| Hans Belting From the essay «The Places Where We Meet Pictures» «... It would be a mistake to confuse what we call the places of pictures with those places where we encounter them. Overtly, the ritual remains the same. The visitor to the exhibition stands before framed pictures. But the ritual tells us little about what really happens. The places of pictures always seem to remain the same, but the pictures themselves change so much that in our imagination they no longer occupy the same places. In recent painting every effort has been undertaken to divert our view from customary paths. But our training is resistant against any of painting’s escapades. Even when Rauschenberg made an automobile tire protrude or Frank Stella convulsively expanded the picture frame into the environment, visitors were nevertheless always prepared to classify these extravagances under the standard impression of "picture". But one need not continue the game of diversionary manoeuvres. The rules are already strange enough when we try to lay them out and bring them into our consciousness. I therefore refer here to the norm of art experience. Paintings as placeless places share the wall with other paintings, from which they maintain a distance and against whom they must hold their own. Only rarely do we perceive them as things and yet they possess an initial material existence. They are stretched over a frame and have a format which makes them different and determines their place on the wall. Sigmar Polke interrupted this experience of pictures and played with it, when he made the frame visible behind the transparent canvas, or sewed his painting together with printed material or with wallpaper. But, with the exception of the Laterna Magica works, his pictures still keep their place on the wall and thus defend a place where we have always expected them to be. Hanns Kunitzberger pursued a different path when he exhibited sixteen large-format pictures in a scene that may be described as a performance with painting and music. The «Abbild» project was realized with a string quartet by Beat Furrer in a room at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK – Austrian Museum for Applied Art) in Vienna in November of 2005. The paintings stood in the middle of the room with their painted faces so closely opposite one another that they only left a narrow corridor open for the visitor. The viewers only ever got to see partial views and had to physically move on among the pictures in order to gain a successive view of them and of the performing musicians. The backs of the paintings, on the other hand, with their extensive supports and mounts, were readily visible, because they were in full view in a larger viewing space. Suddenly the place of the pictures (similar to the place of sound) became a theme or at least a problem of the exhibition or performance respectively. In this room the viewer lost his passive role, because his view of the paintings on exhibit was restricted and changed. What he had never used to see in such an exhibition – the backs of the pictures – was conquering a new place in his view. The pictures lost their tried-and-true site in order to reclaim a new site from our viewing. What is otherwise the norm in an exhibition became an issue precisely by means of this small shift in the presentation. ...» Hans Belting, Art Historian and Media Theorist, 2006. From the volume «Hanns Kunitzberger. Die Orte der Bilder. Painting.» |