Marco Breuer, "Untitled (C-1166)" (2012)
chromogenic paper, exposed, folded, burned
14 3/8 x 11 3/8 inches
A Man Without a Camera
By John Yau
Marco Breuer is best known for the photographs that he makes without
using a camera. (He does other sorts of photography, but this body of
work is largely what we know about his endeavors). Rather than pointing
at a moment that is gone, and wresting fixity from flux, as photographs
are said to do, Breuer acknowledges the triumph of instability, with its
attendant manifestations of destruction and demise.
By subjecting
the photograph’s material nature to a variety of physical interventions
(heat, folding, scratching), Breuer subverts the timelessness we
associate with the photographic image, while conveying time’s ravaging
effects on the photograph itself. Nothing escapes infinity’s embrace.
(The other photographer who recognizes this incontrovertible fact is
Miroslav Tischy, who, in nearly every other way, resides on the opposite
end of the spectrum from Breuer.)
* * *
For Breuer, sublime beauty and stark terror are inseparable. This is
what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously wrote in the first “Duino
Elegy:”
…. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.
The
universe’s disdain for life is the lucid mirror Breuer looks into — as
well as holds up to us. His scarred sheets of luminous paper exist on
the brink between here (the present) and there (the future, which is
all-consuming infinity). The idea that one can make something eternal
may be a necessary fiction, but Breuer recognizes it as necessary
nonetheless. His consciousness of time’s dominion is what distinguishes
his photographs from the work of photographers who don’t use a camera
(Adam Fuss).
For all of their affinities, there is a distinction
that I would like to make between Breuer and Rilke. Rilke’s “Duino
Elegies” brim with longing. The poet has shaped a deep, inchoate cry
into a most beautiful and poignant music. Breuer’s photographs are
irreparably scarred. They are intimations of mortality, the beginnings
of time’s answer to Rilke’s question: “Who, if I cried out, would hear
me among the Angelic/Orders?” The feelings of anonymity that Breuer’s
work embraces — the folds he makes in his photographs could be done by
anyone — subverts the lyric “I” animating Rilke’s poems. Breuer
questions the "I," rather than denying it, as so many theorists, who
believe in historical time rather than real time, do.
* * *
Marco
Breuer was born in Landshut, Germany in 1966 (a decade after Andreas
Gursky, who was born in Leipzig in 1955). He first came to New York in
1990 and, like many others before him, used the city’s diverse resources
to educate himself: he learned papermaking, bookbinding and printmaking
at different places, as well as spent a lot of time in the Museum of
Modern Art’s print study room. After traveling back and forth between
New York and Germany, he moved here in 1993.
In his insightful and informative essay, “The Material in Question” in Early Recordings
(Aperture, 2007), Mark Alice Durant writes about Gursky, Thomas Ruff
and Thomas Struth — all of whom were students of Hilla and Bern Becher
at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf — as becoming "the near-exclusive
representatives of German photographic practice. And theirs was a style
to which Breuer’s modest, economical, and more personal works were
almost diametrically opposed."
By advancing that there is only one
correct position occupied by those working in a certain medium, the
marketplace and other institutions knowingly help suppress, overlook and
ignore the heated dialogue unfolding among various artists. The effect
is deleterious to the situation, if only because it encourages viewers
to develop habits of seeing and thinking that sidestep the questions
artists fold into their work.
[snip]
In Condition,
his current exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery, Breuer is showing sixteen
works. All of them were made of chromogenic sheets, the
chemically-layered paper used to make color photographs or C-prints,
which Breuer subjected to a range of conditions: exposure; folding;
heat; scratching; abrasion. In earlier bodies of work, he chewed and
sanded the paper. He once fired a shotgun into a box of paper, curious
to see what would happen. He is a rigorous and relentless experimenter.
The
works in the show are divided into two color groups: largely black and
luminous turquoise blue. I think of them as the photographer’s
equivalents of labor and leisure.
The photographs are vertical
rectangles of varying sizes, with none bigger than 32 x 25 inches. In
the ones where black is the predominant color, Breuer often repeatedly
folded the paper according to a simple mathematical progression (always
in half, for example). Opened back up and smoothed out, the paper would
be a grid made of deep creases. Exposing the black paper to light as
well as heating its surface caused other changes and colors to emerge.
Rather than preserving a moment in a photograph and making it seem
timeless, the grid structure, the abrasions and gouged surfaces,
underscores that the photograph has endured time. The grid also evokes
labor, the same thing done over and over.
Marco Breuer, "Untitled (C-1178)" (2012), chromogenic paper, burned,
31 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches
These effects further the anonymity implied in the authorship of these
photographs. The various processes and changes that Breuer initiates
don’t convey touch or any of the states we associate with drawing. And
yet, the marks certainly don’t feel arbitrary or accidental. I feel as
if I am looking at — scrutinizing, really — detritus, which evokes all
the photographs that have been taken and are now lost or destroyed. Or
perhaps I am examining the residue of an unnamed catastrophe. These are
some of associations that come to mind while looking at Breuer’s work,
inflecting my experience of them.
Read full review @ HYPERALLERGIC
