98 | 2007

ARNO VAN ROOSMALEN

Călin Dan: Emotional Architecture

(…) Calin Dan (1955, Arad, Romania) received an MA in art history and theory, but has developed his work in a number of disciplines; not only as a theorist and a historian, but predominantly as a visual artist, curator and cultural critic. Given the complicated and difficult circumstances under the Ceaus¸escu regime, he managed to achieve a reputation in art circles for his activities as an art historian and journalist. In 1992, soon after the revolution of December 1989, he was appointed Director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art Bucharest. This contributed to his iconic position as one of the father figures of contemporary art in Romania. By establishing himself in Amsterdam in 1996 he shook off this unintended patriarchal role vis-à-vis the younger generation of Romanian artists. At that time he displayed a strong interest in media art, focussing on multi-media installations, multi-user environments and media theory, both as an artist and as curator and critic.
“The more distance I get from Romania, the more I am interested in it”, he wrote in 2000. This interest was not only motivated by coming to terms with the complexity of his personal past, but also by the conviction “that local circumstances considered, each and every different country in Eastern Europe is a very interesting lab of the future”. Parallel to his intellectual and emotional re-approach to Romania, more precisely to the pivotal site of the House of the People in Bucharest, he articulated his interest in architecture and the urban environment and developed the conceptual framework embedded in the notion of “emotional architecture”. The resulting work is an original blend of personal observations, folklore, historical facts and architectural analysis. (…)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 98/2007, pp. 12–23.

WOLFGANG BRÜCKLE

Timm Rautert: A Conversation about "Deutsche in Uniform" and Other Fields of Work

For decades, the photographer Timm Rautert, whose work is currently travelling in a retrospective across Germany, engaged above all in documentary photography and photojournalism, gaining fame as a photojournalist with a wide audience particularly thanks to critical reports for Zeit magazine, that he created together with Michael Holzach. His keen eye for areas of social life and production that are driven out of the public eye are characteristic of this and other Rautert projects; the subtitle of a more recent project from 1995 could in fact head the majority of his works: “Excursions to the unknown society in which we live”. As of 1968, this field of professional activity was joined by his experimental “Bildanalytische Fotografie” (picture-analytical photography) and – among other things – the “Deutsche in Uniform” (Germans in uniform) project in 1974 to 1975, a few examples of which are depicted below. The series, a freelance piece that takes an unusual angle on a particular tradition of German documentary photography, consists of a total of thirty-three photos. In 1975, the Zeit magazine published some examples based on a black-and-white version that Rautert had created at the same time. He took most of the photos with a medium-format camera at his then studio in Dusseldorf. Preparation for the first complete publication in book form (by the Steidl publishers at the beginning of 2007) gave rise to this conversation in May 2006.

THE HUMAN BEING: APPEARANCE AND DISAPPEARANCE

Wolfgang Brückle: Mr Rautert, you took the photos for “Deutsche in Uniform” in 1974. This series of portraits is now being published en bloc in print for the first time. After a good thirty years that have now passed since then, the impression may arise that these pictures of professionals are a by-product of your reportage about “The Last of their Trade” (“Die Letzten ihrer Zunft”), that was created around the same time and in which you report on dying professions. They may almost be seen as a collection of rare butterflies, for one thing of course because of the now antiquated fashion. Did you anticipate this back then?

Timm Rautert: No nostalgic penchant was involved at that time. Incidentally, I do not see it as a by-product, as it differs in terms of the working method. My piece about “The Last of their Trade”, that I did shortly afterwards, was a series, not a reportage. The aim was to create a basis for comparison, in that respect something similar to what I intended to achieve with the uniform work: I wanted the documentation of a profession, that I created precisely not in work situations, to lead to an image of the person. I was interested in the individual that could not disappear in the masses with his special activity. That is the difference to people in uniform, who can hide as individuals. The dying professions did not develop any types. But I also wanted the uniformed people to appear as individual persons: I was hoping that the particularity that the uniform creates for the wearer would come to the fore. And the people actually did present themselves accordingly. So I could definitely emphasise the individual people in this way, too.(…)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 98/2007, pp. 24–37.

BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN

Susan Silas: On "Helmbrechts walk"

Susan Silas’s “Helmbrechts walk, 1998 – 2003” captures a melancholy landscape: fog, grey, dismal towns, sorry forests, empty roads, rust-caked train tracks leading nowhere. I have often wondered how I would read Silas’s powerful images if I did not already know, before looking, that they record the path of a death march taken in the spring of 1945 by 580 Jewish women from many places in occupied Europe. Fifty-three years after the event, Silas, with a camera, retraced these women’s steps. “Helmbrechts walk”, an unbound artist’s book of 48 plates, tells the story of these 22 days via pairs of images, one pair representing each day, framed by an epilogue and a map. Silas juxtaposes the story of the march with gripping, violent news accounts from the same period in 1998 to create a multi-layered analysis of the wreckage of twentieth century history. By entering the landscape where hundreds of women walked, Silas inserts a living Jewess into the woods where historically Jews were seen, in their urban, wandering, stereotypical guises, as anathema. Silas’s art exposes violence, fights amnesia, insists on the presence of the past, demands memorialisation, and re-appropriates the landscape tradition; she teaches us about this death march while grappling with the marchers traumatic experiences. (…)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 98/2007, pp. 38-49.

KIRSTY BELL

Christine Würmell

The emphasis on the simultaneous emptiness of images, and their multiple, coexistent, contradictory meanings, lends Würmell’s work a complexity not always apparent at first glance. She is an avid reader of her immediate public landscape, be it the city environment around her with its patchwork of architecture, advertising and graffiti, or the landscapes of the media or internet. Hers is not an anthropological investigation, however. She concentrates not on figures in the landscape, or the actual activities of social groups, but rather on the remnants of their actions; the images they leave behind. She follows these tracks closely to map out their various possible meanings or construe connections between unrelated cultural or aesthetic phenomena.
The accumulation of contradictory, overlapping systems of reference and interpretation reaches critical mass in Würmell’s installation “Who’s afraid of Magenta, Yellow and Blue?” (2006). The numerous assembled elements here present evidence of advertising and graffiti, corporate co-opting, media manipulation and political activism in the public realm, all articulated through a number of aesthetic devices that allude to conceptual art strategies and abstract expressionist practice. Together these produce a complex analysis of the porous boundaries between high art, advertising, politics and media.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 98/2007, pp. 50-61.

RAINER BELLENBAUM

Change of Dispositif

Juxtaposing printed, flickering and projected images has long since become a convention in the exhibition world. It is hardly necessary any more to physically separate the media from each other, for example photos in the white cube from films in the black box. Instead, we see presentation displays with powerful projectors, smart screens or focused loudspeakers that combine or mix these exhibits in different media in small spaces. Not to belittle the advantages that this entails with regard to conveying visual topics in a flexible, fast way. However, the interpenetration of the black box and white cube does not automatically undermine the attachment to traditions of idealistic perception of which they are often accused. Rather, such a multimedia interlacing often not only diminishes the contrasts between light and dark, motion and rest, or situation and event, but also the impetus emanating from a more clear-cut change between specific media dispositifs, above all sudden changes in the imagination. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why exhibition-makers have recently started to make increasing use again of classical arrangements of space and viewers. For example when Alexander Horwath aims to accentuate the “normal films” curated by him at the current documenta 12 more strongly in classical cinema than a bare black box could achieve. Or when, for example, the Berliner Museum für Fotografie (as before the Fondation Cartier pour l?art contemporain, Paris) presents the films of documentary film-maker Raymond Depardon in a solemn dark-room, but the associated photos in a plain white cube. In this four-part column, that starts here, I would like to focus on such current reconceptualisations of classical dispositifs in order to re-outline the modes of imagination inscribed in them. If, in so doing, I refer back to classical theory models, however, it is not to transfigure their partial obsoleteness. Rather, these are individual figures of argumentation that, similar to a sudden change of dispositif, can shake up and shift our accustomed attention. (…)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 98/2007, pp. 62–63.