Wien. Twelve black-and-white photographs are laid on the hot ring of an old stove in a structured sequence until each of them goes up in smoke, leaving charred remains. The whole process is accompanied by a commentary with an autobiographical twist, narrated by Michael Snow, always talking about the following image, not about the one burning up for all to see at that very moment. A small lesson about the fundamentally diverse qualities of language and images, about the work of remembering and also about the asynchronicity of image and sound, or rather about non-linear narrative forms, which have a long and multi-faceted tradition in art and avant-garde film. I’m referring to the 1971 film »Nostalgia« (16mm, 36 min) by American film/video director, writer, theoretician and photographer, Hollis Frampton, which is the centrepiece in the exhibition »Blows into microphone…«, »not curated« – as the invitation coquettishly phrased it - by Achim Lengerer. However in the exhibition the film itself and other works by Frampton - whose initials, HF, are a kind of logo in North America, although in Europe »only« a restricted circle can decipher them - remain an absent presence, for it was not until nearly the end of the exhibition that these were presented in the context of a small two-part extended programme in the Votiv cinema. Rather than counting on somehow conveying the message through a discursive or other accompanying programme, »das label für produktion«, which sees itself in the role of publisher and includes Lengerer, relies on an intelligent, permeable exhibition display, which sketches out a fabric of enormously diverse references. In this context individual contributions, such as Vroni Schwegler’s etchings or Giovanna Sarti’s paintings, do not simply mark out a spatial Beyond; they reject the notion of a direct reference system pertaining to Frampton’s person or work and open up a broader perspective in the process. Albert Sackl’s analogue film »Vom Innen; von aussen«, which is shot exclusively in single-image shots and here shown in a version specially adapted and reworked for the exhibition, as well as Dani Gal’s »The New Terrorism« installation comprising a record and projected slides could be described as being loosely linked to Frampton’s work. The former shifts the perspective and measuring of coordinates in the filmic space onto his naked body, which jerks, turns on its own axis several times, reproduces itself and uses individual body fragments as a blank screen on which to project this dance of constantly fluctuating proportions. In contrast, Gal seeks to narrate an international history of terrorism cutting through all eras by looking at individual conflicts or events ranging from the French Revolution and the attack on Franz Ferdinand to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, various gang shoot-outs in different parts of the USA and even a plethora of industrial kidnappings in Argentina, Venezuela and Columbia. In the process he deploys image and sound in random interactions – a methodology diametrically opposed to Frampton’s work – and generates a surrogate composed of history (stories) and their mediatisation. Whilst Sharon Lockhart’s photo with the informative title »View from Hollis Frampton’s House in Eaton New York« and Renée Green’s video »Some chance operations«, which considers the production of history through the prism of Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari, are directly related to Frampton as an individual via a quote about the history of photography, Lisa Oppenheim, for example, in her finely accented video »Dioptric« (2003, 10 min), also dedicated to Frampton, refers directly to his methodology. Using a broad range of media formats, such as video, 8mm film, photography, home movies etc., she combines her stories on the sound track about making or observing images with shots of a star-studded sky. Between these – in sections without a voice-over text - she edits in images that are either utterly unrelated or are only tenuously linked to what is being said. Explicit references are also to be found in Achim Lengerer’s sound work, as well as in the video by Michael S. Riedel und Dennis Loesch, which looks like a lousy pirated copy, which, as the title asserts, they produced at »Filmschau 12.11.99 / Frampton, Nostalgia«. This work, filmed from the screen with a video camera, without any sound and utterly disregarding perspective and the heads of the audience looming into the image, zoomed in on individual details of the film »Nostalgia«, ultimately rendering it unrecognisable and indeed unreadable. This destructive »copying process« – akin to that often used by television journalism in a more finely honed form when observing art, albeit often generating exactly the contrary effect – achieves a constructive added value that Lengerer does not attain in the artwork presented here. In his sound installation he has the actor Steve Gander reproduce a lecture by Frampton, which he originally gave in 1979 in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York during a seven-part lecture and screening series, although neither Frampton’s humorous tone nor the topical – now historical – components come into play in the performative translation, In addition, the transcript was published as part of a Frampton special in Kunstmagazin October, Nr. 109, where it also finds its ideal correspondence; in the exhibition the magazine disappears behind glass and mutates into a mere desirable art object. In »Blows into microphone…« Hollis Frampton remains an intangible, imaginary spirit. »Somewhat« beyond an ordering of the visible, which nonetheless makes vision, or rather perception, possible and gives it structure. It is not the author or a conventional concept of the author that is exhibited and exposed, but instead the intermediality of modes of work - appropriating quotations, the most diverse forms of reference or image/sound collages - is made productive. Ultimately the final photo in the film »Nostalgia« also remains unseen, sketched out solely in the narration: »When I came to print the negative an odd thing struck my eye. Something, standing in the cross-street and invisible to me, was reflected in a factory window and then reflected once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door. It was only a tiny detail. Since then, I have enlarged the negative enormously. The grain of the film all but obliterates the features of the image. It is obscure. By any possible reckoning it is hopelessly ambiguous. Nevertheless, what I believe I see recorded in that speck of film fills me with such fear, such utter dread and loathing that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph. Here it is! Look at it! Do you see what I see?«

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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