Perception in Motion
ON THE WORKS OF RUTH ANDERWALD + LEONHARD GROND
In Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond’s work, photography and film shed light on each other. While the photography uses series of images to undermine the static, unique nature of the individual picture, the film work is characterised by an approach that reflects on the pictorial-structural conditions of this medium of motion. The cinematic aspect of photography and the photographic aspect of film form the relational basis of an œuvre that, in its turn, serves to represent transitions and instabilities, deliberately inverts accustomed spatial-visual orders, perplexes practised, internalised ways of seeing things, and thus spotlights and expounds the problems of perception.
Doing headstands and jumping in the air are well-tried ways in which to liberate the body from the normal state of its conventional grounding, to align it differently to its environment, and thus to change the appearance and perception of the environment. Anderwald + Grond placed themselves and others in unstable positions in several series of photos, with the aim of destabilising the view, focusing on the related dynamics, that goes beyond the bounds of the single moment, and its suspension in photography as mutually honing components. The bodies suspended in mid-jump in Menschliche Flugversuche (Human flying attempts) (2004) create a portrait of photography as a method of capturing a past moment. Here, lifting off the ground and representing this motion implies distancing oneself from one’s familiar grounding and examining this very distance so as to focus on the point at which it usually disappears in the »blind spot« of its self, that is to say, in distanceless self-oblivion. This signals a change of perspective as a token of becoming aware of perception as a phenomenon that is always structured by perspective in any case. These works do not simply convey the pure pleasure of the moment and the aspect of shaking off reality as a liberating physical gesture, they are rather reminiscent of an intellectual, pleasurable approach to the world by briefly creating a distance to it. The jumping bodies appear as if incarnations of intense, concentrated attention striving towards to a zenith, that is, at the same time, a transition. »The now attentional body is a kind of transitional being. It ranges half-way between a spontaneous body, which we, being attentional, do not yet possess, and a habitual body, which we no longer completely possess and which again and again causes us to sink back into the sleep of habit.«1 These comments on the phenomenology of attention by Bernhard Waldenfels also paraphrase a central aspect of the »human flight attempts«: namely, that they embody a self-aware act vis-à-vis an event that »pre-empts our action« and »survives our action«.2 The jump therefore reflects a detachment from that which otherwise only happens to one.
The Atlanten (Atlasses) also lend an image liberated from the norm of gravity to the weight of the world, which, as we know, jumpers can never escape. They seem to carry the world on their shoulders, as if it is not they who are attracted by the earth, but vice versa. In truth, the photos are simply turned upside down, with the protagonists lying on their backs and bracing their arms against the ground. The profanation of mythology has its sculptural history in the Socle du Monde (1962), upon which Piero Manzoni placed the world by simply labelling this plinth upside down. Literally turning the world on its head does not simply imply engaging in an absurd game with swapped roles, on the contrary, it refers to the fundamental conditions of perception and photographic representation. After all, originally we see the world upside down, before the brain turns everything around. And the first form of representing reality by means of photography depicts an upside-down world in the camera obscura, that, in turn, is the focus of the film installation Camera Solaris (2008). In this respect, it is precisely this visual disruption that allows us to get our bearings in relation to the principles of seeing and depicting. But it is not only the relationship of the actors to the world that these works play with, in order to focus the eye on and break down internalised ways of seeing things, but equally the relationship of the image to its surroundings. What we usually accept without thinking, the mode of its hanging, becomes the key subject here.
Anderwald + Grond have swapped and mirrored the sky and the earth, up and down, in their films too. In Kan Yu (2009) the camera serves to modulate perception: it moves the eye up close to things, even touching them with the lens, causing them to morph into abstract patterns and, by that very fact, visualising the filming technique. In the maelstrom of cutting sequences, the sky and the earth become inverted, as if here it is the landscape that is jumping in their air. As the camera zooms in and shifts the perspective, it becomes clear that these are moving images that are just as far removed from the nature that they depict as from the laws of physics that they fake. It is a media-based pretence of reality that openly reveals itself to be such and whose optical inversion mocks the idea of thinking the representation and that which is represented to be one and the same.
