82 | 2003

FRIEDRICH TIETJEN

"You can't escape relating back to facts" Interview with Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall has become well-known since the end of the seventies particularly for his expansive light boxes; his black and white photos are more rarely the focus of attention, and his sculptural and performance works are less well-known still (cf. Camera Austria 77/2002, p. 83). His interest in concrete, factual aspects was characteristic of his work even before he finished his “Fight Against Photography”: although he did not fundamentally challenge the ordainments of artistic photography with his pictures of “Destroyed Room” (1979) up to “Vampires’ Picnic” (1991), the in some cases extraordinarily artificially constructed motifs did push photography to its limits. Wall has been increasingly distancing himself from this goal since the beginning of the nineties, concentrating instead on making adequate use of the possibilities presented by the medium. In the case of photography this is its depictive capacity, the quintessential element of his works. He equally emphasises the materiality of his works, the objectness of the medium. Thus arise two views as two different relations to the factual: while the generally large format of the works ensures that their objectivity is conspicuous particularly from a distance, in combination with the life-size scale of the protagonists the artist causes real and picture space to blend from up close. Closer still, we recognise what Wall means elsewhere by “the radical invisibility of the surface”: although the illusionism of the pictures diminishes, their material base does not come to fore, as is usually the case with paintings, for example: The image does not become visible on the surface but rather appears at an indeterminate depth. The reference to the realm of the factual also impacts on the choice of subjects. The fact that practically all of Wall’s photographs to date are enacted, constructed or both does not contradict this. Instead of the authenticity of depiction ascribed to photography, his pictures refer to the veracity of seeing.

Friedrich Tietjen: I have the impression that in doing so you are following different strategies: on the one hand there are the arranged and composed images that have a snapshot-appearance such as “Man with a Rifle”; on the other there are still-life pictures like “Some Beans” and “An Octopus”. To me these seem to be two different ways of approaching truthfulness in photography.

Jeff Wall: I think that no matter how you construct any photo you’re always working with this inevitable factuality, you can’t escape relating back to facts. If you make a picture based on an imaginary occurrence (like I have done), you still have to bring actual things into the place where the camera is to photograph them and then manipulate them. I don’t think that photography can ever escape that condition, and so my interest is just to work in relationship to it.

Friedrich Tietjen: But photography often denies its own factuality: photography is not being made present in the photograph but as absent as possible – or at least there?s some sort of flickering.

Jeff Wall: That’s interesting. The idea of modernism in painting was to bring the surface into view as a surface, to counteract the illusionism which was seen to be in some ways only the outcome of the surface. I think you can look at photography in a similar way, but since it is not painting there are differences. When you attempt to perceive the photographic surface in the way you do with painting, you find that the surface is invisible. I call it a radical invisibility of the surface. But our sense of modernism in photography is still related to the relation between surface and illusion. It’s just that the surface photography is dealing with is an invisible one.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 82/2003, pp. 7–18.

HILDEGUND AMANSHAUSER

Interview with Ene-Liis Semper

Hildegund Amanshauser: Your international breakthrough was in 2000 at the Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana with your piece “FF / REW” (1998). It is a black and white video in which a woman, represented by yourself, kills herself in two different ways (shooting and hanging). After she has succeeded, the film is played backwards again. How did you perceive the context of this exhibition for yourself and your work?

Ene-Liis Semper: As the video “FF / REW” was already a couple of years old by then, I was actually not expecting to achieve a breakthrough at Manifesta. I would surely have felt better if the curator, Maria Hlavajova, had commissioned a new piece from me. But Maria was sure that this was the piece she needed. To my great surprise, the responses were very positive. Thanks to Maria.

Hildegund Amanshauser: For several years, you were more or less the only figure in your video works. How do they relate to your performances?

Ene-Liis Semper: There is no direct or systematic link between them. I have done several performances but I did them outside of what could be called »the main line of development« in my video work, and I have not done performances as consistently as videos. I have performed in my videos myself as it would probably be very inconvenient for someone else to fulfil my extreme demands. And besides, I have never really liked the idea of being violent with someone else.

Hildegund Amanshauser: These works have a lot to do with borderline experiences like pain, loneliness, despair, being tortured etc. Do you see a correspondence with the feminist art of the 60s and 70s, like Gina Pane or Valie Export?

