Freya Gerz: Sketchbook
© Freya Gerz
Curatorial Statement
Visit the exhibition Sketchbook >
Photographs, images, are more than what they appear to be. Going beyond the idea associated with photographs as document, recording what is in front of the lens at a moment in time. Images steer our understanding of what we know and what we do not know. Images ask questions, or better yet, we ask questions of images.
Photographs mean nothing until acted upon by a viewer/reader of the visual text. It is the interaction of the behavior of looking by a reader and the artifact (photograph) produced by the intentional behavior of an author. Photographs are objects created to be the medium through which authors and readers come together. Similar to a book of text, the text on the page is the space where the author and the reader meet in an attempt to create a shared meaning. We can safely say that a photograph means nothing until the author and reader says it does. It is this interaction of author and reader that we come to the work of Freya Gerz.
Gerz’s visual text, “Sketchbook” moves us beyond the boundaries of a collection of photographs (we can use the terms “text” and “photographs” interchangeably for both are constructions created to be acted upon) to an intentional sequence of images as displayed in her exhibition in VASA and in her forthcoming book. The work must be seen as an act of intellect and not a randomization or gesture. The title “Sketchbook” carries its own references and implications.
In “Sketchbook” we address more than individual images but an intentionally ordered sequence of experiences creating spaces and boundaries for the evolution of meaning. (I use the concept of evolution in reference to the fluidness of meaning as we experience the design and organization of “Sketchbook”.)
Not to see the images as located in broader contexts is to experience the images as fixed with no connection (historical, social or political), are isolated and doomed to a life of ambiguity and meaningless existing within a sea of possibilities. From this perspective there is not “a” meaning but many possible meanings.
As readers of this text we are invited to go further, to engage and explore the spaces between each image, to pause and read the space as an image itself. Here the juxtaposition of spaces and images provide the reader with fertile air through which to construct meaning(s).
If we approach images as metaphors, ripe with potential for significance, the in-between space between images shelters a dialog of conflict between the images, giving cause for evolving insights and understandings existing within a consolation of possibilities. It is within these possibilities that the reader finds the richness of the text and its un-imposed universe of meanings.
The concept behind “conflict” emerges out of “Montage Theory” as put forward by Sergei Eisenstein in the second decade of the 20th century.
Montage theory, in its rudimentary form, asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film's ideological and intellectual power. (Wikipedia.org)
and
Montage' means bringing the conflicting images/shots together that gives a unique contrast leaving a shock and anticipation for the audience. Eisenstein believed that more the conflicting the shots are the more it is intellectual leaving its audience in shock which also stirs their inner emotions. (https://www.filmtheory.org/soviet-montage-theory/)
In light of “Sketchbook” the sequencing or montage of images provides a challenge to the reader (as well as to the author) in their understanding of the work. Freya Gerz provides the reader with images that at first appear to have no connection to each other beyond the fact that they exist between the first and last image – book ends.
|
Bookends: first and last image in "Sketchbook" Each image with its own signification, the space inbetween is the work.
How do you move from one image to the other, the start to the end?
In this manner we are forced to see the images in a specific order a sequence, challenging us to “make sense” of it. At a point in this process the author of the text becomes its reader, sequencing and re-sequencing the flow of experience to a point where it makes sense. The author becomes the text’s first reader.
Freya’s images, ambiguous in design, are best approached as metaphors and notations on the author’s acts, her decisions. The meaning of an imags is not fixed or grounded, but exists in a constellation of potential meanings. As Eisenstein’s definition suggests it is the conflicting nature of her images that brings about a challenge to making sense. The reader is then further challenged to make sense of the relationships formed by the spaces between each image. It is the space, the possibilities that gives the work its significance.
This concept is interesting in that it positions the potential meaning of the work within the spaces found between images. Images that conflict and struggle to find signification. The challenge to the reader of her text is to first confront possible meaning(s) of individual images, then to the image created as a result of the positioning or sequencing – the space. The signification of “Sketchbook” lies not in the individual images and spaces, but in its totality.
Freya Gerz’s “Sketchbook” provides the reader of her text with a challenge: What does it mean.