The search for visibility - what do Helnwein pictures want?
C
Lentos Museum of Contemporary Art Linz
"Face It" Gottfried Helnwein - one man show
Thomas Edlinger
Essay
THE SEARCH FOR VISIBILITY - WHAT DO HELNWEIN PICTURES WANT?
Of course, the current studies on the face already rely less on
effect-seeking, expressive drasticness. Rather, Gottfried Helnwein
masks a possible mental turmoil or traumatization of his picture
models, which might be suggested, for example, by the black, seemingly
fascistoid and fetishized uniform parts, behind the posed expression of
his children's faces. Like Laocoon, these "beautiful" children that
seem as though carved from wax, no longer cry out. They bear something
that is not named and yet is visible. In their intimacy, they
communicate an unfathomable inscrutability. The viewer's irritation
arises from not being able to find a clue to this mystery. The wound is
to be kept open and no one should be allowed to heal it.
In the age of their digital simulation, pictures are more suspicious
than ever. They are considered "simulacra", illusions, whose meanings
are now merely simulated in the universe of technical images. Detached
from their original function of representation, they have long since
become a component of the generation of the world that makes it
increasingly difficult to distinguish the world from the image we have
of it. Whereas the flood of today's forms of visualization is both
democratized due to simplified and affordable technological devices
(mobile phones, DV, mini and web-cams, etc.) and specialized due to new
types of image generating procedures (probes inside the body,
satellites in orbit, 3D animations, etc.), the claim of bearing witness
reality - even though this has been epistemologically problematized
since Plato's allegory of the cave - is devaluated. The more all the
different types of pictures "cover" the world (in the literal sense of
not only penetrating and discovering, but also blocking and "covering
up"), the more pointless our faith in their promise of truth
paradoxically seems to be.
The globally circulating and self-referential streams of images reshape
the real, according to the credo of postmodern media theory, developing
a "virtual" life of their own beyond the real at the same time. By
tapping into the real like vampires and ultimately absorbing it (as
conventional talk of media reality indicates), they create new
realities detached from an original real. In fact, the images tend to
appear as though they were already the real, as though it only existed
in its mediatization. The perception of what was once called the
extra-media world can now only be imagined under media conditions.
"What we know about our society, even about our world, we know through
mass media," according to the famous opening statement from Niklas
Luhmann's investigation of the reality of mass media. Paradoxically the
media are the blind spot in media perception. Indeed they tend to make
themselves invisible in the act of image generation. Watching
television, one does not see the television, but always something else
- just as one does not see the panel picture in the panel picture.
The imperialism of a self-referential sign universe that is tyrannical
or intoxicating according to culture-critical position also indicates
the frequently cited crisis of representation. If visual representation
is understood in the narrower sense of making present what is absent,
then the question arises as to the potentials and the limitations of
depicting what is absent, becoming especially acute in light of the
opacity of the possibilities for creating and modifying images today.
What kind of evident effectiveness can immaterial or virtual image
worlds still claim, whose vitality has emancipated itself from a
referential pre-image state of a presumed extra-media reality, when
both the knowledge of their manipulability and their actually practiced
manipulatedness are increasingly becoming the everyday experience of
society?
Conversely, the suggestive power of images working towards leveling the
categorical difference between image and reality should not be
underestimated. For it is specifically the widely and repeatedly
attested "power of images", their magical, fetishized quality of making
visible what was previously unseen, which feeds and radicalizes the
desires projected onto the image: iconoclastic furor on the one side
(which finds expression in politically and/or religiously motivated
prohibitions and iconoclasm), on the other the idolatry that celebrates
the imaginary seductive power of lasting visual presence. The two
antagonistic/opposite ways of dealing with the "flood of images", in
other words iconophobia and iconomania, thus prove to be two sides of
the same coin.
Yet if the images are neither willing nor able to provide us with an
assured knowledge of the world through representing what exists as the
real, then it must be possible to explain our affective tie to the
image and its appellative radiance in some other way than from a
disinterested pleasure or a rationalist interest in knowledge.
"Images," writes the German art historian Hans Belting, "call for our
belief, but they are not made to convince us; instead they are intended
to impress us." Although we know what we cannot know from images, still
we continue to produce and consume them permanently. Why? Because
despite all our skepticism about "false", lying images, we believe or
want to believe, because we seek the "genuine", convincing image in a
para-religious way, the one that could reveal truths to us beyond plain
documentarism.
