When the Body Vanishes
by Marc Peschke
translation by Catherine Framm
You can’t escape them. They crowd into your field of vision. They
jump out at you from newspapers, TV, internet and magazines. They sink
their teeth into you. Images of nudity and nakedness are ubiquitous, are
part and parcel of the system. They’re made to be a turn-on. They
demand us to look. They want us not to just click it away. Want us to
buy. Never mind what. Anything. They are hackneyed, they are unavoidable,
they penetrate without asking. They are calculating and staged –
and yet in their very triteness they convey the message of a promise.
Among other projects, the Berlin-based artist Peter Freitag has been
working on the subject of pornographic images. He is not the first. Especially
Thomas Ruff’s "Nudes", digital re-workings of pornographic
pictures found in the internet, have come to the attention of the public.
With their Gerhard Richter blur filter-like fuzziness, they make some
of the erotic ennui perceptible that the perpetual consumer of porn may
experience.
"Private Stages" is what Peter Freitag calls his series, the
point of departure of which is the search for pornographic photos in the
internet. The artist is interested in their interiors; he is searching
for that which is private, for a particular ambience, an atmosphere in
space that suggests intimacy and authenticity. He is searching for pictures
that bear a promise within them that as pictures they will never be able
to keep – projection screens for evermore. He prints the internet
pictures and then uses an unusual artistic technique: with a hole punch,
he cuts small circles out of the pictures – then reassembles them
as collage. Concealing and revealing at one and the same time.
By the fragmentation of that which was once whole, by combining different
contexts, and creating new correlations through collage, Freitag, in this
age of digital - photographic disarray, has succeeded in the use of a
technically traditional but extremely effective device. The technique
of collage has been chosen with precision as a way of creating a picture
of the failure of pornography – pornography does not keep its promise,
awakening desire that ultimately can not be satisfied.
Collage in this case is: de-collage, de-contextualization, but also
re-construction. The assemblage of the small, colorful dots into new body
shapes seems an appropriate response to the tangled mass of endlessly
reproduced images from advertising and pornography, whose message above
all is: take me. Buy me. But now there is nothing left to buy, not even
to look at. In the newly collaged pictures, that which was once central
has now disappeared. The body becomes distorted, disappears, dissolves,
disintegrates, becomes an ornament, a decoration.
On the other hand, the surrounding objects and space take on new importance.
There where a body once lay with legs spread wide, promising lasciviousness,
there now lies a cluster of closely nestled dots that form a new body
with their contour. But no skin is to be seen in these little round scraps.
On the contrary – there is nothing but bedding, sofa coverings,
or other interior surfaces that the artist has punched out of a second
copy of the same picture. Before us we see staged privacy, fake pretences
of a private world, modelled living space, backdrops in front of which
the pornographic production is staged. But this same production has disappeared
under the blade of the hole punching low-tech re-toucher. What is left
is a space full of promises – and disappointed expectations.
The pictures created in this way bear fictitious but personal women’s
names like "Iris", "Esther" or "Janine".
They are names that Peter Freitag has affectionately be-stowed upon his
anonymous models. They convey an idea of how each of these internet-women
actually looks. The pictures that have been literally "emptied"
now reveal their function as containers for the desires and longings of
the observer. Thus, the personalized picture, "Iris", is a "projection
container" of the many ideas and associations one might have of an
Iris.
These works have a lot to them. The reality of pornography is still
there, but the work also takes it a step further, going beyond the pornographic
– and, the delight in the actual technical process is always present.
When Freitag says he could hardly stop making these little collages, one
takes him at his word: he is addicted to pictures, an addiction that reminds
of another addiction rampant especially in the USA. Perhaps the most popular
victim of this addiction (to pornographic pictures) is Anthony Kiedis,
the Red Hot Chili Peppers vocalist – a man who has had completely
real physical sex with the likes of Heidi Klum, Sofia Coppola, Madonna
and some thousand other women. But early last year Kiedis publicly admitted
to being addicted to pornography. According to a US neurologist the fault
seems to lie in a particular area of the brain that is activated by pornographic
images. Therefore, men have to like pornography.
But back to Freitag’s works: These small, delicately framed cut-out
pictures are exquisite jewels of cultural transformation. They are linked
to a long tradition of art that questions outer beauty and tears apart,
cuts up, perforates that which with its hollowness, boredom and commercial
exploitation no longer promises happiness for us anyway.
Peter Freitag himself uses the term "found footage" to refer
to his acquisition of material from mass media for his art. The term comes
from experimental film and refers to films that consist of extrinsic film
material. "Why should we invent a new aesthetic when we already have
one", Boris Groys rightly asks in this context. Peter Freitag cuts
up pseudo-reality, cracks its cohesiveness, exposes its inner contradictions,
transforms its body image, revealing the contrived quality of pornographic
pictures, illustrating their failure. Yet along with all this, he manages
to transport into the new picture a bit of their promise.
Boris Groys is surely right – but: why read Boris Groys when we
could be browsing through this wonderful sex booklet? It’s got everything:
irony, beauty, contradictions, the digital as well as the analog, art,
life, sex and their opposite. As the art theorist successors of Foucault
have been telling us for decades – the body is vanishing. It seems
to me that someone has come and pasted over brand-new pictures, grazing
dead-on this very loss.
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