JULIA KISSINA
On "Toys" by Julia Kissina
by Boris von Brauchitsch
Human life is sacred – one could agree on this matter if required if one’s own interests do not stand in the way of such an ethical consensus. Life begins with conception – on this, too, consensus can usually be reached. But is this really already a human being – this tiny little thing without heart or feeling? Isn’t this first and foremost great material for experiments?
Do we not want in this world – this world which we have been trying to control for thousands of years and which the more cunningly we grasp into a stranglehold, the more it slips away – do we not want to at least take charge of our own demise in this world?
Julia Kissina approaches these ideas with disarming scurrility. Her photographic works create a bridge between mythology and the genetic gamble. The esthetics and capacity of the cross-matched creatures and mutants, at home in the worlds of spirits and gods of all cultures, are explored playfully. Biotopes are created for mythical creatures in her studio. Can nymphs with three legs really run faster? How useful are the birdlike arms of the forest fairy? Does sexual pleasure possibly double with two genitals?
Julia Kissina’s creatures have been assigned their roles. But instead of making the best of their flexible bones as stuntmen, or confusing their opponents at football with additional legs, they seem to refuse to work.
The counterworld to the dictation of beauty is of poetic subversion. In it lives a horde of fantastic, fabulous protagonists which appears to be harmless, but always implies the thesis of progress as an art. Kissina’s scenery is populated by the spirits that the genetic researchers have conjured up. As a countermove, the artist repeatedly yet gently and perseveringly poses the question of the options of the arts towards cultural crimes. Should here, too, form follow function, then the mutation will eventually inevitably transform into beauty. The portraits of disturbing esthetics, art works in the age of their biological reproducibility, transform the path to doom into a fairytale – upon whose transfigured romanticism the infamous reality flashes up again and again and challenges us to an offensive position.
MICHAEL MICHLMAYR
‘Placed times – timed places’: On Michael Michlmayr’s most recent photographic works
by Theresia Prammer
“The realism of photography creates confusion as to what is real”
Susan Sontag
Passages – When considering the title the author has prefixed to his new picture sequences, it is difficult not to think of Walter Benjamin’s passage works: on strolling, on time intervals and time places, on passing time and losing time. But the stroller at work here is not on the look out for snapshots: he is creating a montage of snapshot moments. These photographs spot passages as threshold places, where something happens to someone, where someone passes something. These are places in which the passing manifestations of everyday life become intertwined into new contexts. He also methodically ties in conceptual artistic processes with these picture compositions: the series Passages, realized for the first time with digital means, corresponds one to one to the diverse documentation of time lapses of the gyratory work complex. But in addition to repetition, these works also play with the fragmentary, questioning it in a new, smooth composition: the coexistence of the separate picture moments produces successive new pictures, suggests a structural compactness which does not correspond to the individual picture. Passage follows upon passage, each of the passages undergoes different phases. Links, overlaps, compressions are won from ever varying constellations. The openness of the perspective lets the choice of the picture detail appear no less necessary: the picture itself thus becomes the passage, is the passage it is describing. Michlmayr confronts the real places with the imaginary with systematic care, he assembles captured moments into new time frescoes, multiplies the ‘seen’, lets the original disappear behind the duplicate. Places and times in the pictures communicate with one another and refer to a period in which ‘what has been’ and ‘what has not been’ coexist and in which the trust in the image function of the picture is suspended: time becomes readable through multiplication, alienation. What is perceived cannot be taken for ‘real’, there is no reality, only simultaneous or time-shifted realities<(i> which can be photographed as well as created. The results are actually similar to a stage: to an everyday absurd theater that pulls you into its spell, which passes by you like an illustrated book (cinematically). On the one hand, what we are dealing with here are photographs that create – at best – "posed", pre-contrived new connections; and on the other hand urban life with cheerful documentations: full of chance meetings, chance products: transferred into new constructions of meaning. The application of digital technology and the conscious manipulation of the picture surface that goes along with it strengthen the random effect of these photo works: " On the one hand temporal processes with digital means melted into a spatial whole, on the other hand, a ‘complete’ panoramic view was temporally dissected", the author explains. But the estrangement does not result from the declared virtuality of the reproduction, but from the splitting of the pictures, from the strategy of ‘repetition’, which causes a kind of blow up effect for the viewer. Which reality reveals itself in these photos? Which reality stands out? Do they not reveal in addition to ‘what has been’ ‘what is possible’, and in every possible a new ‘has been’? These subjects (objects, animals, people), sought out or picked up by chance, seem to anticipate that they are one and many. The eye of the beholder wanders from face to face but always glances upon the same faces: duplicates, ever new fragmentations of a reality that come to light precisely through the uniformity of the presentation in its entire diversity. No passages without passers-by. The present work is not only a study of landscapes and ‘timescapes’, but also a study of the means of transportation of contemporaries: of people, who are intertwined and set against each other, of fitness and leisure boredom, of movement as an end in itself (Greifenstein) and fleeting contacts. The author is also quite able to gain comical sides out of his procedure (as in the Viennese impression Hundezone [dog’s zone]), or oppressive ones as in the Prater Hauptallee. When digital photography was still relatively unknown, Roland Barthes was influenced by the concept "Ca a été". The photo as the real ‘has been’, as a trace of a material occurrence that took place, which must have taken place: the snapshot as recording of something real, the photograph as a more or less objective witness. With the emergence of digital technology came the radical weakening of these securities: the consultant as trigger, "instigator" of the optical process is no longer determinable with the same lucidity, the subjects have become unclear or – in spite of or precisely on account of the even more refined technical precision – become unclear again. So, too, with these photographs: though the manipulation takes a real scene as starting point, the reproduction loses on reliability. What was? The people and situations at the moment of the snapshot? The finished composition after the arrangement by the artist? What could be? What has taken place is fixed in a way that does not allow any clear reference anymore. The photograph takes place without warranty, cannot be verified. The viewer cannot grasp the timeframe of the picture, loses himself in the vexing games of the facets and vanishing points. In the blurring of the temporal structures Michlmayr’s approach also takes the snapshot to ad absurdum. The passages show people who seem like pictures of pictures; the photographic picture does not communicate the nature of these meetings, creates no immediacy, does not attempt any approach to the psychology. These photo works not only show people and objects: they transcend and produce them, depersonalize the meetings. The persons soon appear to be victim of a momentary anaesthesia, soon they become their own parody in their frenzied activities. Michael Michlmayr’s photographic compositions are reflections about this non-equivalence of the same, this margin of difference between same and equal, of ‘what was’ and the reconstructed, of discovering and relating to (fabrications), are attempts of the un-translatability of a matter unto itself. The reduction to (or concentration on) the minimal and essential becomes the principle in some pictures: this occurs most poignantly and most magically in the Meerblick (sea view), a picture in which only a single blue pours over the page, flooding the image carrier except for one – brighter, but also blue – strip, which is the horizon. Here the metaphor “strip horizon” is taken literally, the color becomes the ‘pars pro toto’ for the whole. Only the solitude of the swimmer before the background of the blue, in a strip of motorboats, makes the sea as such definable. And fetches the marvelling viewer from the clouds back down to earth.