maandag 23 november 2015

High performance photohumor & more

Or something like that. The original point of departure was a misfired proposal for the symposium photography performing humor which has been postponed... having a background in all these concepts, Patrick Morarescu and I thought we might do something with it and decided to open a small investigative studio at Buktapaktop in Brussels in advance of said symposium... we even got friends to fly in from Switzerland and Germany for what ended up being a bit of Belgian shut- & lockdown tourism...
Anyway, we had prepared some ludicrous questions based on Barthe’s Camera Lucida, referring to the ‘affective turn’ mentioned in the symposium’s open call, as well as various investigations into the ‘Augenblick’ (blink-of-eye-moment) by such as Karl-Heinz Bohrer (Ästhetische Negativität) and Vilém Flusser (Bildmischung) as well as our own hare-brained ideas concerning the subject, object, ocular operator...

Luck would have it that the run-up to our slapstick operation would be marred by the terror attacks in Paris, reminding us as Charlie Hebdo did - that being funny can cost you dear... but is it a reason to stop? No- so rather than postponing as so many, we decided to go ahead and wing it. The small impromptu studio was based on basic historic models, using daylight and diffusion through drapes & curtains, some props and attitudes... or as one sitter said, nomadic studios as one still finds in far-flung places and which used to wander about our fairground circuits... 

Perhaps because of the lockdown a lot of the sitters opted for the new fashion of covering your face, everyone is beginning to hide behind veils and headdress, balaclava’s and bataclans.... except those who are about to blow themselves up... a different kind of blow-up than we considered in the 60’s... even the kids decided democratically not to participate for fear of having themselves displayed on facelook and/or other unsavory social media... now that imagery has become so free-for-all (everyone pays), no-one wants it any more... 

(one of P.M.’s projects is ‘performing grounds’ in which no humans figure but which speaks of human activity and intervention in the landscape and architecture of our public space – maybe that will be all we can  document (doculent?) in the future... without permission)

After a rather slow start the studio warmed up with the presence of friends, and an interesting series of discreet portraits were produced... the second part of the operation was curtailed somewhat by the fact there was no longer a need for a preparatory discussion for the upcoming symposium, and essentially boiled down to a short (presumably comic) performative send-off of the proceedings after which some socializing and banter rounded off the evening, before heading off into the uncertain night.


Heinrich O