90 | 2005

ANDREAS REITER RAABE

Interview with Daniel Buren

A. R.: In Lyotard’s book on your work, where there were a lot of photographs of your installations, there was also one photograph by an unknown photographer: a coloured bird. The reason you gave for using that photograph was that, similar to the photo souvenir, a photograph of the work is as far removed from the actual work as the bird is from the actual, living bird. But isn’t photography always already something else?

D. B.: Even if I still think like this about my work, you have to see that in the late 60s to do a work like mine was something really unusual; so much so that if you wanted to use a photograph in a magazine, people would ask me to do something – a photo of something done in the street as a collage – which usually meant that they were saying: where is the work? So I had to explain, that the photo is a souvenir of the work, the work is – somewhere in the picture, but it’s part of the whole thing, only that the photo frames the act – I think I was one of the few, if not the only one, to work in an urban context. At the same time you had other artists of the same generation (much more famous ones) who were working in the desert, the fields or the mountains etc., and they were using the picture, the photograph, not only as a document of their work, but as a work on their work, which for me is very different. These artists were doing work that was extremely hard if not totally impossible to sell. So they took large photographs, small photographs, framed photographs etc., and these were their goods of exchange, and I immediately thought, without taking any kind of moralistic position, that if this continues, after a while the real work will be completely overwhelmed by the picture and the work will actually be the picture. You can see this even today, and so I thought it would not be absurd to refuse to sell another thing – a decision I disliked even more. But I also didn’t want to create a mythical aspect, so I thought that I needed a photograph to prove that I’d done certain things which had sometimes appeared for no more than two hours. But it is hard to be very clear about the fact that these photos are not works of art. They come from a work of art and it is in order to stress this point that I used the term photo souvenir, which means almost for everyone either a postcard or the photo of your grandparents. That is to say, there is no confusion, no one will mistake the portrait of their grandmother for their grandmother. So I used that term on that basis and I’m still totally convinced that it’s important to say that; and of course I never sold any pictures except for my postcards …

Text feature in Camera Austria International 90/2005, pp. 10–24.

HILDEGUND AMANSHAUSER

"Blak lik mi". Interview with Destiny Deacon

H.A.: The political aspect of your work seems to be very important to me; your works can be read within the feminist or post colonial discourse, how would you describe the significance of these topics within your artistic production

D.D.: I suppose I am stuck with the categories of feminism and post colonial discourse because it always has been and always will be that way of life for me. I have never had a choice. Sometimes I wish I could be another category. The topics are normal to me because they are universal.

H.A.: Let’s deal with your photographs. You normally shoot Polaroids and then produce light jet prints in different sizes, depending on the exhibition venue. You take a very simple and little elaborate technique perhaps even brutal, brutal as the topics you often choose. With the exhibiting versions of the photographs do you accept the rules of the international art world?

D.D.: I didn’t know there were any “rules” in “the international art world”. What you see is what you get, no matter where it gets exhibited. It’s important that an image looks okay and that people can get some feeling or understanding out from it. I’m surprised you use the word »brutal«. I put a laugh and a tear in each picture.

H.A.: Your photographs are often concerned with the living conditions of Aboriginal Australians, instead of photographing »real« people you usually take dolls, Aboriginal dolls, which are produced for white children or tourists.

D.D.: Yes I play with the sad and bad realities of life, trying to be positive and tough at the same time. I have no love for dolls, but I have been collecting Aboriginal and blak dolls since the 1970s. Mainly second-hand ones from markets that I feel sorry for and need to rescue. Now other people – family and friends – often collect them for me too. A lot of white Australians see my people as flora, fauna, and objects of history. When I photograph a doll it must look alive to tell a story. An object of representation. Usually these pictures are taken in my living room or backyard. The people I use are family and friends, i.e. whoever is agreeable to pose at short notice. I use dolls and people for the same purpose, as models to get a message across. Anyway, at least the dolls never tell me to hurry up or shut up.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 90/2005, 25–36.

