In the Museum of Digital Baroque
Peter Freitag’s Work with the Old Masters
by Ralf F. Hartmann
translation by Catherine Framm
Franz Peter I in vermilion robes at the height of his power: watchfully
observing the viewer with a fixed gaze, he leans back in what seems to
be a stately armchair of the kind to be found in the European galleries
of Baroque art as an essential constituent in monarchical portraits. Peter
and Eva, on the other hand, as the innocent pair before the Fall of Man,
are to be found in a state of natural, relaxed togetherness: he, Narcissus,
in almost ideal nudity, she, clothed stylishly and gazing self-assuredly
out of the picture, both of them in unclouded harmony. In contrast, the
eternal pose of introspection: the self-doubting, aging soldier, brooding,
as his life passes before him within his downward gaze. Further along
in this virtual museum, another diptych is governed by classical composition
and harmonic balance, carefully counter-poised figures combined with elegance
of color: The Four Brothers.
Regardless of whether Peter Freitag enters into dialogue with Velasquez,
Cranach or Dürer, his eye for the history of European art always
contains a mix of playful calculation and serious critical image analysis.
In his recent digital portraiture series, Freitag, accustomed to availing
himself of diverse sources of imagery, has turned his attention to some
of the incontestable masterpieces of European art. Thus, out of a mélange
of camouflaging caricature and seemingly disrespectful persiflage, he
has compiled a subjective ancestral portrait gallery of the great cultural
prototypes. This may seem unusual for a contemporary artist working with
digital imagery. In an age of Cultural Studies and critical Imaging Science,
the bewildering sampling of bodies and settings from fashion magazines,
intentionally drawing upon a supposed Art History, has grown rare.
The younger generation of contemporary artists like Peter Freitag is
far more interested in the image archives of the everyday, the collective
memory of a visually determined society in which the ubiquitous presence
of images demands an equal measure of decisiveness and bravado from the
producers of art. Since post-modern times and the beginnings of the World
Wide Web at the latest, all that was canonical has been lost. The generators
of pictures have conflated, and that which was reverentially preserved
is suddenly standing next to the everyday and that which has been ranked
as museum-quality stands next to the trivial. There has been such a shift
in significance in the visual arts that classical art history has been
replaced by critical Imaging Science, thus making it both possible and
necessary to draw on almost everything visual for the analysis of a perplexing
reality.
Not infrequently a detailed investigation of visual systems will bring
to light the complex constructedness of realities, thereby also throwing
new light upon the classical topoi of art history. Portraits of rulers,
legends of the saints, and the origins of the Christian world view lose
their eternally valid significance and proceed to become – when
Peter Freitag transplants the heroes of art history into our everyday,
modern consumer world – mere objects of investigation on the virtual
autopsy table of the present, on which the significances of history are
without further ado amalgamated with those of the present.
The aristocratic becomes common, the sacred profane, and the ideal becomes
ordinary. For the most part this still takes place in the realm of scholarship
and thus within the framework of a highly sensitive abstraction, at the
end of which the concrete threatens to become lost completely. Everything
directly identity-related or having a subjective impact retreats into
the background behind the cloak of aloof scholarly loquaciousness.
But suddenly the alter ego of the artist emerges in eerie introspection
out of his metal chest armor, his modern Judith cradles the decapitated
head with his mirror image in front of her, and the artists’ four
brothers are recruited to supply the necessary personnel for a presentation
of the Düreresque apostles. The seemingly naïve putting-yourself-in-their-place
becomes a multiple artistic appropriation in which not only the characteristic
personnel but also all the attributes of the representation are subjected
to exacting scrutiny and submit to an adaptation that is almost fresh.
Utopias, stories and dramas stand trial before the present and are subjected
to a necessary analysis that will once again pose the necessary question
as to the current significance of classical artworks: How can we as contemporaries
of today’s world, relate to these incunabula of yesterday? Can we
find any relevance in these classically treated themes? Is it even possible
to find gratification in aesthetic solutions and confrontational drama
before the background of openly negotiated gender issues, digital picture
production, and visual imagery at our disposal on all sides? Or is it
not much more the case that everything specific, political and significant
in this unlimited availability has dissipated into the vague, the un-political
and the meaningless?
Peter Freitag’s bold adaptation of classical artworks is a first
attempt at plumbing the depths of these questions in visual form. In playful
exchange with the modern flood of images, he tries to once again win back
the immediacy of that which has been so respectfully musealized –
and thus preserved. The great themes of art history, the painted manifestations
of whole eras, receive a new interpretation through the medium of his
photography which here no longer poses irrelevant questions as to authenticity
and the construction of reality, but rather searches for the visual traces
of canonical image history in subjective reality and in the excessive
picture production of the present time. Timeless questions are at our
disposal, fundamental issues are to be negotiated and artistically grappled
with. The more unlimited the picture systems, the more limited do the
interpretations of perhaps the portrait of the pope, of the first human
couple, or of the modern Judith seem. Peter Freitag makes no bones about
the fact that the images are constructions. On the contrary: the digital
constructions are everywhere visible and call for new strategies in dealing
with them. For this reason, his grip on the history of art is at the same
time scarily subjective as well as comfortingly objective.
top
|
