Hans Dickel
Jürgen Klauke Cindy Sherman
Masquerades of identity Jürgen Kaluke's "male fantasies"
Cantz, Sammlung Goetz, 1994
Translation: Baker & Harrison
"Subjective photography": this was the term Otto Steinert used in 1952 to emphasise the artistic potential of a medium which could "help the individual make full use of his creative rights – not in conflict with technique but by exploiting all possible technical means." "Subjective photography" means humanised, individualised photography (1). After this new assessment of photography, in connection with the debate on the content and media of art in the early seventies, Jürgen Klauke also set out to redefine the relationship between man and photography within the context of art. He no longer employs the technical means of photography to represent "subjective images of individual objects" (O. Steinert), but to record as objectively as possible his theatrical representations of various subjects. By presenting the motif – his own body – in creative forms in front of the camera, he was able to avoid the effects of so-called "Art photography" and instead put photography to new use as the vehicle for his artistic concerns (2).
In the wake of the debate on the relationship between "art and life" during the years of the 1968 student protest movement, which called into question the traditions of artistic production, Klauke used photography as a pictorial representation of the processes which are acted out within life itself. In documenting his dramatisations, the photographs are therefore both authentic and fictitious, and this results in a semiotic ambivalence which gives his pictures their artistic character: "The document is transformed into an artefact in so far as a description of private existence actually becomes the invention of it" (Werner Hofmann) (3). In Klauke's work, photography becomes a technique employed to portray invented figures. These pictures always contain a draft or "premonition" (Ernst Bloch) of possible change – precisely that scope for manoeuvre which art can draw on as compared to life itself.
The transformation of the artist's own self in photographically produced images had already been celebrated by Marcel Duchamp, and he often surprised the observer with androgynous roles, too. Writing in the journal "Camera Work" as early as 1913, the art theorist Marius de Zayas, a New York friend of Duchamp's, drew a sharp distinction between artistic photography and the use of a purely technical process of pictorial representation: "Photography is a process of demonstration or revelation, artistic photography is a means of expression. Man uses photography to depict something that is exterior to himself, whereas artistic photography depicts something within him" (4).
Klauke continues this 20th century tradition of the artistic application of photography by employing it to project an experimentally polymorphous identity. By means of this theatrical representation, he separates "photography as art from its reality as a document, thus making it a medium of self-reflection" (Gerhard J. Lischka) (5).
In contrast to many of his fellow artists who were leaving academy painting classes around 1970, plunging from "art into life" and putting on performances and happenings, Klauke had competed training as a "free graphic artist" when he entered the Cologne art scene in 1969. Photography soon became his preferred medium, being less encumbered by tradition than painting, which was condemned by many avant-gardists at the time as bourgeois and decadent. He was thus able to cover new ground quite early on, and received a positive mention in the press as early as 1969 as a "projectionist of consciousness" (6). Klauke also managed to escape the doctrines of the socialist groups of these years. His subjective view of the inside of human sexual instincts scarcely lent itself to being harnessed as a "germ cell of the revolution"; at best, it was possible to see his pictures as contributing to an "emancipation of desire" (7). However, this kind of programmatic slogan rarely came from the artist himself; Klauke was more interested in liberating a multiple personality, and his deliberately anti-establishment stance of those years could only benefit this fundamental endeavour.
He was therefore particularly interested in the photographic image in terms of its transitional function between "art and life": with the technical means of photography available to him, he was able to express pictorially the experiences which he staged in front of the camera.
