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Behind the Image - On Peter Freitag's Work
by Stefanie Heckmann
translation by Pamela Selwyn
But when a belief vanishes, there survives it -
more and more vigorously so as to cloak
the absence of the power, now lost to us,
of imparting reality to new things - a fetishistic
attachment to the old things which it did once
animate, as if it was in them and not ourselves
that the divine spark resided....
Marcel
Proust, Swann's Way
Why, wondered the postwar German writer Arno Schmidt, can't we simply
hook other people up to our brains and let them see the same images and
memories we do? Today, only fifty years after Schmidt expressed his desire
for such networks, universal access to memory and experience appears to
have become everyday and the detour via the mind obsolete. At a time when
the media provide us with ever more perfect pictures of the reality around
us, the creativity and imaginative capacity of human memory has largely
been replaced by a pool of photographic or digital images. Images produced
by the media, which pass in quick succession, overlay individual memories
and ideas. At the same time, the progression of images fosters the atrophying
of our ability to concentrate on one thing over a longer period and to
develop a coherent system of references. For the computer generation,
reality will be practically indistinguishable from the experience of it
as mediated by photo reproduction, television, video and computer simulation.
Art has become part of an all-encompassing media culture; it has absorbed
the counter- and subcultures into itself. Elements from advertising, fashion
and lifestyles, music, etc., once outside its catchment area, are extracted
from their contexts, and the set-pieces welded together into new pictorial
orders. Peter Freitag's computer prints also draw on the store of public
images. The artist works with pictures he finds in the advertising brochures
of conventional tour operators and processes them digitally on the computer.
The kind of pictures of vacation paradises we encounter in travel catalogues
have long become frozen into clichés, and, mutually interchangeable,
are stored in our memories. The small format advertising photos show cheerful
pseudo-worlds which the eye scans quickly without being struck by anything
in particular. Most of the pictures offer glimpses of hotel rooms in which
people in groups engage in simple activities that we associate with leisure.
The protagonists lie on their beds, read or drink, sit at table or play
with their children. The scenes convey an impression of happiness and
contentment and satisfy the human longing for harmony. The message is
clear, unequivocal and devoid of contradictions. The depicted objects
appear to draw their meaning from themselves. The aim of the pictures
in the catalogues is to give the potential customer a positive impression
of the vacation spot, hotel, beach or swimming pool, and to encourage
him or her to buy a holiday package.
It is all the more surprising to find such images in an art context,
and more astonishing still that they manage to grab our attention. What
makes such pictures interesting for the visual arts?
At first glance, the artist's interventions into his prototypes are scarcely
perceptible, since the surfaces of the pictures still appear homogeneous.
What matters is that Peter Freitag has extracted all moveable objects,
such as the glasses, books, toys and dishes with which the figures originally
occupied themselves, from the preexisting scenes. Only the people, rooms
and very basic furnishings remain. He then copies the respective backgrounds
into the empty spaces left by the removals. The pictures also appear as
a series, enlarged several times and with heightened color contrasts.
The dots, a clear indicator of a printed prototype, remain visible or
are laid over the picture evenly after digital processing.
The scenes in travel brochures, which show people at the pool, in hotel
rooms or at breakfast, do not document actual vacations. They are mostly
situations staged with typical models, which merely suggest a cheerful,
relaxed holiday atmosphere. Hotel rooms are always comparable to stages
on which we perform the roles of travelers with the props we find or bring
with us. Whereas holiday snapshots, however, generally retain the fullness
of what we have experienced and seen, the photos staged for the catalogue,
with admirable economy, show us just enough to fulfill our expectations
of an idyllic holiday scene. They offer simply constructed, emotionally
satisfying basic situations, pandering to conservative role clichés
and managing with only a few key props. These make it easier for us to
recognize the usual constellations. For these dramatizations exploit the
fact that we do not perceive things, pictures, or situations explicitly
in everyday life, but merely skim them superficially in order to compare
them with what we already know. A few, carefully chosen optical clues
thus generally suffice to facilitate recognition.
The images from catalogues provide such convenient models among other
things because they are realized with limited means. If one extracts an
element -in this case, objects-from the sparsely staged pictures, whose
sole aim is recognition, the appearance of reality collapses. The order
of things is disturbed. The picture's system of reference is lost. Without
the enlivening presence of the objects with which the figures were originally
involved, the other furnishings become frozen into mere scenery. The rooms
resemble empty stages, on which the figures are abandoned and act in seeming
isolation from each other.
