The Studio and the Street
On the Origins of the
Exhibition "More than Meets the Eye"
Andreas
Gursky, Tokio Börse, 1990
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
Since
the late seventies, photography has been considered a fine art in its own
right. From the very beginning, however, it has oscillated between two
poles, that of the studio and the street, the staged shot and the
documentation. On the occasion of the exhibition "More than Meets the
Eye," Ulf Erdmann Ziegler shows how this duality continues to
determine the medium to this day.
Hanging
on Eugène Atget
's, the Parisian photographer's, door was a sign that read: "Documents
pour artistes". That was one hundred years ago. Today, his work
constitutes a key part of the MoMA
collection in New York, where the canonization of photography began forty
years ago, a process that can be considered complete now following the
retrospectives of Andreas
Gursky and Lee
Friedlander.
Gursky's gigantic color panoramas of the sites of
global business and Friedlander’s pensive and penetrating black and white
images represent two different approaches to photography – provided one
has the calling. Friedlander became a photographer at the age of fourteen
after a kind of religious conversion in the darkroom, while Gursky
practically grew up in a commercial photo studio.
Gotthard
Graubner, Untitled
(Buddhist
Monastery in Bhutan/ Himalayas), um 1976
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © Gotthard Graubner
The
race between the turtle and the hare was decided years ago: photography is
clearly an art form. And this position carries with it an enormous
advantage: if a polarity between the fine arts and photography didn't
exist, then it would no longer need to be investigated, described, and
represented. Inverted Zen here: the goal is the path.
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Deutsche Bank's photography is part of a collection
of "works on paper," which means that it exists in the context of other
artistic works. In formal terms, one thing works on paper have in common
is that they are presented behind glass; another is that the public seldom
sees works on paper as major works of art. Drawings, for instance, often
serve as a key to interpreting other works, a kind of link between the
life and the work that is more valuable and accessible to the expert than
to the lay person.
There are, in fact, many works in this
collection that describe an artist's search or a moment of transgression: Gerhard
Richter's ventures into being a grey caveman, Gotthard
Graubner's secret protocols from a cloister in the Himalayas, Imi
Knoebel's photographic notes on his light sculptures in the studio.
It's more a matter of experience than photography. For artists such as Pierre
Bonnard, George
Grosz, or Cy Twombly ,
photography is an enrichment of everyday life, a welcome opportunity to
immerse oneself in a foreign technique – not so much art as artistic
activity. This also applies in varying degrees to Richter, Graubner, and
Knoebel.
Raimund
Kummer, M&C, 1989
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
It
does not, however, apply to Astrid
Klein, Jürgen
Klauke, Katharina
Sieverding, or Raimund
Kummer. When photography entered their studios, it was as an original
form of art. In Klein's work, the studio borders on the darkroom. For
Klauke, the camera serves as a solitary observer of grotesque occurrences
on a stage. For Sieverding, the photograph is a medium of idolatry, like
in Hollywood. In the case of Raimund Kummer, photography wanders from the
miniature through the quote and on to the workbench, where it grows and
grows until the studio and the picture can no longer be distinguished from
one another.
Katharina
Sieverding, Life-Death, 1969/95
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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