Despite the controversial nature of the content, even these early photographs clearly show Klauke's carefully calculated conception: a balanced composition of the figure within the picture, a neutral background such as white walls, dark fabric or rolls of dark-blue paper for the colour photographs of figures posing in red leather, uniform lighting (no light/shade effects), a close-up view and two-dimensional arrangement avoiding any three-dimensional depth within the picture. These representational means direct all attention to the figure and to the inner depths of its erotic and sexual fantasies. The matter-of-fact, dispassionate photographic technique used by Klauke in these years gives the dramatic subjects of his pictures the strict framework from which their explosive physical energy can burst forth. Looking at these photographs, one is unavoidably drawn into and focused on the intimate theme of sexual desire, with the result that the powerful effect of this theme becomes all the more disturbing and provocative. Klauke himself appears in his photo sequences as "Transformer" (1973) between the sexes, and between the possibilities of pictorial representation and the limitations of reality – in other words between art and life.
In 1970, he began to wrap his body with cloth shapes, adorning himself with various forms of bondage, fetters which only served to heighten sensuality – as for example in the sequence "Self Performance" of 1972/73 (p.14/15). An application in the shape of the female genitals and painted with red lips becomes on his body a symbol of feminine lust. In this kind of picture in which he rehearses identities – another example is the sequence "Physiognomies" of 1972/73 (p.12/13) – Klauke acts out certain roles in order to show human beings in their capacity for transformation, and to escape their being pinned down to a single identity.
In the sequence "Masculine-Feminine" of 1975, Klauke presented a symbiosis of the sexes, together with a female assistant: both figures appear entirely shaven, in red leather clothing and lascivious veils, as if in a second skin. In their interaction they seek a rapprochement of self and other, man and woman achieving a visual fusion – "2:1", as Klauke puts it laconically. In "Dr. Müllers Sex-Shop or That's what I think love should be", 1977, p. 20/21) and "Grüße vom Vatikan (Regards from the Vatican", 1976/77), Klauke does not just dramatise his own roles and sexual fantasies, but also those of other people. For these works, he bought a supply of the kind of porno shop stimulants which are intended to revive the defunct eroticism of their owners; in Klauke's dramatisation, however, this artificial theatre of surrogates becomes transformed into an absurd fantasy of rubber penises and plastic dolls which appear to take control of the human figure instead of serving him. Klauke highlights these spare parts of an empty life, thes "Venus in fragments", both in order to lay bear the lie of pornography and to reveal in his work the broad spectrum of eroticism in general. In contrast to this, Cindy Sherman portrays the clumsiness of her protagonist in handling a condom ("Untitled ' 179"), reflecting the loss of sexual freedom resulting from the fear of Aids.
The central theme of Klauke's photographic works of the seventies is the question of male identity, also the subject of Klaus Theweleit’s much-read two-volume study "Männerphantasien" (Male Fantasies, 1977/78). Here, Theweleit describes the socialisation of the military man who forms his ego using "Fragmented body armour", always dependent upon obsessive "survival mechanisms" to assert his dubious identity and set himself apart from everything else – from "women, floods and bodies", from the "bewildering diversity of living things; the more lifeless, ordered and monumental reality seems, the safer these men feel" (8). With his portrayal of polymorphous identity, Klauke was able to contribute to the decline of these conventional ideas of the military man. Drawing on our faith in the authenticity of photography, he reinforces what he hoped to reveal in his performances, namely the facets of a multiple personality. A disconcerting tension is built up between fiction and experience in order to develop the expressive possibilities of a dazzlingly ambi-sexual figure – ranging from a leather fetishist in full gear to a tender young ephebe. With these transformations, Klauke again contributed to the breakdown of the idea of "military men" as described by Theweleit.
In "Viva España" (1976/79), a series without specified sequence, the artist once more includes a female partner. The male figure, stuffed into dark garments, disappears almost headless beneath the outstretched legs of a naked woman, who is performing an acrobatic headstand. The hermaphroditic images of two bodies suggest a (con-)fusion of the sexes.