Ene-Liis Semper: No, not really. I don’t feel very connected to that generation of feminist work. I had no awareness of that kind of work during the years of my development. And besides, I am very much afraid that certain images of violence are more often treated with a unifying approach than other kinds of images. Violent imagery demands quick explanations, and this can lead to deceptive conclusions. Indeed, it seems a little perverse to distinguish all the fine nuances and degrees of “the sense of being tortured”. But I think we have to be more specific and more distinctive in these matters. If you start to ask more specific questions about how and why I work and about the context from which I come, the illusion of correspondence falls apart.

Hildegund Amanshauser: Tell me, what would be the right questions to ask in order to find out how and why you work and from what context you come?

Ene-Liis Semper: It’s quite hard to explain how I work, and I really do not like to describe all the “secret” meanings behind each work. Let’s say that I am trying to awaken subconscious memories about everybody’s human experience of being here and now, as my ideas arise from my own thoughts and convictions and I do believe that, on the deepest level, the viewer could feel the same

Text feature in Camera Austria International 82/2003, pp. 19–30.

RIKE FRANK

Narrating the projection ... Interview with Dorit Margreiter

When one thinks of Dorit Margreiter’s work, one thinks about architecture and gender, modernist ideals and everyday culture, real places and places of fiction located in between city and television, and institutional criticism in the broader sense. In her spatial and video installations, the artist has, in recent years, persistently dealt with current theoretical discourses and conceptual issues that investigate an artistic practice. The choice of formats and the spatial compositions allude to everyday narrative forms, for example soaps or documentary interviews, in addition to historical, architectural models of space, including Friedrich Kiesler’s TL structure. At first glance, these forms seem to act as stages in order to talk about such not inherently artistic issues as gender positions, identity constructions, migration, urbanism or the mediatisation of social spaces within a defined setting.

Dorit Margreiter: photographs rarely appear as individual photographs; they either document an installation situation, a specific recording process, or they are part of an installation narrative. But the photo is rarely an autonomous, single picture.

Rike Frank: What kind of photography do you use in your work?

Dorit Margreiter: In many cases, for example in “Case Study House”, I use digital photography because the medium describes exactly what I am interested in – film narrative or the description of a video sequence. Unlike conventional exposure, the make-up of the image in digital photography is identical to that of digital video, only with a higher resolution. The result is a similar picture space. Digital photography creates a completely flat picture space, i.e. features like depth of field play a totally different role and are practically impossible to create. And that is precisely what interests me in connection with architectural photography: to create two-dimensionality through the means of the composition of the picture itself. By dint of the flat composition of the picture, the process of transporting architecture into two dimensions becomes the subject at a different level.

Rike Frank: You speak about using one medium to reflect about another medium, and that digital photography lends itself to exploring aspects of film or videography, motion in pictures. Can you explain that in more detail referring to the “Von Material zu Film” (From Material to Film) series?

Dorit Margreiter: This is a series of two pictures next to each other in one frame. Each piece consists of two photographs and outlines a pan or a cut or a zoom. I am interested in precisely these simple camera movements. It is as if a ficticious film is slowed down until only two frames of twenty-four per second can be seen. The series shows places that could be film locations. This constellation makes it unclear whether the people you see are passers-by, walking through the picture by chance, or whether the setting is staged. In some cases they are places that operate with this meta-enactment or on the basis of fiction, for example the Urban Entertainment Center “Citywalk” in Los Angeles or the theme park “California Adventure” in Anaheim. In some cases they are architectural icons that were used as film sets after they had become landmarks, e.g. the “TWA Building” in New York, or they are places that might well be film sets one day.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 82/2003, pp. 31–42.

