WASSER & ÖL — THE PICTORIAL IMPULSE — WHAT BECOMES A LEGEND MOST — INTERVIEW 1999 — REFLEXIONEN — RELAXATIONS — REMEMBER — REALITY CHECK

On the most recent works of Franziska Maderthaner

Since the 1980's, pictures which are art have again become more intricate than those roaming the scenes of advertisement and propaganda, or the information- and service-industries. Before that, for nearly a century, the autonomous used to be simpler than the heteronomous. In fact, a pissoir on a pedestal or a black square were considered to be the spearheads of conceptuality and certainly a lot of competence went into their performance. Yet, one couldn ´t see it. One had to know.

We are done with this now. Due to the process, for which until now there exists no better notion than 'postmodern', the pictures may now again testify to the fact that seeing has something to do with thinking. Pictures are not mere illustrations, they do not possess visuality alone, pictures above all consist of pictorality. What pictorality is, is shown in an exemplary way in the most recent works of Franziska Maderthaner.

Her images make it explicit that pictorality has always already presupposed some sort of cognitive compression. The image represented is not merely this one particular piece of a spectacle, equipped with several attractions of color and procedures, the look at and into a world of optical opulence. A picture is first of all a form of organisation, the resolute together of sensations, which have always already been within the picture itself.

So, a model is built, let's say on a scale of 1:10. This model comes with a variety of arrangements, clips from publications are stapled to the side, soft figures, toys and household utensils are distributed within this miniature space and the function of whatever material altered - to serve as accessories of the heterogenous. Then a photograph of this model or model-situation is taken, then a slide is made from the photograph which in its turn is projected onto a wall, where it is finally painted on a canvas. Thus, after a long procedure, the canvas, as seen in the painting, emerges with all the delicatessen of the peinture.

Their wealth of details and synthetic togetherness of different things in Franziska Maderthaner's pictures do not only look intricate in their crossing over partiality. They are meant to be exactly that, and in their use of various associations and invitations to expand one's thoughts, they keep a mechanism of multiplication and outbidding of meaning going, that turns intricacy into complexity.

One could call this kind of technique sampling. Firstly, Franziska Maderthaner's pictures are certainly not fancy ones, as this notion (of sampling) might suggest. Secondly this particular method of integrating various elements does not obey the logic of a sort of somehow or some getting-a-hold-of of something from somewhere or other; things are not at all reduced to their phenomenal appearance, but always already include meaning, because they are reminiscent of the context, out of which they are taken, while at the same time sustaining it.

Thirdly, it is telling that Franziska Maderthaner, before she started with her recent works, has been using a technique that would provide the supposed contingency of things brought together in the picture with the most logical legitimization for illogicity, viz. the old convention of aleatoric logic; thus, eventually, playing with dice decided what should be in the picture. All in all these pictures are by far too constructed, both in their mechanics and their methods, to be but products of sampling. They do produce an abundance of meaning and not the collapse of all sense. They look for the exuberance of meaning and do not demonstrate its impossibility. They are, in one word, rather polysemic than disseminative.

Whether one likes it or not, for artists as well as for critics and for all those dealing with esthetic matters, there is a specific both historic and present moment, when preferences, modes of access and dispositions are anchored in one's mind. At some point the formation of criteria is set in motion, with this particular sometime henceforth prevailing. For those who grew up with Minimalism it is difficult not to pay attention to the serial, untechnical and cool (and probably also not to think of the 'Expressives' as being monkeyish throughout their lifetime).

Franziska Maderthaner was born in 1962 and with a birth date like this, one is by necessity prone to finding esthetic orientations in the late seventies and early eighties, which informed and influenced her œvre. And in fact a lot of what her recent works represent so succinctly and concisely, can be traced back to that time. In the 1980's, photorealism (the presence of which at the documenta 5 provided Franziska Maderthaner with an early artistic sort of satori) had its first renaissance (and in Jean Baudrillard's dictum of 'hyperrealism' its theory had been catching up).

