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work of Irene Mueller functions in the arena where photography
and painting collide. For her it is neither about “painterly”
photography, theatrical production, tableaux vivants, nor about
photo-realism in painting as put into effect in the Mark Tansey
sense. In her artistic strategy Mueller falls back mostly upon
material that comes to hand, on photos from Webcams, for example,
or portrait photos for identity cards or passports. Her interest
is in the anonymous photo subjects which she appropriates for
her own use, but transforms without any artistic gesture. When
Mueller transposes the standardized portrait photos of Vietnamese
from the 1950s into the painter’s medium, a leap from
one mode of communication to another does indeed take place,
but without any direct artistic jolt, which as an act of individualization
could only seem pompous. Matter-of-factly, like the photographer
of the’50s, she works with the basic material. Of course
the criteria are different, yet the iconic content of the photographs
remains nearly unchanged. For what reason then is she making
them her own? It is the subtle nuances and the way the questions
are put that lend this kind of appropriation its charm. For
one thing it is evident that each copy – even in the digital
age – and every leap from medium to medium changes the
picture’s content, and here moreover the role of painting
is put up to be examined again. Pictorial emotion of the sort
we find again today in the kitschy art of the Leipzig School,
is avoided altogether. Painting is for Mueller a thoroughly |
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meditative
and physical practice, but this practice finds its justification
only in alignment with media like analogue and digital photography.
A painting outside the media, as is constantly demanded, would
be illusory revisionism.
It is, besides, not just the confrontation
of painting with the technical media that fascinates Mueller,
but serialization. The pictures do not stand isolated like a
single “chef d’oeuvre”, but have to be seen
as connected. It is not a question of planned sequences, to
be compared to forward movement in a film, but rather of a group
of pictures that are static in themselves. In the capturing
of a situation or an idea, of a moment or a detail, painting
as well as photography fulfills its goal. Thus the painted Vietnam
portraits give an impression of deathmasks and suggest thereby
the historical character of pictures. But they also produce
the effect of identikits because through the photographic and
subsequent artistic procedures an homogenization has occurred.
The Vietnam pictures already point to another subject complex
with which Mueller has long been engaged: reconstructed pictures.
Here the process of making portrait production anonymous and
uniform has been pushed to the heights. These “functional
portraits” make it clear what semiotics is all about:
the non-identity of characters and the characterized. The lack
of faith in the representation of reality clearly takes effect
in the |
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reconstructed
picture. At the same time the making
of the
reconstructed picture is a nemotechnical
achievement and the reconstructed picture may come closest to
Vasari’s conception of art as an imitation of nature.
The series principle can be discerned in all areas of Irene
Mueller’s work – the portraits of the Vietnamese,
the reconstructed pictures and the “country scenes”
from webcams. This principle otherwise surfaces mostly in anonymous
picture production – there, where it is a matter of producing
the quickest and biggest possible output. The series principle
is especially evident in “useful” pictures –
in science pictures, for example in medicine, meteorology and
criminology. These picture series serve, moreover, to bring
out and to interpret the smallest changes. The pictorial art
too has always dealt with these conditions of perception—one
thinks for example of the extremely slow-moving films of the
flux movement (Yoko Ono, Chieko Shiomi, Joe Jones). Mueller’s
works too are similarly captivating, not through a quick initial
impression or attraction, but through the proposition that a
routine first glance does not tell you all that is there. To
promote and use our perception of pictures again as a seismograph
for the tiniest shifts and changes is more than we can expect
of good art. For despite the much lamented flood of pictures,
which has led to a real anaesthetization of our senses,.we are
today more than ever called to be exact in our perceptions
and our distinctions.
Ulrich
Wegenast, 29.03.05
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