"Examples for Communication"
by Erik Bakke
onlinemagazine www.indieplanet.com;
NYC; June 8, 2000
on the soloshow of Peter Freitag "Examples for Communication"
Through June 24, 2000
at Clementine Gallery 526 West 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 243-5937
The German artist Peter Freitag's first solo exhibition in New York is
entitled 'Examples of Communication'. The title, like the intention of
the work, is misleading. The Lambda prints of scanned and then altered
images from European travel and resort brochures are anything but straightforward
examples of communication. As the press release states, Freitag "removes
all the props (magazines, toys, drinks, etc.)" and leaves just the
models in these happy hotel and outdoor scenes. Had he just scanned the
images and presented them as prints those may have functioned as "examples
of communication" of the advertising world's methods of attracting
customers to resorts. But once Freitag's "hand" is involved
the works become multi-layered cultural critiques as well as investigations
into the aesthetic. The advertiser's artifice that may or may not work
with the props looks downright eerie with the props gone. The positioning
of a young girl, posed on a hotel bed while the rest of the "family"
peers into the room from outside, looks oddly inappropriate, and the "father"
in his bathing suite heading for a lake to do some swimming, while the
rest of the "family" occupies itself or observes, looks, well,
suspicious. Given that the sources of Freitag's images are so banal it
is intriguing that the images end up looking scary. Yes, scary. I don't
want to know those people and I don't want to be there where they are.
For the sake of contrast one can look at the photographs of Spencer Tunick
where the viewer is not only confronted, usually, with masses of very
real and less than perfect, nude humanity (the volunteers Tunick enlists
for his shots) but also with a photograph taken with a camera.
Freitag's and Tunick's works serve as examples of two effective but divergent
approaches to using the photographic image -- Freitag's images are computer
altered appropriations of commercial images that bring us face to face
with our place in contemporary culture, and Tunick's images are in the
tradition of the photographer as artist manipulating set and camera that
the end remind us of the constant of our physical humanity. As far as
art goes both artists are heading in the right direction, but given the
choice of hanging out with either artist's cast of characters we would
probably find ourselves willing to strip down to our own less than ideal
nudity and join our like compatriots and leave Freitag's scarless Frankenstein
monsters as a warning of what not try to become.
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