NATASA ILIC

Sanja Iveković: Teaching Private Politics

Since the early 1970s, Sanja Ivekovic has been interested in the political contents of privacy from the perspective of feminist critique. Whether engaged in performances, videos, installations, actions in public spaces, media or activist projects, the artist has always transposed a wide range of personal themes to public or media spaces, and in doing so emphasised their political potential and social impact. Her works explore the crisis zones of regimes of representation and the ideological positions underlying them. By showing the political uses of visual representations which had previously seemed ideologically inert, with the purpose of not only politicising and changing mediated visualisations of gender, but also with the purpose of changing viewers’ behaviour, the artist makes use of pictures to dramatise and teach private politics.
Her works from the 70s are about the specific effects of media in socialist Yugoslavia. This fact is important not only because since the beginning she has taken account of the differences feminism in the specific circumstances of the socialist regime and thus negated the universal essentialist quality of the woman’s view, but also because she exposes procedures involved in the production of differences, inclusion and exclusion, in a regime that laid claim to the »universal truth« of rights attained for the working class. In this regard, the works of Sanja Ivekovic are about the points of intersection at which individual identity gets caught in the net of differences produced by each social order in a specific way. These works are as much a critique of socialism as a social order of attained human rights – human rights being equated with workers’ rights – as they are also about identity confusion caused by media overflow, which blurs the differences between reality and its mediation.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 90/2005, 37–49.

SHAHEEN MERALI

Peter Riedlinger: Before the wall

In 2001/02, at the time of his second visit to the city of Jerusalem, Peter Riedlinger ran a photographic workshop for Palestinian youths under the umbrella of the Al-Mammal Foundation for Contemporary Arts. During this period Riedlinger continued to pursue his own photographic work and – further encouraged by the director of the foundation, Jack Persekian – started to record the dramatic changes to be seen on the outskirts of the city, known as Greater Jerusalem. The recorded changes included an increase in the number of roadblocks, the duplication of checkpoints, never ending and unnecessary road constructions, general closures and settlement construction which, in total, provided the organic physical material out of which Greater Jerusalem was built.
What emerges from this series of images is a study about Israel as a state and as a country in formation. With his Camera, Riedlinger systematically examines the architectural concept of settlement and investigates the territory, revealing it to be divided, invaded and thoroughly under construction. In doing so Riedlinger also manages to give the viewer an understanding of the constraining factors for dialogue, which start with the political and military conflict compounded by decades of psychological barriers. The battle for land and mobility within this land are inscribed in these images as a subtext that allows the viewer to realise the institutional screening and intimidation of the ethnic other, the Palestinian.
In their straight documentary manner, Riedlinger’s images do not only contribute to the understanding of a traumatised state but also provide some insight into the history of the making of Israel and its “territories”. His photographs are governed by the political will to bear witness while simultaneously refraining from judgmental commentary.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 90/2005, 50–55.

TOM HOLERT

Mass Media Acts (3)

On Visual Programming of the Political Space: Sea of Colors And Flags

Tbilissi, Kiev, Beirut, Bishkek: whatever these names mean today, or what changes they symbolise in historical retrospection, the latest series of “revolutions” and changes of government have also given rise to specific images of the political sphere. The images are neither completely new nor completely anachronistic; they add new combinations of familiar components to the concept of symbolic politics and the notions of visually activated spaces. That is to say, by using the established political iconography of opposition and the moving crowd, the oppositions in Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon and Kirgisia both modified and modernised this iconography. The “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, for example, with their winter tent camps and clever colour branding, deployed images of the patient, dogged and above all numerous opponents of the old, Putin-friendly regime. The low temperatures contrasted nicely with the warm orange of the scarves and flags. This sight (of themselves) was presented to the persevering crowd on big screens showing the orange-inundated revolutionary programme of the opposition-friendly Channel 5. In this way, the freezing bodies of the demonstrators were not only fed by US-funded rationing logistics, they were also symbolically warmed inside and out, as it were, by the warmth of the new colour.
The television, Internet and press images from Kiev demonstrate how the choice of a colour came to replace the usual logo design on such occasions. Of course there were slogans on banners and orange flags, accompanied by the omnipresent picture of opposition leader Viktor Juschtschenko, marked by the ravages of his ominous illness/poisoning. But there was no logo like the hammer and sickle of old on the – colour-related – red flag or, in the recent history of revolution branding, the clenched fist of the Serb student organisation OTPOR. Instead, the hue of the “Orange Revolution” coloured the images of the mass demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital in a strangely vague and yet subtly penetrating way, as if the crowd was floating on a vast sea of colour. It was reminiscent of mass colour choreographies of totalitarian regimes. Or of the post-totalitarian enactments of nationhood at sports events. Orange – as the fans of the Dutch national football team have been testing in exemplary mass-media acts in front of colour television cameras for decades – lends itself exceptionally well to the “bodiless” (Deleuze/Guattari) metamorphosis of a large number of people into a single Oranje block of emotion.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 90/2005, 72–73.