The US American image theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, who provided one of
the key terms for analyzing visual culture with the term "pictorial
turn" in 1994, shifts the focus of his deliberations in his current
book What do Pictures Want? from the frequently asked questions about
the truth or power of images to their libidinous charge. Starting from
our image desires and fears, he is not interested in the effects of
visual production on the audience (which, in analogy to research on the
effects of media, are hardly to be ultimately determined empirically).
Instead, Mitchell focuses on the collective sensation of being exposed
to the images' lives of their own as described above, the simulation of
the "lives of their own", and regards the appellative images not as an
expression of planned "imagineerings", but rather attributes to them an
inherently animistic quality: "Images are like living organisms; living
organisms are best described as things that have desires (for example,
appetites, needs, demands, drives); therefore the question of what
pictures want is inevitable." As evidence of this miraculous charge, he
refers to the resistance of the students in his seminars against
complying with his instructions to cut up a photo of their own mothers.
Mitchell makes use of this rhetorical "as though" anthropomorphisizing
of the dead pixels, colors and forms to hone his thesis of the mythical
relationship between our society and the image - not only in the
narrow, object-like sense of "pictures", but also in the broader sense
of immaterial, mentally framed notions conveyed by the word "images".
He initially summarizes the response to the wish suggested by the
images quite generally in the formula of "being loved"; under the
conditions of competition exacerbated under the attention economy, this
means: being noticed and respected, observed and adored or feared, in
short being perceived and taken seriously.
Which images meet these criteria of such a strong image? Mitchell draws
a historically broad arch, giving examples from the most diverse
registers. He bases his ideas to the same extent on art-historically
proven examples such as Géricault's stirring painting The Raft of the
Medusa from 1819 as well as couplings of image and text on the question
of the gaze regime, such as Barbara Kruger's untitled work from 1981,
on which the sentence "Your gaze hits the side of my face" is printed
above the half-profile of an almost expressionless, smoothed head of a
woman. He explores the imaginary worlds of cyberspace and the mass
media images of fears of the future like the cloned sheep Dolly that
mark an era. And he links Byzantine depictions of Christ from the 11th
century, in which Jesus seems to look directly at the viewer, with the
genealogy of the "I want you" recruitment posters for the US army that
are similarly structured in terms of picture composition. (These
posters call the viewer to battle with a raised forefinger and have
generated a plethora of successor images up to the present, which make
use of the proven power of suggestion of this pictorial rhetoric, in
part to circulate contrary messages like an "Uncle Osama" call.)
In Gottfried Helnwein's portrait works and in his decades of attention
to the forms of expression and textures of the human face, he has
repeatedly made use of a form of representation that compels the viewer
to an almost mirror-like confrontation with the gaze of the imaginary
other. Pictures like the untitled portrait of a girl in semi-darkness
from 1998 or its male counterpart Untitled (Modern Sleep) from 2005,
showing a frontal view of a child's face against a black background,
almost completely overshadowed on the right by light coming from the
left, exemplify the character of a direct appellation to the viewer -
with a clear affinity to the examples discussed by Mitchell. In the
same way that Uncle Sam confronts the viewer with his "I want you", the
two face studies necessitate - more than other images, whether they
are artistic or from mass media - being perceived, "being loved".
What does this affective added value derive from? First of all, it is
obviously due to the overwhelming effect of a tendency to
monumentalization that has meanwhile become typical for Helnwein. The
"detail" picture size of 189 x 131 cm imbues the portrait with
something glorified, sublime, larger than life. In some projects
Helnwein also couples the monumentalness with another moment that
counters the "decay of the aura" that Benjamin noted, namely the
specific place of the artwork. According to Benjamin, it is solely this
singularity of place ensuring the aura, which marks the ontological
difference between the original picture and the place-less copy. Yet if
reproduction destroys this unique quality by cutting off the
topological connection to space, then the converse conclusion also
seems to suggest itself, namely the possibility of working on a
reanimation of the aura by reintroducing a topological coupling of the
artwork (that is quite capable of being reproduced) and the
(non-reproducible material) place. It seems as though this is what
Helnwein might have had in mind, for example when he unrolled the
approximately 6 x 18 m large pictures from the series Modern Sleep
before the audience at the Santa Monica airport in 2003, or when the
Kinderkopf (Child's Head) measuring 6 x 4 m functioned as a massive
architectonic intervention in the interior of the former Dominican
church in Krems, Austria, in 1999. Both of these projects identify
Helnwein as an artist concerned with the re-auratization of the image.
