Klaus Honnef (Director of photograph collection in Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn)
From Image to Phantom
Jürgen Klauke's Main Photographic Works
Very early, earlier than most visual artists in Europe and the USA, Jürgen Klauke discovered photography as a very suitable means for lending his artistic concepts form. From the beginning, however, he approached the medium of photography with a critical view and neither succumbed to the "look of the object" that spread its demand for authentic representation of the visible, nor did he suffice himself with the illustration of its manifold phenomenological aspects. Rather, he immediately made it usable for his artistic purposes and quickly made his mark of distinctive artistic individuality on photography. Although use of the technical medium had a more playful character at the time being, it is no product of chance. Rather, it results from an artistic position that, in the entourage of Process Art and Concept Art, dep“arts from the conventional conception of art and follows a direction for which Joseph Beuys had opened up a new artistic horizon with his programmatic formula of a "broadened concept of art". Klauke was one of the first artists to scout out what were then unknown territories which opened themselves to art.
An artist like Klauke had to first conquer for art what, thirty years later, seems to be a given that one hardly wastes words over. An artistic strategy based upon an intermedia approach making use of the most different media in order to attain its meaning was anything other than a given at the time. Just as little a given was a mixing of the artistic disciplines theater, visual art (traditions like painting, sculpture and drawing) and film; of the hand-crafted disciplines; and of technical and electronic media. Klauke had already stood out as a drawer and as a graphic artist. He had employed newspapers and books to convey his artistic concepts. With his often provoking performances with which he became further known in Europe, theatrical forms were pulled into artistic practice. Thanks to theatrical forms and the theories of Concept Art formulated shortly beforehand, the momentum of what is fleeting and the ephemeral made an entrance into art and shook the status of the artwork as an object. The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno recognized what was revolutionary in the artistic development and logically spoke of a "fraying" of the arts. For Jürgen Klauke, photography was therefore only one medium among many applied in order to reach his artistic goals. Nevertheless, the photographic works recall a meaningful chapter of his art. Also, there is no doubt that, enabled by his artistic imagination and innovative ability, photography in Germany and in Europe has become the preferred medium of contemporary high art. Though to apostrophize Klauke as a photographic artist would not reach far enough. Still, only his photographic works are under discussion here.
Jürgen Klauke approached photography with the uninhibitedness of an artist - without special interest for its history and specific aesthetic, but with an unwavering sense that photography stages everything it portrays and that the constantly sworn "authenticity" of what is photographed is founded in the inherent tendency of the medium to stage instead of "objectively" represent the image that it depicts from the visible world. As photography formally cuts out, freezes and ossifies the flashing moment of what is visible from the net of coordinates in space and time, it does not fix a representation of what visibly exists, but rather sketches out a projection screen for the various methods of portraying what is staged. His extensive experience as a performance artist has surely sharpened Klauke's feel for the artificiality of the medium as well as his inherent ability to metam…orphose facts into fiction.
Indeed, the artist's first remarkable photographic works also fulfilled documentary intentions, especially in reference to his striking contribution to Body and Performance Art. But from the very beginning, at the time intuitively, later decidedly and consciously, he believed in the momentum of staging in photography. At the same time, his performances intensified certain sides of reality thanks to thought out dramaturgy and consequently raised it to an aesthetic level. His photographic works completely shift the boundaries between art and reality to the advantage of photography's autonomously determined reality. Because photography's specific technique of depiction - historically speaking - is the medium that reproduces empirical reality more exactly than all previous methods, it inevitably created the impression of the duplication of reality. In the photographic images the visible reality returns as specter. The French film “critic André Bazin caught sight of the magical qualities in this. These qualities fit in with Klauke's artistic visions. "Me, Myself & I" (1970) was the telling title of his first important publication, a small book with essays, drawings and photographs of different provenance. It allows a view into the complex structure of his artistic universe in which anthropological, sociological and psychological references cross. The differentiation of human identity and the unfolding of the "subject as manyness" (Nicolaus Sombart) in "Me, Myself & I" are already called up amongst the dominant subjects of his art and the medium photography supplies him with the concrete example.
