The Phenomenon’s essential Substance

Christine Frisinghelli, E.P. zugeeignet

Hartmut Skerbisch’s artistic project strikes one as work in the space between conceptual and perceptual art. On the one hand, there is his conceptual clarity in representing given situations and in arranging materials as a basis of relating thought; on the other, the creation of physical connections between materials in a given spatial situation so that constellations become „palpable”. [1] The selection, isolation and arrangement of things and materials, the stageing of their factual physical presence is realised in complex spatial constellations that refer, at the same time, to nothing but the situation itself (lt Is, Now Spaces, Now Generator, Presence as Presence … ) and thus become points of departure for the viewer’s thought and potential experience. The viewer’s space of identification and experience is defined as the actual working location. Skerbisch’s works thus fulfill the claim of being „decentralised” art (that is, an art executed only in cooperation with the viewer), as the following two project descriptions show: „The leafy speafing situation exists as soon as the viewer begins to refer the image on the monitor to his own breath rhythm.” / „A person perceiving the elements of situation B finds himself in identical emulation of the situation, so that the piece is completed.” Skerbisch follows the principles of concept art („Ideas are better expressed through numbers, photographs, words or any means of the artist’s choice”), [2] particularly when his work employs communication techniques like writing, language or text, electricity, TV or photography. The treatment of these media as material, their working as a physical impact (for instance on space) and the context they can be tied into by language (writing) form an ever general, ever open (egalitarian) base of perception and interpretation. In his work, Skerbisch employs media (exhibiting their products and the way they work) that represent and interfere with our views of the world and illustrate our desire for knowledge (information, which is also order and control): Video and Language in his Spatial Arrangement, (Putting Allspace in a Notshall /Putting Allspace in a Nutshell), 1969 / television in The Monitor Speaks Its Own Lan(g)uage, 1976, in Sceptre and Gleaming Stone, 1977 / television and language in n x 4 Reproductions, 1979 / photography in Scenes from the Play of the Same Title, 1980 to 1990 and All Have Seen All, 1990 (the two latter works in collaboration with Michael Schuster) and in Image Rendition, 1994. These works deal with the media themselves, with the way they appear and work in their material quality and their „underlying world-feigning execution ” [3] : signals, light, colors, language, moving and static images; the seemingly possible bridging of spatial distances, the apparent simultaneity of all that is happening, the duplication of world in reality-analogue images.

With the inclusion of photography (representing a caesure in the theory and practice of mimesis) into the catalogue of employed materials/media, their specific properties are also put on show; the openness of their semiotic character; their potentially innate serial character; their indexicality and the archival; the evocation of reality, but also the imperfections of the photographic record and its lack of materiality; the dependence of meaning on context and commentary. The culturally imprinted expectations we place in the medium of photography – the belief and trust we maintain against better knowledge – are proof of the credibility the medium gains from the reality effect, the „éffet du réel” (a term used by Roland Barthes in connection with photography) to which it owes its unbroken power of conviction. In the photographic image, the viewer’s perspective coincides with that of the recording apparatus (and of the photographer). In the moment the photograph emerges, it deletes the process of its creation: lt seems to emerge from itself, wherein its greatest power of conviction is expressed – a power that satisfies our desire for objectivity and for a mimetic, „true” depiction.

When Hartmut Skerbisch, in his photo/text work n x 4 Reproductions on Cibachrome, 1979, reproduces a Polaroid instant photograph, blows it up twice on Cibachrome and adds to both identical images the caption Paradise and Downfall, his procedure hints at a degree of levelling out the messages of image and text which results, like his Now Spaces, in a Zero Party, in a party that neutralises history and meaning, a „Party for Nothing, that is, for the presence as presence and for existence as existence, since all our histories, our entire past, all our utopias – our perpetual tasks that guide and give depth to our spiritual lives – are increasingly available as information outside ourselves, impressing us less and less as cheap backdrops to any arbitrary situation. ” [4]