This game is taken even further by visualising guarantors of visibility in Ink, Rain, Swans in a Shanghai Park (2010), a film that was shot during a solar eclipse, i.e. when the sun became particularly conspicuous by dint of being darkened. While one usually »overlooks« it and avoids its countenance, the moon casting its shadow upon it reveals it to be the true source of all visibility. It thus renders perceptible that which otherwise serves perception, it reveals by concealing, thus demonstrating another kind of inverting familiar aspects with illuminating consequences. The theme of the water-mirror in which the sky becomes entrapped features in this film in the form of a bowl filled with black ink. But because the rain falls into it, clouding the immaculateness of the mirror’s surface, it is equally subject to a self-depiction by means of disturbing its function.
Anderwald + Grond focused once again on the theme of the water-mirror in order to destabilise clear-cut lines of demarcation of a landscape in the series of photos Notes on a Coast (2003–2007). In order to lose the ground beneath their feet and to assume a precarious floating position, from where familiar orders and conceptions of space begin to waver, the two artists went into the sea of Israel’s Mediterranean coast with their camera. In this way they convey »not a mere perception of motion, but a perception in motion (…) a moving-oneself (…) that not only changes, but generates places (…)«.3 The photographs display this generation of a place in the obvious visual deviation from its actual reality, for now the water appears to overflow the shore, devouring it along with its hotel buildings. The familiar idyllic tourist equilibrium of sun, sand and sea is thus turned upside down, and the general perceptive and existential components become socio-politically charged by the specific topography and history of the place. From a perspective where the water is proverbially up to your neck, it seems reasonable to assume dark scenarios in these pictures that refer to »the latent threat of a people in a decades-long state that is not always declared to be war, but never peace. From a European viewpoint, the waves crash against this country like the projections aimed at Israel.«4 Notes on a Coast demonstrates unobtrusively that perception is always also bound to contexts of reception history and iconology/ideology and is thus also in a constant state of flux.
In addition to and by means of shifting topographical parameters that underlie the works described above, the re-exposure of chronological orders in Anderwald + Grond’s œuvre also assumes functions of analysing representation and perception. In the Vagabondage Nocturne photographs taken between 2001 and 2008, for example, they focus on night-time scenes and subject areas obscured by the dark to close scrutiny. In the flash, for instance, dancing snowflakes fuse with the lights of a ship to create a shadowy floating body of light. This photograph, like numerous others which explore the night-time sea with its reflections of water and light, was taken during a trip to Norway. Pictures of a country wedding, in contrast, that feature, inter alia, couples dancing or drinking, in which the excerpted, momentary aspect suddenly eclipses the aspect of luminosity, come from the local surroundings. Here, matter-of-fact observation and poetical atmosphere are mutually stimulating. These photographs differ from everyday perceptual routine, in which the conscious perception of light itself usually falls by the wayside, in that they also demonstrate the lighting up and fading of the subjects. The fact that the phenomena of light and dark, destabilised within themselves, are what actually makes visibility and perception possible is subject here to the representation: »Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness (light is determined by darkness and so is darkened light, and darkness is determined by light, is illuminated darkness), and for this reason, that it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being.«5
In order to capture the indistinct transitions in night-time conditions, diffuse zones of colour and grey, that are usually avoided for reasons of purist, high-contrast attention to detail, are deliberately left as they are and used. Anderwald + Grond also explore the influence of imaging methods by having different studios make prints of the same photographs, that consequently differ in terms of their colour and brightness values. The game with the variability and contingency of the individual image is spun out in the mode of presentation, with the same subjects used in different series and thus always subjected to different contextualisations. What is more, including portrait formats in the series dominated by landscape formats draws attention back to the basic formal conditions of the contents of the images. Like when we also address the system of language we are using to speak so as not to lapse into a conceptual realism that already regards the sign as the denotatum.
The concept of vagabondage not only refers to the artists’ travels and expeditions to take their pictures, it also overwrites night itself, metaphorically, as a journey and passage that intensifies perception and experience by the very fact of withdrawing and perplexing visibility. »Night-time scenes with all the emotions, desires and notions that they precipitate, the actions that they permit, the knowledge that they bring about, are seen as places of passage and sudden change. We need the knowledge, deeper than the day, that is held by the night. But we must also go through the night in order to wake into a day changed by this experience.«6 Elisabeth Bronfen’s Kulturgeschichte der Nacht (Cultural history of night), from which this comment was taken, reflects a variety and differentiation of historical and philosophical aspects of the night in which field of references Anderwald + Grond also see their nocturnal work. The darkness of night, Bronfen says, »is home to places that allow us to try out ways of escaping everyday constraints as well as a revolutionary inversion of conventional orders«7 and, by means of its confusing indistinctness, not only leads to a »confusion of the eye«8, but also to heightened attention to »other kinds of perception«9. The images of the night demonstrate that and how the perception of perception itself ultimately counts among these non-standard modes of perception.