In the informative group of works "Self Performance" (the start of the paradigmatic photographic works) the artist metamorphoses in front of the camera from a male into a female protagonist. This metamorphosis is not completed in a continuing course as the description suggests. Rather, the single imªages of the photographic sequence represent single stations of the metamorphosis outside of narrative or chronological logic though every station remains strangely ambivalent. In the seventies, Jürgen Klauke is almost the only protagonist of his photographs consisting of several parts. He constructs a sort of crystallization figure for the outer-artistic influences of his artistic exploration. The supposed self-portrait mirrors - in the words of Lischka - a portrait of the society Klauke is a member of. This self-portrait hides itself as well as reveals itself as though behind changing masks in "Self Performance". What Klauke performs is, on one hand, the game of never-ending role changing. On the other hand, it is the subcutaneous hermaphrodite in the human being. "Forms emerge that haunt the confused imagination of the viewer as the male-female symbiosis." (Evelyn Weiss) The secret yearning for an androgynous gender resonates in accordan¿ce with the indissoluble unit of man and woman. The last image of "Masculine/Feminine" (1973-74), a thirteen part photographic work, seems to have realized the dream at least in photographic image. Male and female beings melt into one person.
In these photographic images the artist attests to the yearning for the continuity of the forms of being as they exist before birth and after death as well as transiently during the union of the sexes after their dive into the entirety of nature. Human existence realizes itself, on the contrary, in forced discontinuity, in the difference of the sexes, the duality of body and soul, self and world, individual and collective. His photographic series and sequences deal with the unbreakable isolation of the subject and the encystation inside one's own self with painful obviousness. The atmosphere of existential loneliness and despair determines existence in an environment which is foreign in itself. Occasionally —, a latent, ever-present violence bursts out. It springs from different sources. At one moment, Klauke defines it as social. At the next, it shows itself as a universal phenomenon. The unnerving ambivalence it exudes increases its threatening quality. In the photographic works with the significant title "Lust for Life" (1976) the artist demonstrates a number of methods to end one's life with sardonic humor.
For Jürgen Klauke the seventies were a kind of laboratory for artistic experiment. While photography generally lost its significance in the area of relaying news, electronic media having overtaken this business, it raised its aesthetic standards and tested its artistic possibilities. In his work, sequences of images replaced the single-image photography that is in wide professional use. Jürgen Klauke adapted the form of the sequence, which is actually a method of organizing artistic material for film, for his aesthetic purposes. At first he incorporated narrative structures, however, soon moved on to more complex formal organizational structures that also used the space between the single images as a resource for the imagination. Larger tableaus changed the specific character of the photographic image that in the historical use of photographic portraiture almost exclusively extended to having an audience of private viewing, and raised it to having an effect on the public. Contrary to advertising, nevertheless, which operates with similar strategies, Klauke did not put weight on the rhetoric of an overpowering surface effect, but reduced his language to an almost minimalist core and strengthened the ritualized characteristics of his art.
Clear and rigid formal constellations of symbolic precision as well as sculptural volume; barely or slightly varied repetitions of the unchanging, constrictingly empty spaces; an oppressing silence and melancholic atmosphere are the pr∆ofound characteristics of his masterpiece "Formalization of Boredom" (1979/1982) with which he impressively took stock of his artistic-aesthetic efforts until that time. This multi-piece and multi-form work that Klauke had planned from the beginning with numerous designed drawings to be executed in photographs is made up of large photographs, photographic tableaus, photographic sequences, a performance and a film. It plays upon all the motifs in his previous work, but adds a new formal dimension, namely, the third dimension of acutely empirical space as a necessary part of the artistic work. The work "Formalization of Boredom" is an environment. The photographic work transforms the concrete space of immediate experience into an imaginary space of transcendental experience without solid contours and boundaries. The spatial staging of the photographic images evokes not only a fully unusual feel for space, but an odd feel for time. The law of chronologicaœl time suddenly seems obsolete. Time itself stands still. The three protagonists, among them the artist, present themselves on the plates as though paralyzed. On the plates and in the sequences, processes only appear as extremely reduced and compressed into ciphers. Time visualizes itself in space. At the same time, the empirical space becomes the pictorial space and the specifics of the photographic setting become the actual motif. Prescribed lines regarding perception do not exist. Often only the props dominate the otherwise emptied scene - anonymous suits, chairs, a bucket, sometimes a television in multiple reproduction. Tension that does not want to dissolve puts its mark on the entirety. The formalized boredom reveals itself as the staging of what is not happening, of nothingness. "If nothingness blooms in signs, if non-being emerges in the heart of the sign system the inherent occurrence of art takes place." (Jean Baudrillard)
As far as the artist purpo›sely interacted with the concrete space of sensory experience and formed it with his photographic works, he interfered with the context of what is social and overcame the position of that Modernism which exclusively confined itself to the proclamation of the autonomous artwork. Considering a society whose conscience and behavior is being manipulated with growing intensity by the flow of images in mass media, this position seems socio-politically and historically outdated. Thus, Klauke increased and condensed the strata of the social sphere in both photographic cycles begun in the eighties and sometimes parallel or simultaneously realized: "Sunday Neuroses" (1990/91) and "Prosecuritas" (1986/94). The capital work groups correspond with each other in content and reflect two sides of one and the same thing; outer and inner world; individual as well as collective state of being at the end of the century under the influence of an overwhelming media apparatus. Therefore, it is no wonder that with the shift of the focus of attention from the Self onto the world of objects and others, as well as their relationship to the Self and vise versa, the specific implications of the medium that Klauke principally employs appear in the field of vision. "Prosecuritas" and "Sunday Neuroses" make the medium photography a theme and set their sites upon it from different poles. Seeming and being are the central poles, but do not articulate themselves as solidly outlined, reliable definitions in either photographic work. As the identity of the "persona" dissolved in Klauke's earlier work groups, the importance of the conceptuality of being and seeming loses its certainty in the later work groups.
