Investigating Lost Time Hermann Wolf
Conjectures about the Paintings of
Andreas Jauss 1997 - 1998
For the benefit of understanding, first an explanation
of the desired presentation by the artist
is necessary. Why are the physical measurements of each
work the same? Why are the works mounted, or displayed at
public showings, the way that they are? Is the selection
or the choice of the shown paintings really exchangeable
as it looks?
Each painting to be hung for exhibition has the same width
and height measurements, and because of this uniformity,
the artist is able to accumulate and to hang paintings so
that they appear as one "block". The artist is
able to cover an entire exhibition space with his
paintings ensuring the same space distance between the
pieces.
Various genres of pictures are included within a block
and the variety has significance. Cityscapes are mingled
with interior views of rooms;
close-up resemblances to early film stills are mixed with
motifs often drawn from various newsmagazines; depictions
of travel destinations share space
with ideas taken from the archives of art history. This
searching and investigating of themes, the
mingling of actuality, both forgotten and remembered, are
also an attempt to lay the "cornerstones"*1
upon which the image of reality is supposed to
be grounded. By looking closely at the pieces, the nomenclature
as it were, the whole can be known. The poet/narrator in
Andre Gides Paludes asks himself: "What do
I tell of this moment? Why do I tell of this [moment]
more than of the other? Do we really know what is of
importance? What a
presumption to make a choice! Let us look on everything
with the same attention".He continues to ask, "
Viewing! What do I see? Three greengrocers passing by. An
autobus, of course. A gatekeeper sweeps in front of his
door. The shopkeepers freshen their store windows. The
cook goes to the market. Pupils go to the school. Kiosks
receive their magazines. Men in haste buy them. They set
up tables in front of the café".*2
Scenes of an apparent frozen reality; action moments bearing the pattern of
repetition in their everyday triviality;self-referential
fulfillment without increase of perception are completed
in their temporary singularity.
Variations of these particulars are the substance of
the artist imagination and the images that he finds in
the world. The paintings here, however, do not provide
the viewer with stable, stiff, and safe identities, which
could be deceiving. The quietness and the persistence is
delusive. If nothing else, the paintings could even s how
us anticipated catastrophes, a destabilized structure
which marks the intersection between now and then,
between future occurrence and present action.
Besides the attempt to certify and to acknowledge our
surroundings from both
sensualistic and perceptible perspectives, the artist
here attempts to find a way to address the problem of
representation, fully cognizant of the absence of the
answer to this question: Can attributes of modern
lifestyle and everyday experiences be represented by
images created by the artist? B. Brecht writes " Any
attempt to answer the question is complicated because a
simple reproduction of reality tells less about reality
itself. For example, a photograph or any other visual
representation of the Krupp industrial complex or the AEG
plant tells almost nothing about these institutions. The actual
reality has transgressed into the functional; the
objectification of the human realities, i.e., the
factory, precludes turning the factory back into the
human realities. It is really necessary to build up
something artificial. It is necessary to create art."*3
If reality is actually a construction, as
B.Brecht claims, the attempt of the artist underlies the
desire to reappropriate reality.*4
The focusing of transitions, fracture points,
time-space constellations, the cutting to pieces and
dismembering of things and then putting them together
again into a whole can be compared to "television
channel surfing" as a principle of function. In
other words, by analogy, the television viewer has
devised a way of organizing electronic images and their
conditions; television serves millions of pictures
individually to a million strong audience day by day and
viewers can arrange them in a million different ways
simply by using the remote control. Further, they daily
consume pictures on television at the very moment of a
catastrophic event, for example, an earthquake, a
firestorm, a flood -- this list could go on and on -- natural
disasters destroy in seconds structures that have
been built to be strong and safe. There is continually
something that is happening.
Change the channel and there is a different image, if it
is only the offer of a better laundry detergent. Try to
shorten the interval betwee n these images and there will
be left nothing but the prophetic rustle and static
reminiscent of the image that a single channel provides
when the station has gone off the air at the end of the
day.
Here, we have an investigation of lost time.
time
*1 Paul de Man in: Derrida,Jaques Memoires ;
für Paul de Man, Passagen 1988
*2 Gide, Andre´ Paludes Suhrkamp,1960
*3 Brecht,B. Breuer,Gerda (Hrsg) Aussenhaut+Innenhaut;Photographie
und Architektur, Henry van der Velde Gesellschaft
Hagen 1997
*4vgl. Konstruktivismus; Geschichte und
Anwendung DELFIN 1992. Suhrkamp, Wissenschaft
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