MICHAEL HALL

"No attempts have been made to conceal the process of the construction ..." Interview with Clegg & Guttmann

Most recently the work of Clegg & Guttmann has shifted focus to discuss the themes of music, philosophy and politics of the early 1900’s in order to establish a community of shared experience with the early modernists, going beyond specific questions of form, giving voice to a sense of historical continuity. In their view “the modernists tried to give form to the same set of conditions as the ones which define our own world, namely, the condition of permanent change, of dissonance, of discontinuity and of a lack of sufficient reason”
In light of our culture’s accelerated desire to consume nostalgia, it is difficult not to see modernism as an “ancient modernity”, a place where the future and the past are constant.
Presently, we find ourselves in an indefinite state of hyper-realism, regardless if we are watching a Hollywood film, CNN or surfing the internet, representation along with our contemporary reality is constantly put through a cut-and-paste job to construct the desired answer or product message. So, if reality and / or truth has already broken down, can we put it back together again into a new form? If so, then the question is whether the necessary tools for rebuilding or at least restarting the radical impulse of modernity have been here all along. Therefore, the question arises: can the avant-gardist’s procedure of collage adapted by Clegg & Guttmann adequately describe our contemporary condition or is it an antique process in which to view modernity in its inherently fragmented and discontinuous modes.

Michael Hall: At present there seems to be a resurgence of works (or interest in works) which have “modernist” qualities, but they cannot be easily categorised as traditionally modern and they don?t utilise the necessary strategies to be considered what we understand as post-modernist, in historical terms. What I am trying to say is that the works are not functioning on an intertextual level. When looking at your new collages and sculptures, one has the feeling that one has seen this work before, but you can never name it exactly. It’s quotation without the quotation marks, so to speak. It’s using very traditional languages and methodologies but trying to provoke something new. Would you agree with this interpretation and is this an approach that you are utilising?

Clegg & Guttmann: The sculptures have a strange presence, that eerie feeling that you describe of seeing something old and new at the same time, looking at a work that possibly could have been produced at any time in the twentieth century. It is part of our accelerated nostalgia for the immediate past, of seeing something that could have been made even by another artist but wasn’t, or a sense of discovery and simultaneous alienation. What you call “quotation without quotation marks” is also applicable to how our »representation of power« portraits looked in the early eighties – partially familiar in image and pose and at the same time new and different.

Michael Hall: So, is it about creating new hybrid forms. Your working methodologies as artists have traditionally been utilised much more like the “Social Sciences” which tend to fuse multiple concepts or areas of specialisation to find single answers. Do you think we are moving towards a re-convergence of disciplines or do you see continued forms of specialisation and hence additional fragmentation? Of course, specialisation has always been an outgrowth of capitalism.

Clegg & Guttmann: When we assess the legacy of the avant-garde, when we try to understand better the ideas behind the method of “Decomposition – Reconstitution”, in general, and the technique of papier collé and the meaning of atonal music, in particular, we must see them in their historical context. We must train ourselves to see the horrors of the war and the brutal methods of the fascists, behind the playful and imaginative collages of the Dadaists and the refined other-worldly music of Schönberg and his followers. We must build a new system of historical co-ordinates in order to connect the confusing reality of the present with earlier episodes of modern history. Without an awareness of these connections we are bound to repeat the same mistakes and fail to read the flashing signs of danger. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in the present period, recent history can teach us the most profound lessons we can hope to learn. Such lessons are needed not only in order to understand the meaning and the modus operandi of artworks but, more broadly, how to respond to the contemporary reality. We must, however, construct the conditions that make such learning possible. We should brush aside the purely formal concerns and see culture in its relation to other aspects of life. We should train ourselves to recognise the sweet narcotic odour of escapism and identify it when it emanates from the canvases of contemporary artists. We have to be able to distinguish art whose purpose is to facilitate escape from art which aspires to interpret reality and articulate it. In short, we should break down the boundaries between art and life and see inart an activity which takes place in the same world where war and destruction take their toll. The project in this show is an attempt to create a condition which will enable the viewer to reflect on cultural activities when they intersect with the violence and war. It is a process of historical co-organisation which should make it possible to comprehend the work of art as it inhabits a larger context than the purely artistic one. It is not suppose to belittle art or “cut it to size”. Quite the contrary, it is a song in praise of art which sets for itself the goal of articulating reality and fight against the dominant world-picture. For this purpose it is a highly effective tool; it was proven again and again that artists who are dedicated can help to free us of the grip of ideology and prepare us for the next stage, namely, the transformation of reality.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 82/2003, pp. 43–48.

KRYSTIAN WOZNICKI

Aesthetics of Globalisation

Text feature in Camera Austria International 82/2003, pp. 74–75.