Some of Klauke's masquerades reveal a certain underlying melancholy, as for example the figure of the wise clown, and one can also identify signs of loneliness and grief in his pictures, for example in the isolation of his figures within the empty space of the photograph. Klauke took up this theme explicitly in several photo sequences: in "Alleinsein ist eine Erfahrung von immer weniger (Loneliness is an experience of less and less", 1975), he expresses a tension between an individual's existence and the superficial pretence of the social role with a portrayal of himself sitting at a table in the company of empty suit jackets. Similar motifs protesting against anything conventional and yet also reflecting a fear of isolation are to be found in the work groups "Melancholie der Stühle (Melancholoy of chairs", 1980), "Auf leisen Sohlen (Treading softly, 1982/3) and "Very de Nada" (1984/5).
After concentrating mainly on the theatre of the erotic in his works of the seventies, he then entered a second stage of his artistic development in the eighties. He now confined his work to black and white photographs, with his own figure playing a less important role in the dramatisations or appearing only in outline as a standardised representation of the human form "Die Ästhetik des Verschwindens (The Aesthetics of Disappearing", 1982/83, p.28/29). Here, Klauke tries to depict social ossification, the clown without a mask, so to speak – in other words the reverse side of his earlier dramatisations. Black men's suits, empty jackets on abandoned chairs or a bucket over the head, all of which signifies a deadening of the senses. The background figures now appear on a par with the inanimate objects, mute props of an all-pervading gloom. These ideas were first given explicit visual expression in the group "Formalisierung der Langeweile" (Formalisation of boredom", 1980, i.e., p. 26/27) in which all individual details are neutralised, with the figures disguised in black and the body language reduced to a bare shorthand. These are images which depict social life brought to a standstill by convention, but they also contain an element of the eccentric which continues to perplex.
In spite of the obvious proximity of Klauke's work to that of Cindy Sherman, it is worth briefly mentioning the differences between them. Sherman confuses us with a clever strategy of affirmation: she tends to adapt her self-dramatisations to our expectations as formed by the images of the mass media instead of playing with the difference between the sexes as Klauke does. With Sherman, the question of identity and its extension has given way to the insight that image and identity are no longer clearly distinguishable in the postmodern subject. Sherman escapes the social obligation that individuals must be identifiable, and her pictures do not so much seek to liberate the multiple personality as to conceal it (9).
Whereas Sherman subverts the superficial magic of women in film and television by first imitating them and then setting them against contrasting elements, Klauke assumes the role of the fool, contrasting his distorted caricatures with the idealised norm of the male image.
Summary
The return to the use of human figures and more tangible subjects, especially noticeable in the photographic art of the seventies, reflects a new interest among the artists concerned in issues relating to their social environment. Photography gained major significance as a medium here, as artists discovered both its authenticity and its potential for the pictorial representation of dramatised subjects. It was these qualities that make it especially suitable for the visualisation of polymorphous identities. As a medium of artistic work, photography in particular achieved a break with the modernist tradition and opened a diverse spectrum of postmodern artistic expression which might be termed "pluralistic", following Wolfang Welsch's definition of postmodern: "The postmodern choice lies in the plurality of lifestyles and actions, of thought patterns and social conceptions, of orientation systems and minorities. (...) Postmodern art perpetuates modern art, but it leaves modernism behind it."(10)
The new discovery of the body as a medium for art resulted in the formulation of figurative images, initially in performances, which were derived from the social environment but which artistic freedom transported beyond the social domain. The use of photography was such that it did not offend against the modernist taboo of objective representation, since the photographs convey a pictorial documentation of scenes which are staged "in front" of the camera.
The creative work of Jürgen Klauke departs unmistakably from the aesthetics of modernism. I have undertaken amore detailed analysis of the postmodern character of his figurative "art with photography" elsewhere.(11) Klauke is one of those artists who went beyond the traditions of modern art in the wake of the student protest movement of 1968 – not by simply applying the existing repertoire of forms to different themes, as is the case with so-called art photography (12), but seeking to overcome the self-centredness of modernism by interweaving the aesthetic and political concerns of their social environment in a novel way.
Notes