of photos depicting various gay meets in Los Angeles. These semi-legal spots, scattered around the city, are not indicated in any way, and only exist as points on a map in visitors’ memories. Sameshima had gone back there during the day when they were deserted, just locked doors and empty rooms. Even without any description, these works are more than just post-conceptual photography, not just a clever trick, a fragmentation of the world that is merely based on a strategy of breaking and cutting off. But nor do they express a simple yearning for something past or unfulfilled in the psychological sense, there is something perfectly natural, almost affirmative, about non-existence in this case, something that yields no space for any legend. Elsewhere, emptiness is often heavily laden, because what it really implies is something that is missing, thus symbolising a yearning in the purely romantic sense. Although there is a yearning in Sameshima’s works, it is not of the kind that can be satisfied by mere filling up. In this context defined via emotions, it is interesting to ask whether the people portrayed in the more recent works shown here are actually present and represented and thus whether they can be easily incorporated into a system of creating and fulfilling yearning, hence conforming to the usual conditions of portraying bodies, faces and the related narratives.
In American photography of the past ten to fifteen years in particular, there has been a kind of fascination with representing human figures and portraits which is, however, also seen as undermining the genre. Where some time ago the hegemonic status of the panel painting and painting in general took place, today it is a matter of focusing on and exploring the repressive power (specifically) of the photographic portrait. At exactly the same time painting largely stopped devoting itself to this issue, it was adopted by photography. The realisation that the genre influences and controls the reception of corporeality in what is actually a creating sense is of key importance in this context. Many works particularly challenge some purported reality or authenticity, dealing with these issues with a wide range of instruments such as masquerade, falsified historical reference or representation of “subcultural” bodies. The field is problematic in that in many instances it is unclear whether the intended criticism and subversion are not immediately deployed as an actor on the stage of the middle-class spectacle, thus merely playing a role in the current successful piece called “Sensations”. If photography enters the realm of marked contents and contents felt to be deviant, it often induces a voyeuristic moment, merely pretending to grant insights into another world, which ultimately boils down to a manifestation of the critically analysed conditions, just under different circumstances. (…)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 71/2000, pp. 27–38.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur Fotografie

Text feature in Camera Austria International 71/2000, pp. 39–40.

MICHAEL WETZEL

Obsessionen des Makellosen II: Künstlerische Kindheit. Lewis Caroll und die “Liebhaber” der kleinen Mädchen

Text feature in Camera Austria International 71/2000, pp. 41–42.