81 | 2003

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Isa Genzken: A conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans: Chicago was the first city to have skyscrapers?

Isa Genzken: Chicago was the birthplace of skyscrapers; there was a big fire once that destroyed almost all the houses – at one fell swoop – and then they started building up. That’s how the first skyscrapers came about. Earlier than in New York.

Wolfgang Tillmans: It was because they invented lifts, wasn’t it?

Isa Genzken: Yes.

Wolfgang Tillmans: I remember reading that once. OTIS invented them, I think, and that’s why there just weren’t any skyscrapers before that. But skyscrapers have always taken your fancy, haven’t they?

Isa Genzken: I was twenty-one when I first went to New York, and I was so fascinated by the architecture and glad that something like that existed and that I was able to have this visual experience that I thought to myself, this is where I want to live. To me, New York had a direct link with sculpture – that must have been it. Although at twenty-one I wasn’t a sculptress yet, I was just starting my studies and I didn’t even know what I wanted to do. New York is a city of incredible stability and solidity. And then the height of the buildings – that impressed me, like the people who always seemed a bit happier than the Germans in the street. When I came back to Germany it seemed to me that it wasn’t particularly nice, my visual surroundings – it was all so dreary. And modernism hardly features at all in Germany. Ok, there was Bauhaus and there was this and that, but modernism is practically non-existent in architecture. You can see loads of modern architecture in New York: there was the Empire State Building in the thirties, then there were the Twin Towers… I mean, the Twin Towers were extremely modern… The awful thing about architecture here is that everything, almost everything, is done in the cheapest construction style, the cheapest. They don’t make sure people use the best materials, they just use what’s cheapest. Just look at Potsdamer Platz, it’s like a piece of scenery! It’s all done so cheap, it could be in Cologne or in Tenerife… They would never allow something like that in New York, they just have an incredible sense of quality.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 81/2003, pp. 7–18.

HELMUT DRAXLER

Michael Schuster: Squaring the Circle

Michael Schuster’s new works hardly differ from his previous works with regard to their methodology. As always, they deal with the conditions of perception in terms of media, technology and everyday culture. By taking given conditions literally and with the aid of a pictorial humour aimed at “tautological” aporia, the artist thwarts subjective expectations of art. These are indeed “Szenen aus dem gleichnamigen Stück”, scenes from the play of the same name. And yet, in addition to their unusual visuality and complex forms of realisation, these new works, the “DROMBEG” (2002), the “Eibisfeld” project (2002), and the concrete boat, to be installed at the Austrian Sculpture Park to the south of Graz in spring 2003, above all exhibit multifarious references of a historical, social and art historical nature that generally ask the question as to the function of the contents of Schuster’s work.
The great difference of the three works makes it clear how Schuster modulates and varies his methods. Unlike many of the earlier works, the pictures of cameras and colour checkers, the mirrors, antennas or the installations with solar collectors, they exhibit other contents than mere self-referential ones. Yet the link between the works and thus the function of the contents cannot be derived from the contents themselves. The stone circle, the land register plan, and the concrete boat have nothing to do with each other, they do not open up any “iconographic” interpretation of the works. However, there is rooted in them a referential reservoir that becomes comparable only by dint of Schuster’s consistent methodical approach. It is always a matter of transfer and shift. Meaning arises in the process, specifically in the relation to the implementing work processes. Work on the 3D program, the work performed by the carpenters and carriers, always remain perceptible, they do not “vanish” in the artistic design. The division of work is not cancelled out by the artistic existence but rather remains symbolically legible. Schuster thus offers neither existential, authentic experiences, nor does he speak out in favour of a new functionalisation in the sense of the productivist avant-garde. As in the photographic works, he is concerned with acting in relation to conditions and production standards. As in “Fünf Minuten mit der Tour d’Autriche” (five minutes with the Tour d’Autriche) from 1981, ultimately all his works may only be apprehended by way of the artist?s attitude or stance, i.e. by understanding art as a process running parallel to modern everyday life. It is precisely the paradoxical humour of his work that makes it clear that the situations do not want to be reconciled but rather endured with all their contradictions.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 81/2003, pp. 19–30.

ANNETT BUSCH

Djibril Diop Mambéty: Let's talk about Poetry and not about Shit

Going away, coming back, staying. At certain moments, supposedly contrary movements or states may intersect, potentially bringing each other to a standstill for seconds. Like the sea. When a wave flowing back from the beach is thrown off course by the next wave. You can almost imagine the dead in the unending movements of the waves. Djibril Diop Mambéty, who people liked to call a visionary, whose films so often finished by the sea, who could answer questions concerning style, jump cuts and montage, “It’s the way I dream“ there, by the sea, is where we might well find this Djibril Diop Mambéty, who carries an angel, “Djibril”, even in his name. “I try to make the image illustrate the movement.” […]
“He was so beautiful that it scared you. […] No, but it’s true. He was the most beautiful man in Dakar. Six foot three tall, glisteningly black, with a piercing look, a very nice voice ? he had everything. He had everything it takes to please, he was an incredible lady-killer. He was a seducer and he knew it, but he was not out for banal adventure“ that was not what he was after. He was already obsessed with something else, something far more complex“ quite simply, he wanted to understand life. Because when someone starts to think about things too early, it means […]“ his life became so incredibly difficult“ […] so, once someone has an awareness, he cannot sleep any more.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 81/2003, pp. 31–34.