In a different way, the photographic works in which Anderwald + Grond devoted their attention to a number of converted buildings in public space are also capable of figuratively shedding light on contexts that are otherwise obscure and capturing in images transitions that usually elude perception. For example, they observed the construction measures being carried out in the Schlossmuseum in Linz and in the Joanneum in Graz, where, in both cases, the historical fabric was partly renovated and new buildings were (and are being) added, documenting and publishing the process in the form of newspaper supplements. Torn-up walls and floors, rubble, construction vehicles and equipment, barriers and prohibitory signs, with workmen all kitted-out in between, do not figure accidentally, but are rather arranged in carefully composed details. The accuracy of these pictures and the disastrous, chaotic nature of their contents serve to lend precision to each other. As newspaper supplements, these pictures flash the building sites concealed from the public behind hoardings back to public space, raising questions that are usually repressed: are the art and culture represented by such buildings without, and housed within, so firmly identified with flawlessness and timeless perfection that any whiff of a building site would mar this image? Is not the work performed at these cultural institutions in itself a central cultural activity that makes the production and communication of culture possible in the first place? Does not screening off the building site, with its traces of work, destruction and change, imply a form of repressing culture as a constant revaluation of existing orders? The focus, then, is on the underlying conditions of cultural representation that, in this case, lie in their own structural preconditions. In the form of these buildings, they present a mirror of society, but not in the unalloyed beauty in which its public representatives are wont to extol it, but rather damaged, burst asunder and not yet fully functional again. Just right, that is, for Anderwald + Grond to invert this impairment caused by others into clarifying mirror images of perception.
Text: Rainer Fuchs
Translation: Richard Watts
1 Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2004, p. 140.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid. p. 172.
4 Stella Rollig, Notes on Notes on a Coast, in: Notes on a Coast – Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond, exhibition catalogue Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, Vienna 2005, s. p.
5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Die Lehre vom Sein (1832). Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Teil [English: The Science of Logic], ed.: Hans- Jürgen Gawoll. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1990, p. 84 (quoted here after: Elisabeth Bronfen, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht – Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht, Munich: Hanser Verlag 2008, p. 117).
6 Elisabeth Bronfen, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht – Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht, see quote 5, p. 176).
7 Ibid., p.169.
8 Ibid., p.167.
9 Ibid.
Doing headstands and jumping in the air are well-tried ways in which to liberate the body from the normal state of its conventional grounding, to align it differently to its environment, and thus to change the appearance and perception of the environment. Anderwald + Grond placed themselves and others in unstable positions in several series of photos, with the aim of destabilising the view, focusing on the related dynamics, that goes beyond the bounds of the single moment, and its suspension in photography as mutually honing components. The bodies suspended in mid-jump in Menschliche Flugversuche (Human flying attempts) (2004) create a portrait of photography as a method of capturing a past moment. Here, lifting off the ground and representing this motion implies distancing oneself from one’s familiar grounding and examining this very distance so as to focus on the point at which it usually disappears in the »blind spot« of its self, that is to say, in distanceless self-oblivion. This signals a change of perspective as a token of becoming aware of perception as a phenomenon that is always structured by perspective in any case. These works do not simply convey the pure pleasure of the moment and the aspect of shaking off reality as a liberating physical gesture, they are rather reminiscent of an intellectual, pleasurable approach to the world by briefly creating a distance to it. The jumping bodies appear as if incarnations of intense, concentrated attention striving towards to a zenith, that is, at the same time, a transition. »The now attentional body is a kind of transitional being. It ranges half-way between a spontaneous body, which we, being attentional, do not yet possess, and a habitual body, which we no longer completely possess and which again and again causes us to sink back into the sleep of habit.«1 These comments on the phenomenology of attention by Bernhard Waldenfels also paraphrase a central aspect of the »human flight attempts«: namely, that they embody a self-aware act vis-à-vis an event that »pre-empts our action« and »survives our action«.2 The jump therefore reflects a detachment from that which otherwise only happens to one.