He himself, however, already closed with this concept - obviously
precipitately - at the start of his career: "I assumed that in the
age of reproduction, the 'aura' of a picture no longer had any
significance. I was enthusiastic about the apparently unlimited
possibilities of reproduction and communication technologies, and for
some time I only regarded the original as an intermediate product
('high-grade refuse') in the reproduction process."
Today, however, in the children's faces works such as Untitled (Modern
Sleep) Gottfried Helnwein models a charged relationship between
contextual evacuation and expressive condensation. He hierarchizes
picture sections for the benefit of a promise of effect: nothing should
distract from the human detail, from the purified expression in all its
interpretive openness. Unlike many other, especially earlier works,
which dealt again and again explicitly with Austrian history, here
Helnwein sacrifices narration to the strangely opaque object's shiny
contours set in sharp contrasts. In the reduction of its subject
matter, the image rejects any superficial message. The face in it is
surrounded by an inscrutable black that repulses meaning, the neck
delimited by a black fantasy uniform adorned with silver. The silenced
mimic suggests an in-between realm between life and death. Again and
again Helnwein stimulates the phantom-like, sometimes almost eerie
appearance of the imaginary wraiths of children from the opposition of
photorealistic depiction and the absence of contextuality that seems to
"freeze" the image.
The artistic interest in staging the uncanny - the turning effect
that makes the familiar unfamiliar - is especially evident in picture
series like Sleep (2004). Steeped in sickly, morbid and cold nuances of
blue and black, here a girl's head is suspended between presence and
absence, between magical animation and visual fade-out. Helnwein
translates the more or less fading memory of the vitality of a figure
into several snapshots, which seem erratically frozen, however, as
though they wanted to step out of temporal order altogether. Thus the
girl with closed eyes, her face turned away in semi-darkness with few
contrasts, eludes the voyeuristic intrusiveness of the viewer (Sleep
5), only to turn suddenly in another variation and directly fix the
viewer with the open eyes of the undead (Sleep 9).
If it is characteristic of (artistically formed) atmospheres that the
ontological boundary between the world of the subject and the world of
the object is blurred , then Gottfried Helnwein must be regarded as an
extremely "atmospheric" artist. His often considerable production
effort serves the creation of aesthetic coherence in the form of
atmospherically dense works. This production is carried out, however,
against the background of a notorious pleasure in both cultural and
media experimentation. The former "shock" painter and media graphics
artist who emigrated to Los Angeles not only has a close relationship
to US American pop culture, which is manifested in his preference for
Walt Disney, Hollywood film stills or the gothic look of his congenial
musician friend Marilyn Manson. It is also possible to trace an
iconographic interest in the fascination of the heavy signs of politics
and religion or in art-historically canonized motifs like romantic
nature in the example of his deserted paintings of Irish landscapes.
Yet this Austrian artist also hybridizes his production methods in
terms of media as well. It is not only the well known competitive
relationship between painting and photography that the artist takes
into consideration in his choice of subject matter. Like the painter
Gerhard Richter with his famous blur principle based on photography, or
the photographer Thomas Ruff in his purposely blurred "Nudes", which
are conversely based on porno images downloaded from the Internet,
Helnwein superimposes various formal conventions of depiction once
reserved for a specific media utilization. The sensuousness of his
hyperreal works is hence not only the result of a mimetic naturalism,
but is instead first developed through the layer-like distortion of the
image using various techniques. As Helnwein explains his working
method: "I distinguish between purely photographic works, which often
lead through many stations and sources like collage and computer
manipulation to the final print, and mixed media works, which are
essentially oil and acrylic paintings, but are subject to a process of
creation similar to the photos. As soon as I have the image I want, it
is either projected onto the canvas and traced in outlines, or it is
digitally printed on the canvas in a rough form and then further
developed in 'old masters' method. First in acrylic, then in oil. The
depicted people, objects and spaces in my pictures are from various
archives (L.A. Public Library, Bavarian State Archive, etc.), from
newspapers, magazines, books, and from people, objects and places I
have photographed myself."