Here, photography’s innate potential seriality (also to be understood, with Sartre, as a „plurality of isolations”) is refracted through the instant principle and the unicate character of Polaroid photography; through reproduction and duplication. This is again cancelled in the following step – the combination, once more, with seemingly contradictory terms: Paradise and Downfall dissolves the series (as presence of two identical images), and the individual image is defined in its (apparently concrete) meaning by the text. The aesthetics of reproduction by duplication of images and concepts, the impossibility of message and identification, tautology as the basic quality of photography as a medium form the structure of this work. Collaboration again brings into play the concept of „ decentralisation” (the work is only completed in the reception, in the viewer’s assembling individual elements) in Scene from the Play of the Same Title, 1980 -1990, by Michael Schuster and Hartmut Skerbisch. Here the two artists evoked a condition wherein we may already be living: the state of „All Have Seen All“.

Staged” as a work in progress, the project starts with the photograph of a theatre entrance situation where a title transparency announces the performance of a „Scene from the Play of the Same Title”. „ The point of departure is PHOTOGRAPHY – photography as an image production machinery with its own rules that forces an us its principles, – not photography as an optical illustration of extra-photographic conditions. And, in connection with this, the measure to designate all scenes occurring in this work, those arranged in reality and those photographically rendered, consistently as „Scene from the Play of the Same Title”. [5]

The title Scene from the Play of the Same Title designates a situation that served as a context for individual, even future stages and stageings of the work, however diverse (these were, for instance, a post card edition, the stageing of an exhibition at the Forum Stadtpark as a „scene” where the postcard display reappeared as an exhibit; photographs of the situation „exhibition opening” that were incorporated into the work as „scenes “; a lecture/projection at the „Symposium on Photography IV”; a publication in „Camera Austria” – or individual image objects (like the camera object „Hasselblad with four lenses “, assembled from original components, reproduced and complemented by the statement „All Have Seen All” as a silk print edition). The contextual bracket was based on the fact that „all situations are based on what is realised in photography: with each image: production of a Scene from the Play of the Same Title: stageing of a piece titled „Scene”.

Thus the functions of photography itself become the object of exploration in Scene from the Play of the Same Title“; at the same time, they are the tool by means of which the exploration is performed: All elements of the work, all individual scenes of this play „that could be the world” are photographic in their nature, and they merely represent what photography does and what has become of our images of the world with the emergence of photography: „Scene from the Play of the Same Title, as well as photography, presents, with each image, a world of standstill and, in connection with it, the impression that everything rendered has taken place in order to be the content of an image. And it so happens that we also live that way.” [6] Or, perhaps, in order to gain distance and (perhaps also) to once more enable observation: „ The photographic image presents its scene as a paragon of death. ” [7]

[1] „NOW-SPHERE – all feel all“,

in: JETZT-GENERATOR,

folder, Galerie Krinzinger,

Innsbruck 1980

[2] Sol Le Witt, Paragraphs

on Conceptual Art.

In: Artforum 10, 1967, p. 79.

Quote from: Über Kunst,

Cologne 1974, p. 177.

[3] See fig. 17-19, S. 28.

„Within the same perceptions that normally guide the mind wherever it moves, it is here brought into the underlying world-feigning execution.“

[4] H. Skerbisch, Null-Party in der Jetzt-Dub-Disco,

information sheet, Galerie H., Graz 1981 and

Putting Allspace in a Notshall,

Verlag Droschl: Graz, 1981.

[5] Michael Schuster, Hartmut Skerbisch,

Scene from the Play of the Same Title, documentation,

CAMERA AUSTRIA Nr. 5,

Forum Stadtpark, Graz 1981, p. 12.

[6] Michael Schuster, Hartmut Skerbisch,

All have seen all,

CAMERA AUSTRIA Nr. 11/12,

Forum Stadtpark, Graz 1983, p. 88

[7] Fig. 35, Image Rendition, 1994, p. 58, 59.