Above and beyond that, the artist also annuls the established rules of the pictorial system in photography. In the series "Sunday Neuroses", verticals and horizontals continually balance out against each other and the images that are usually unified into tableaus or series cancel out the central-perspective organization of the photographic form of presentation in single-image photography. They repeat the form of presentation with a special type of combination up to the point of tautology and permanently shift the barely conceivable focus in a regular up and down rhythm. Considering the different image ensembles, the anthropocentric view of the observation is forfeited and the viewed no longer unfolds from the viewpoint of one single precisely established place. Lavish means of printing, sometimes color prints, additionally lend the photographic environment an occasional metaphysical quality. It opens the viewers an emotional path leading to the series' content. What the series suggest through polished staging and support through a special order is transferred directly onto the observer's capability to perceive. The observers quickly give up their status as observers and, once they have an orientation that is nimble and flexible, become co-creators of the works. Jürgen Klauke realized a new time-space relationship with photographic and artistic means that presents a vivid equivalent to the developments in the natural sciences of the time. He is one of the few artists who succeeded in liberating photography from the cinders of the illusionist ideology of days past.
While the artist still bound the symbol to the physical body in "Sunday Neuroses" so that he was able to demonstrate the emotional expression in the gesture of presentation, he drove the process of reduction above and beyond the vertex of the concrete world in "Prosecuritas". Symbolic-sculptural bodies or metaphor-filled objects no longer populate the larger pictures, but instead phantom-like shapes and tools, devoid of every bodily essence, silhouettes on white, transparencies on dark ground, bare reflections of material existence. Klauke changed the function of an X-ray machine used to lull passengers into a feeling of security at international airports to an artistic tool. On one hand, he made a connection to the pre-photographic practice of the phonogram with this project. On the other hand, he aimed at the "virtual reality" of the digital world of photography and television with its deceptive sparkle. Klauke destroys the seductive glamour and reduces it back to its skeleton-like essence and confronts the smooth images of mass media with fearful shadows of a final-days vision. For the X-ray machine's screen, the artist created a bizarre universe out of the props of his artistic imagination sometimes employing his own body. He photographed the reflexes of the installation in the machine's monitor shaft and, finally, reworked, enlarged, and sometimes also copied the photographs on top of each other. For art, this kicked open the door to an unknown, but no less existing world of a secularized epiphany. Appearance incorporated being. "Klauke pushed visibility to its extreme where only rays are visible. He has plunged into a zone of final visibility and the final images. His final images show us a ghostly reality consisting of light particles and traces of rays, the media world of the post-industrial age made up of phantoms and matrices." (Peter Weibel)
In contemporary art, Jürgen Klauke is a singular figure. His work sovereignly asserts itself in an art world that often leans toward superficiality through an aesthetic statement which is not open to compromise. The technical and electronic media are instruments of his art, never self-fulfilling and he does not submit to their fascination. Especially in Europe, his influence on artistic thought is enormous. Thus, the emphasized consciousness of the body and the heightened sensibility of the threat to the physical as well as psychological integrity of the individual in artistic discussion before the turn of the millennium is also a result of his artistic work. Klauke is definitely not the only artist of his generation to throw out these questions and formulate in an aesthetic gestalt. Bruce Naumann, Christian Boltanski and Cindy Sherman move in the same field, but Jürgen Klauke's view is more comprehensive, constantly aiming to elucidate the relationships of human existence and steps out of the frame of pure aesthetics with a mastering of the use of artistic tools.
(translation from German by Rosanne Altstatt)
Literature