The point of this visual interruption directed against transience and a
tendency to inflation in the (mass) media circulation of images, is
that the exchangeability of images is to be halted specifically with
the media technology means of production that promote it. Helnwein uses
digital image manipulation to counter the virtualization of the image.
He works with the means of technical reproducibility to
re-create/re-attain the aura. Especially in his variations on the
"innocent", decontextualized child's face, which appears to be detached
from the flow of history, he seeks to retain or return to the images a
moment of transcendence. This is naturally a dramatic gesture.
Gottfried Helnwein has always been concerned with the theme of
depicting suffering. In the 1970s and the 1980s he frequently used the
spectacular shock of exaggeration, provocation, grotesque forms and the
grimacing mimic of tormented individuals. Sometimes grotesquely
distorted, sometimes bandaged and held together with surgical staples
like the Actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler in his day, they cried out
their suffering to the world. Helnwein (who often made self-portraits
in similar poses) also frequently linked their suffering with the
inherited burden of National-Socialism and Catholicism and the
authoritarian, repressive climate of post-war Austria in the picture.
At the time Helnwein was often called a media provocateur for
speculating with the overwhelming force of these kinds of scenarios and
suspected of kitsch. And indeed, in the sense of the opposition between
avant-garde and kitsch as proposed by the influential US American art
critic Clement Greenberg in 1939, that second-hand "experience" and
feigned feeling , Helnwein is certainly not to be counted among the
avant-garde, who are essentially defined, according to Greenberg, by
self-reflection on the respective artistic medium. For the purist
conceptualism of this kind of concept of avant-garde specifically
postulates the inadequacy of an illustrative figurativeness in
painting. Avant-garde, understood as the applied (self-) criticism of
aesthetic decisions and procedures, was thus irrevocably opposed to the
sensationalist eclecticism of kitsch, which primarily aimed to mobilize
emotions: "If the avant-garde imitates the procedures of art, then
kitsch, as we see it today, imitates its effects."
Today, of course, this kind of emotionalization of the avant-garde
itself looks like kitsch. Kitsch and a productive, interesting way of
dealing with strategies susceptible to kitsch cannot be cleanly
separated from one another and certainly not for all time. What may
have seemed truthful to us yesterday may already look like kitsch
today. Kitsch is a relation, an attribution, but not an essential
quality. Kitsch is therefore the object of social agreements, whose
recoding is subject to the formation of fronts based on judgments of
taste and the will to distinction.
Of course, the current studies on the face already rely less on
effect-seeking, expressive drasticness. Rather, Gottfried Helnwein
masks a possible mental turmoil or traumatization of his picture
models, which might be suggested, for example, by the black, seemingly
fascistoid and fetishized uniform parts, behind the posed expression of
his children's faces. Like Laocoon, these "beautiful" children that
seem as though carved from wax, no longer cry out. They bear something
that is not named and yet is visible. In their intimacy, they
communicate an unfathomable inscrutability. The viewer's irritation
arises from not being able to find a clue to this mystery. The wound is
to be kept open and no one should be allowed to heal it.
Niklas Luhmann: Die Realität der Massenmedien, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 9.
Hans Belting, Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen, Munich
2005, p. 25.
W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of
Images, Chicago 2005.
Mitchell, op.cit., p. 11.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction", in: ibid., Illuminations, Pimlico edition, London 1999,
p. 214-216.
Gottfried Helnwein in an email interview with the author, 2005.
Cf. Ilka Becker: "Körper, Atmosphärik and künstlerische Fotografie",
in: Tom Holert (Ed.), Imagineering, Cologne 2000, p. 187.
Gottfried Helnwein in an email interview with the author, 2005.
Clement Greenberg: "Avantgarde und Kitsch", in: ibid., Die Essenz der
Moderne (Ed. Karlheiz Lüdeking), Amsterdam-Dresden 1997, p. 40.
Greenberg, op.cit., p. 47.
FACE IT.
Gottfried Helnwein
One man show
10. March 2006 - 12. June 2006
Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz
Chief curator - Stella Rollig