MAX ANNAS

Djibril Diop Mambéty: Touki Bouki

The viewer will not necessarily immediately recognise “Touki Bouki” as the linear film that it really is. A couple decides to leave a city and a country. Lacking the necessary funds, they obtain them in ways commonly regarded as illegal. Then they buy tickets for the big ship to Marseilles and fulfil their dream. Well, that oversimplifies the story somewhat, and leaves a little gap. But the principle holds. Djibril Diop Mambéty tells a very terse, simple story. The fact that some pictures have been detached from their chronological context goes to underscore the linear nature of the film. And the significance of slaughter in the starting sequence.
The abattoir scene plays a role again at the end of the film. Anta and Mory have separated on the gangway. Mory just could not manage to walk on board the ship. On deck, white figures are talking about “those ungrateful Africans”, concluding that “Ils sont de grands enfants …” The film cuts to the abattoir. Of course, this can be taken as a reference to the difficult relationship between colonisers and colonised, as the film scholar Frank Ukadike does. But herein also lies the realisation that people opt for the hell they know. Mory shrinks back from faraway places that he has idealised. Or he fulfils a programmatic “take care of Africa” that Mambéty could have insinuated to his protagonist.
“Touki Bouki” is the tangible attempt to make the greatest film the world has ever seen. A goal, in fact, that every genuine piece of art must fulfil, to be important and genuine and significant, also when negating this stance. In his radical way, after his third film Djibril Diop Mambéty had made his final contribution to cinema, as emphatically and unforgettably as Jean Vigo had done forty years previously. “Touki Bouki” still gives the impression of being a vision on the horizon. Barely tangible. Ever renewing itself. Larger than life. As a phase of convalescence following an all-out act of creation, the sixteen filmless years that were to follow appear relatively brief.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 81/2003, pp. 36–40.

SAUL ALBERT

Vuk Ćosić: History of Art for the Intelligence Community

The website presents five images, immediately recognisable from art postcards. Andrea Mantegna’s “St. Sebastian”, Cézanne’s “Still Life with Plate of Cherries”, Van Gogh’s “The Night Café”, Malevich’s “Black Square” and Warhol’s “Campbell”s Soup Can”. Good, standard art historical subjects that representationally depict the subject of their titles. But what is this? St. Sebastian’s arrows are misbehaving. There’s one bloodily piercing his head, no, his leg, no – his head again. Clearly, a user manual is required.
A careful reading of the accompanying texts reveals the unlikely explanation that the number of arrows in St. Sebastian and the location of the entry wounds correspond to the frequency of letters of the alphabet in web addresses entered into browsers by users of the computer network of the Neue Galerie and the Medienturm in Graz.1 The other images are similarly deviant. Malevich’s square waxes and wanes depending on the time of day, Cézanne’s perspectivally distorted nature morte mischievously refuses to be “mort”: cherries appear and disappear from the table as emails are sent and received by the gallery office staff as they organise the next exhibition. Though this may sound like some kind of insane techno-numerological experiment to uncover hidden divine messages in masterpieces of western art, it is in fact the latest masterpiece by Vuk Cosic, net.artist extraordinaire. […]
Cosic’s re-reuse of the familiar canon of art history as GUI is well aware of this dynamic. Many artists working with these technologies have attempted to problematise the GUI. The ubiquitous metaphors of “files” “folders” and the “desktop” as well as the two dimensional “page” metaphor of the web have provided net artists and software artists with a rich resource of aesthetic-cultural assumptions to be subverted, destabilised and critiqued. Whereas many of these efforts have intervened in the user’s experience of software with aesthetic shock tactics (browsers crashing, lights flashing, counter-intuitive and unpredictable systems), Cosic presents a calm, decorative and superficially unchallenging interface.
“Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data.” Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information is the bible of computer interface design. On one level, Cosic’s interfaces follow these rules. The animations of the images are extremely simple and, once the system is explained, it can be argued that fluctuations in brightness and contrast of Malevich’s “Black Square” make a very neat clock. However, on another level, the data is both simple and trivial: numbers of incoming and outgoing emails could be adequately represented by a two column table. By choosing a graphically, historically and contextually complex painting to display this data, Cosic completely inverts Tufte’s rules.
Rather than obscuring the apolitical in technical mumbo-jumbo and hyperbole, Cosic willingly submits the viewer to aesthetic distraction. After all, why not provide the leisure-seeking FBI agents with a more pleasant visual index of the surveilled subject? He is presenting us with a more socially acceptable spectacle of surveillance; a high brow version of the popular TV series “Big Brother”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 81/2003, pp. 41–46.

KRYSTIAN WOZNICKI

Aesthetics of Globalisation

Text feature in Camera Austria International 81/2003, pp. 66–67.