SIDESHOW BOB
Georg Petermichl
Sideshow Bob is one of the best-known and most intelligent minor characters in the US cartoon series “The Simpsons.”His personality is predominantly characterized by his efforts to escape role of a minor character and play a central part in events. Originally, Sideshow Bob worked as co-presenter of the Krusty Show, where he attempted to undermine the clown with dishonesty and intrigue. But Bart Simpson exposed his dirty dealings, and since then Sideshow Bob has unsuccessfully been trying to kill Bart.) Above all, Georg Petermichl was prompted to call his exhibition SIDESHOW BOB by minor characters’ striving for recognition and the fact that, in a series, it is they who make the main characters truly accessible and interesting.
With regard to the contemporary art business, it is the minor players such as exhibition photographers, curatorial or artistic assistants and the set-up team who make a definitive contribution to the ultimate appearance of an artwork. As an artist who has developed a second string to his bow with applied photography in the field of exhibitions and repro work, this position is well-known to Georg Petermichl. It provided the starting point for this exhibition. Generally speaking, applied photography is devoted to the photographic reproduction of paintings, art objects, sculptures or artists at work and is used predominantly for documentary purposes. Photographers fulfill an essential function with this activity: their work creates the visual basis for the reception in art history and enables worldwide digital distribution via the Internet. For all those who cannot view an artwork in the original, the only alternative is to accept the photographers’ perspective. It is their individual angle of vision that establishes the nature of the work or the architecture of a space.
In SIDESHOW BOB Georg Petermichl defined the main photographic axis of the Neue Galerie with brightly colored, full-wall works that at first glance resembled modern murals. It is only on closer examination that their surface character makes it possible to detect the works’ actual materiality: in fact, these were calendered* (*Flat-rolled) and subsequently laminated PVC films. The pigmented formal vocabulary of the large wall installations in the first and third rooms facilitated our sensual perception of the photographer’s approach; digitally compensating for the “faults” of the spaces depicted – like poor lighting, for example, or incorrect color tones. Among other things, the light source and all the surrounding areas influence the coloration of a surface. Light is absorbed or reflected, which leads to a certain coloration of the wall. The composition of color, form, pattern and line in the geometric abstractions on the walls of the Neue Galerie was produced by combining alpha-channel masks that the artist had created during earlier image processing with Photoshop. The sober coloration of the first room with its different shades of grey was contrasted with the pastel to pop colors of the masks in the rear room, which were dominated by pink, blue and green tones.
In the middle room Georg Petermichl played with the process of light absorption or reflection described above: by previously taking a series of photos of the walls then covered by films, he documented the color tones in the space. Impressive plays of color were created by intensifying these shades, reminiscent of the impressionist plein air painting (Open-air painting) familiar from painters such as Claude Monet in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here the artist deliberately managed without darkening the room. Thus the bright color of the artificial light met directly with the rays of natural light from outside. The architecture of the Neue Galerie was understood from the empirical perspective of an exhibition photographer through this space-filling, space-consuming installation.
In addition, the murals fulfilled another purpose: they also served Georg Petermichl as a background to, or rather a presentation surface for his classically assembled photo works, which act as an exhibition within the exhibition. Many of the exhibits shown there took up and continued from “Appropriation Art” (This artistic genre increasingly came to the fore during the 1980s, due to artists such as Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger or Cindy Shermann. The process of appropriation was used to examine and question essential categories of fine art such as authorship, the museum space, originality and creativity. Subsequently, existing images were removed from their original contexts (advertising / media) and their meaning re-encoded. Cf. Isabelle Graw: Die bessere Hälfte – Künstlerinnen des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts [The Better Half: Artists of the 20th and 21st Century], Dumont Kunstverlag, Cologne 2003.) in the broadest sense. Using the method of appropriation, the artist investigated the diverging poles of amateur and professional photography: nuances of personal expression were revealed not only in family portraits and holiday photos but also in the fields of nude and repro photography. Georg Petermichl’s appropriations were to be read both as critical debate in the sense of compromising and also as an expression of particular appreciation.
Thus the artist encountered the sunrises he had discovered in his parents’ photo albums and re-photographed with great respect and esteem. The photos originally intended for private use were exported into public space and lent the exhibition a very personal, intimate character. To the artist, the pictorial compositions of the moments captured on holiday appeared absolutely perfect, with their interplay of the deliberately constructed and pure contingency. Georg Petermichl placed his own sunsets alongside these atmospheric images. Five photos from that undertaking – entitled Good Night (Washington, D.C.) – were presented to choose from in the Neue Galerie: the decision on which of the photos depicts “the (subjectively felt) perfect moment” was left to the visitors.
On another wall we could see two nude photos. A man and a woman were lying naked – set in a landscape that appears only moderately attractive – on the bonnets of modestly appealing, medium-sized cars. The nude pictures represented a further attempt by Georg Petermichl to approach “lay photography.” This time the appropriation process was disclosed as a debate with the often idealized, mannered portrayals in amateur photography and with the limitations of its resources. The series of black-and-white photos of vases formed a stark contrast to the above works. At first, the images seemed like extracts from a catalogue of archeological finds. In fact, however, these were the artist’s “copies” of antique vessels from Greece and Morocco. They were marked as contemporary reproductions by the imprint of a key ring, and as a result appeared to have been embraced by today’s world.
Finally, Universal Thoughts (Brighton) corresponded to the architecture of the Neue Galerie. In this piece, the sequence of rooms was continued optically. On the one hand, Georg Petermichl’s SIDESHOW BOB in the Neue Galerie created a déjà-vu effect; on the other hand, the show challenged visitors to adopt the role of the exhibition photographer and so became acquainted with his world. The feeling arose of being surrounded by images suggesting the everyday and the well-known; images whose vocabulary was familiar to us. It was only upon closer examination that fine differences from the depictions we were accustomed to became evident. Here the focus was on tracking down and capturing moments of everyday perception. Appropriation was used by the artist as a strategy directed against the concept of the artwork as a unique expression of an autonomous subject, and instead art was viewed as socially, historically and culturally determined.