The Atlanten (Atlasses) also lend an image liberated from the norm of gravity to the weight of the world, which, as we know, jumpers can never escape. They seem to carry the world on their shoulders, as if it is not they who are attracted by the earth, but vice versa. In truth, the photos are simply turned upside down, with the protagonists lying on their backs and bracing their arms against the ground. The profanation of mythology has its sculptural history in the Socle du Monde (1962), upon which Piero Manzoni placed the world by simply labelling this plinth upside down. Literally turning the world on its head does not simply imply engaging in an absurd game with swapped roles, on the contrary, it refers to the fundamental conditions of perception and photographic representation. After all, originally we see the world upside down, before the brain turns everything around. And the first form of representing reality by means of photography depicts an upside-down world in the camera obscura, that, in turn, is the focus of the film installation Camera Solaris (2008). In this respect, it is precisely this visual disruption that allows us to get our bearings in relation to the principles of seeing and depicting. But it is not only the relationship of the actors to the world that these works play with, in order to focus the eye on and break down internalised ways of seeing things, but equally the relationship of the image to its surroundings. What we usually accept without thinking, the mode of its hanging, becomes the key subject here.
Anderwald + Grond have swapped and mirrored the sky and the earth, up and down, in their films too. In Kan Yu (2009) the camera serves to modulate perception: it moves the eye up close to things, even touching them with the lens, causing them to morph into abstract patterns and, by that very fact, visualising the filming technique. In the maelstrom of cutting sequences, the sky and the earth become inverted, as if here it is the landscape that is jumping in their air. As the camera zooms in and shifts the perspective, it becomes clear that these are moving images that are just as far removed from the nature that they depict as from the laws of physics that they fake. It is a media-based pretence of reality that openly reveals itself to be such and whose optical inversion mocks the idea of thinking the representation and that which is represented to be one and the same.
This game is taken even further by visualising guarantors of visibility in Ink, Rain, Swans in a Shanghai Park (2010), a film that was shot during a solar eclipse, i.e. when the sun became particularly conspicuous by dint of being darkened. While one usually »overlooks« it and avoids its countenance, the moon casting its shadow upon it reveals it to be the true source of all visibility. It thus renders perceptible that which otherwise serves perception, it reveals by concealing, thus demonstrating another kind of inverting familiar aspects with illuminating consequences. The theme of the water-mirror in which the sky becomes entrapped features in this film in the form of a bowl filled with black ink. But because the rain falls into it, clouding the immaculateness of the mirror’s surface, it is equally subject to a self-depiction by means of disturbing its function.
Anderwald + Grond focused once again on the theme of the water-mirror in order to destabilise clear-cut lines of demarcation of a landscape in the series of photos Notes on a Coast (2003–2007). In order to lose the ground beneath their feet and to assume a precarious floating position, from where familiar orders and conceptions of space begin to waver, the two artists went into the sea of Israel’s Mediterranean coast with their camera. In this way they convey »not a mere perception of motion, but a perception in motion (…) a moving-oneself (…) that not only changes, but generates places (…)«.3 The photographs display this generation of a place in the obvious visual deviation from its actual reality, for now the water appears to overflow the shore, devouring it along with its hotel buildings. The familiar idyllic tourist equilibrium of sun, sand and sea is thus turned upside down, and the general perceptive and existential components become socio-politically charged by the specific topography and history of the place. From a perspective where the water is proverbially up to your neck, it seems reasonable to assume dark scenarios in these pictures that refer to »the latent threat of a people in a decades-long state that is not always declared to be war, but never peace. From a European viewpoint, the waves crash against this country like the projections aimed at Israel.«4 Notes on a Coast demonstrates unobtrusively that perception is always also bound to contexts of reception history and iconology/ideology and is thus also in a constant state of flux.