The impression of isolation or disrupted communication is heightened
by the circumstance that the attention of the figures in the prototypes
was originally directed at the objects and not at the other people in
the room. If one removes the objects, they gaze into nothingness, while
the viewer automatically connects the meaningless gestures and the actions
of the figures and tries to interpret them. Confusion arises between what
we see and what we know.
The new atmospheric moments of alienation that we can read into the pictures
are not a characteristic of the figures themselves. They could proceed
from them only if the depicted persons had a coherent identity. This is
not the case, however, since the models in the staged catalogue photos
are only types who serve as projection surfaces. They appear as stand-ins
or figures of identification, just as the objects rather generally represent
leisure pursuits.
The psychological or sociological interpretation of the situation is
a creative achievement on the part of the viewer trying to interpret the
disparate and seemingly mysterious situations. Although the faces and
rooms remain identical to the prototype, the clashing of differing codes,
which no longer produce a coherent image, permit the pictures to participate
in psychological or social phenomena such as isolation and community,
loneliness, sexuality and communication, which the viewer reads into them.
Through manipulation, the artist produces a lack, which runs through the
picture like a fissure and serves as a peg to hang our imagination on.
The viewer notices the empty spaces intuitively and instinctively begins
to fill them with his or her own ideas and imaginings.
Peter Freitag's works involve research to the extent that the artist
does more than simply scratch the surface of the pictures, penetrating
the images and allowing us to experience their scope of meaning by altering
it. His subtle adaptations reveal the images behind the images, which
are in a position to hold our gaze. Originally unequivocal in appearance,
motifs, aims, and contexts, the advertising photos gain a new iconographic
quality from the artist's interventions. The manipulated prints no longer
depict definitive contents. The pictures look like stills taken from a
larger context, without providing an interpretation of what they show.
In this way the works force us to pause, without sacrificing any of their
fascination to the realization of how they were made. Their strength is
their ambivalence; the message is left open. One can read all sorts of
things into the situations. They suggest stories that seemingly need only
to be reconstructed, but actually remain to be told.
Without the original order of things, the pictures cannot simply be consumed
anymore. The psychological dramas whose trail we think we are following
find no resolution in the picture. The new pictorial situations thus provoke
a form of seeing that slowly and searchingly feels its way forward, which
leads to a constant comparison of already known types of pictures with
the new, mysterious scenes. Only gradually are the origins, quality and
specific intention of the original material revealed, along with its importance
in the context of the adaptation. Alternating with the perception of the
Other, the new view of persons, spaces, and situations or the diagnosis
of psychological and social states of mind, new systems of reference emerge.
A central question that arises is that of whose game is really being played
here.
The artist's decision to restrict himself to images from travel brochures
is no coincidence. One could, however, imagine other groups of themes
as well. The already highly typified, clichéd and reduced images
in the travel brochures are nonetheless particularly conducive, with only
slight manipulation, to disrupting pictorial orders and changing basic
emotional situations, and thereby to making us aware of the ways in which
pictures function. The pictures do not illustrate the complete randomness
of images in the media age, their vulnerability to manipulation or the
interchangeability of what they show. Instead, Peter Freitag's works make
us conscious of the fine line between reality, reproduction, and fiction
and the great extent to which the production of public images serves the
longings of the viewer.
Peter Freitag's computer prints are closer to painting than they are
to media art. Although the pictures owe their existence to the possibilities
of the computer, they appear to swim against rather than with the tide
of electronically produced images. The artist is interested neither in
following current electronic trends nor in criticizing media culture.
His works seek instead to demonstrate how much painting as a traditional
art form needs redefinition and an opening towards the new technologies.
Much like painted images, they chiefly exude tranquility. They create
an intimate space in which the viewer is invited to fathom its mystery.
In keeping with painting since Modernism, they also reflect their own
conditions and possibilities, and encourage us to treat images analytically-
on the one hand because the concept and creation process are plainly evident
and can be reconstructed, and on the other because, paradoxically enough,
the mystery of their effect remains ultimately untouched by these circumstances.
"Painting is the visual place to which the viewer can return as often
as she likes, without recourse to rewind, fast forward, or repeat buttons,"
someone wrote recently in an art magazine. In this sense Peter Freitag's
pictorial spaces invite us to stay a while, and to come back sometime.
Without a second glance, memory, recognition and also Proust's idea of
"imparting reality to new things" would be unimaginable.
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