In the 1980's, the critical impetus of an art-about-art was in full swing and the artificial context of a collection, now presented in full irony in Franziska Maderthaner's works had been problematized (e.g. with Louise Lawler, who probably suits best for a comparison; but more on that later). And at this time one could admire the new discovery, out of the spirit of postmodernity, marking a new epoch and which gave a real boost to the pictures of art (-about-art). Pictures (read: good pictures) are, in the first place and ever since, pictorial. Before that they were predominantly conceptual.

One of the key texts about this new pictorality of pictures was Craig Owens' 'The Allegorical Impulse' published in 1980, then propagated in the central organ of postmodern esthetics, the 'October', founded in 1976. Owens is offering six notions, to catch on to the new complexity of pictures, which, following the then rather trendy Walter Benjamin, he summarizes in the title 'allegorical', (the only one outdated notion in Owens' conceptuality is, accordingly, this collective term).

Henceforth these six notions shall be applied to the pictorality, which is at the center of Franziska Maderthaner's work.

1. "Appropriation": Thus representations of artworks that populate Franziska Maderthaner's artificial sceneries, are actually materialized and brought into circulation by way of publication and integrated into the model as newspaper clips, like a date painting of On Kawara or a word drawing of Ed Ruscha; now and then they lend themselves to quotelike invocations as in Sigmar Polkes' smiling apparation of 'higher beings', finally and exactly like that, sheer associations that function in the sense of the incorporation of the alien into one's own, and the most innocent similarity renders something wrapped into a Christo and something crumpled into a John Chamberlain.

2. “Site-specifity”: Accordingly, the assembled appropriations are strung into a new context, into a context that stands for the recognition of something notoriously being art in everything invocated and borrowed. Franziska Maderthaner provides for insights into collections, which are as much characterized by the site-independence of their exhibits, as by the site-specifity of their storage. There is always a view, be it of an alpine landscape, the bizarre rock-formations of New Mexico or the scenery of a river.

3. "Impermanence": Everything, touched by the art of his time, is transitory, says Owens, ephemeral by necessity, even if it is imbued with the impression of the solid and indispensable. In this sense Franziska Maderthaner does not only produce the details of her picture-worlds, but also the perfect arbitrariness of what is displayed in her pictorial spaces. These objects are impermanent, because they are totally contingent in their being together. Their convocation is the opposite of necessity.

4. "Accumulation": And yet, all these things are brought together, placed next, on top and adjacent to each other to form an artificial world of relation. The accumulation is performed in the name of heightening or intensification, the reciprocal charging it with meaning.

5. "Discursivity": There is a particular appellative dimension in these pictures. They do not tell the story of a situation, which exists anyway, or talk about their relation with a world outside the rectangle that are the pictures. Discursivity replaces reference, together with the function of addressing, some kind of theatricality, that exists only insofar as it is aimed at perception.

6. "Hybridization": Different from those, as it were, classical procedures of incorporation of existing pictures, viz. collage and montage, hybridization rather starts from accumulation and enrichment than from pure appropriation. Franziska Maderthaner does not use things and appearances in order to compose them as fragments, quotations and particles of realities; rather the contexts from which they are taken are accepted and reused as totalities. It is entire worlds that meet here. As it seems, the pictures of contemporary art, are rendered ever more complex by the mechanisms as put into words by Owens. If Franziska Maderthaner's newest production - in that sense - can be oriented along a process that started in the 1980's, a point of departure is set. But then, the difference is not less marked: Her own being up-to-date and her being relevant to the immediate present lies in the increasing wealth, variety and ramification of the dimensions calculated for in the pictures.

When, in the 1980's, the principle of observation had reached a higher level and an art-about-architecture, an art-about-art-world and an art-about-modernism emerged, the already achieved state of self-thematizing of one's elevated position above things didn't come to an end.

When Louise Lawler dedicated her work to those hybrid realities, in which Andy Warhol - in a private collection - would appear vis-à-vis an impressionist, she made art-about-art in an exemplary way. And this makes it all the more clear, all the more explicit and characteristic, when Franziska Maderthaner in her turn takes up Louise Lawler in order to fathom further meta-levels.

So, as we can learn from that, there exists - also in postmodernity - a logic of outbidding. And finally, after a century of modernist reduction, there are again good pictures.

Rainer Metzger, 2004
translation: Axel Fussi