In addition to and by means of shifting topographical parameters that underlie the works described above, the re-exposure of chronological orders in Anderwald + Grond’s œuvre also assumes functions of analysing representation and perception. In the Vagabondage Nocturne photographs taken between 2001 and 2008, for example, they focus on night-time scenes and subject areas obscured by the dark to close scrutiny. In the flash, for instance, dancing snowflakes fuse with the lights of a ship to create a shadowy floating body of light. This photograph, like numerous others which explore the night-time sea with its reflections of water and light, was taken during a trip to Norway. Pictures of a country wedding, in contrast, that feature, inter alia, couples dancing or drinking, in which the excerpted, momentary aspect suddenly eclipses the aspect of luminosity, come from the local surroundings. Here, matter-of-fact observation and poetical atmosphere are mutually stimulating. These photographs differ from everyday perceptual routine, in which the conscious perception of light itself usually falls by the wayside, in that they also demonstrate the lighting up and fading of the subjects. The fact that the phenomena of light and dark, destabilised within themselves, are what actually makes visibility and perception possible is subject here to the representation: »Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness (light is determined by darkness and so is darkened light, and darkness is determined by light, is illuminated darkness), and for this reason, that it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being.«5
In order to capture the indistinct transitions in night-time conditions, diffuse zones of colour and grey, that are usually avoided for reasons of purist, high-contrast attention to detail, are deliberately left as they are and used. Anderwald + Grond also explore the influence of imaging methods by having different studios make prints of the same photographs, that consequently differ in terms of their colour and brightness values. The game with the variability and contingency of the individual image is spun out in the mode of presentation, with the same subjects used in different series and thus always subjected to different contextualisations. What is more, including portrait formats in the series dominated by landscape formats draws attention back to the basic formal conditions of the contents of the images. Like when we also address the system of language we are using to speak so as not to lapse into a conceptual realism that already regards the sign as the denotatum.
The concept of vagabondage not only refers to the artists’ travels and expeditions to take their pictures, it also overwrites night itself, metaphorically, as a journey and passage that intensifies perception and experience by the very fact of withdrawing and perplexing visibility. »Night-time scenes with all the emotions, desires and notions that they precipitate, the actions that they permit, the knowledge that they bring about, are seen as places of passage and sudden change. We need the knowledge, deeper than the day, that is held by the night. But we must also go through the night in order to wake into a day changed by this experience.«6 Elisabeth Bronfen’s Kulturgeschichte der Nacht (Cultural history of night), from which this comment was taken, reflects a variety and differentiation of historical and philosophical aspects of the night in which field of references Anderwald + Grond also see their nocturnal work. The darkness of night, Bronfen says, »is home to places that allow us to try out ways of escaping everyday constraints as well as a revolutionary inversion of conventional orders«7 and, by means of its confusing indistinctness, not only leads to a »confusion of the eye«8, but also to heightened attention to »other kinds of perception«9. The images of the night demonstrate that and how the perception of perception itself ultimately counts among these non-standard modes of perception.
In a different way, the photographic works in which Anderwald + Grond devoted their attention to a number of converted buildings in public space are also capable of figuratively shedding light on contexts that are otherwise obscure and capturing in images transitions that usually elude perception. For example, they observed the construction measures being carried out in the Schlossmuseum in Linz and in the Joanneum in Graz, where, in both cases, the historical fabric was partly renovated and new buildings were (and are being) added, documenting and publishing the process in the form of newspaper supplements. Torn-up walls and floors, rubble, construction vehicles and equipment, barriers and prohibitory signs, with workmen all kitted-out in between, do not figure accidentally, but are rather arranged in carefully composed details. The accuracy of these pictures and the disastrous, chaotic nature of their contents serve to lend precision to each other. As newspaper supplements, these pictures flash the building sites concealed from the public behind hoardings back to public space, raising questions that are usually repressed: are the art and culture represented by such buildings without, and housed within, so firmly identified with flawlessness and timeless perfection that any whiff of a building site would mar this image? Is not the work performed at these cultural institutions in itself a central cultural activity that makes the production and communication of culture possible in the first place? Does not screening off the building site, with its traces of work, destruction and change, imply a form of repressing culture as a constant revaluation of existing orders? The focus, then, is on the underlying conditions of cultural representation that, in this case, lie in their own structural preconditions. In the form of these buildings, they present a mirror of society, but not in the unalloyed beauty in which its public representatives are wont to extol it, but rather damaged, burst asunder and not yet fully functional again. Just right, that is, for Anderwald + Grond to invert this impairment caused by others into clarifying mirror images of perception.
Text: Rainer Fuchs
Translation: Richard Watts
1 Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2004, p. 140.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid. p. 172.
4 Stella Rollig, Notes on Notes on a Coast, in: Notes on a Coast – Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond, exhibition catalogue Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, Vienna 2005, s. p.
5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Die Lehre vom Sein (1832). Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Teil [English: The Science of Logic], ed.: Hans- Jürgen Gawoll. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1990, p. 84 (quoted here after: Elisabeth Bronfen, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht – Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht, Munich: Hanser Verlag 2008, p. 117).
6 Elisabeth Bronfen, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht – Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht, see quote 5, p. 176).
7 Ibid., p.169.
8 Ibid., p.167.
9 Ibid.