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Distance
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. . .we all fall down Alex Rizkalla The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 4 May - 6 July, 1997 Melbourne |
Bernd & Hiller
Becher, |
The monumental photographs
of Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Candida
Höffer are now exhibited and collected by public
galleries worldwide. This touring exhibition, curated by
Wulf Herzogenrath in cooperation with the German
Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations, pays homage to
the crucial role of their less well known mentors, Berndt
and Hilla Becher, who taught them, and a whole generation
of German art photographers from the Düsseldorf Academy
of Art. If their pupils have surpassed them in
achievement and fame, this exhibition allows us to
perceive the pupils' debt to their teachers. And it is
not altogether a benign debt or an untroubled legacy. Very systematically, with ascetic rigour and painstaking precision, the Bechers set about documenting the disappearing industrial landscape: the abandoned factories, water towers, gasometers silos and coal shafts of post-industrial Germany. In an exhaustive series, they shot each building in splendid isolation. All buildings are alike, perfectly centred, uniformly lit, monumentally positioned, finely detailed in printing and austerely colourless. The comprehensive documentation, the recourse to typology and the clinical eye is reminiscent of August Sanders. But where Sanders' documentation of the range of human types populating Weimar Germany was anthropomorphic, the Bechers devote the same documentary zeal and pseudo-scientific precision to obsolete, dead matter. This precision is harnessed to a landscape populated by deserted and silent buildings, a direct contrast to the Neue Sachlichkeit photographers whose interests were in the dynamic and dramatic functionality of the industrial machine. The dedicated pursuit of a dead landscape and it's enshrinement on perfect classical form betrays a certain archaeological bent but also smacks of necrophilia and repressive passion to control. It is a desire whose refusal is to embrace the living, moving and changing present. The dead past is more attractive than the living present because it can be controlled, ordered and designed. The Becher's students have launched into colour and extremely larger formats, as well as a wider range of subjects. Yet they retain a preference for bright natural lighting, a direct gaze which is quasi-scientific and an unsentimental tendency for formal abstraction, all of which takes its toll on the human figure. When present, as in Andreas Gursky's urban landscapes and domestic and public architectural interiors, the human figure is dwarfed. Even in Thomas Struth's more intimate family portraits, the formal posing, unsmiling inscrutability and immobility of the human form works like an empty mirror. The suppression of the live and the human is accompanied by other austerities. Like the Becher's work, Petra Wunderlich's abandoned quarries and urban exteriors are bereft of colour. Axel Hütte's penchant is also for icy abstractions and minimalist colour. In direct contrast to this harshness is Simone Niewig's series of bright and disorderly market gardens and Jörg Sasse's mundane domestic corners. Red hot shower caps on a wall peg, the tightly coiled and twisted hose on a washing machine, the dramatic red bowl on a high top shelf evoke the passions and tensions seething in the nooks of crannies of domestic life. Sasse's work is, however, an aberration in context of this exhibition. While all the photographs are technically impressive and masterful, there's a dead centre at play which represents an extreme endpoint to the German Enlightenment need for the triumph of scientific reason, ordered formality and repressive discipline. There is no attempt to make judgments about the human impersonality of economically rationalist and postindustrial society. The Bechers do not mourn the deju disparu of the industrial landscape but clinically display it like the fossil of a defunct civilisation. Where the Becher's documented the death of industrial capitalism, Candida Höffer treats the problem historically. She documents the death of history and the incarceration of the corpse in the museum. Culturally and geographically linked to Distance and Proximity is Alex Rizkalla's . . . we all fall down. Rizkalla has recently completed an 18-month residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian in Berlin. His latest project documents the body culture of health and hygiene movements in Germany from their leisurely beginnings in the late 19th century to their cooption by the state and apotheosis in Nazi eugenics and militarism. Rizkalla constructs a museum which includes reproductions of old photographs beautiful bodies performing exercise drills in military formations, and glass vitrines stocked with displays of old hospital equipment and prosthetic apparatuses. But in the installation in a second, darkened room, the projection of individual bodies moving lightly and frenetically over a cluster of hospital enamelware suggested that the body can elude discursive and real institutional straightjacketing. Rizkalla suggests that the pleasures of movement and exercise can be liberatory and that aspiration towards free expression survives the harshest regimes of repression. Amid the surrounding doom there's a perceivable hope, or that may be wishful thinking. |
 Andreas Gursky, St Moritz,
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 Jörg Sasse, W-86-02-02, |
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 Alex Rizkalla, . . . we all |
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| Freda Freiberg 1997 |
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© The artists and 
Courtesy of The RMIT Gallery
and Alex Rizkalla
