Nathalie Grenzhaeuser - Gabi Schaffner

Gabi Schaffner
Constructions of Silence: Seen & Not Seen

How does one comprised of something that is actually comprised of absence and nonaction? Silence is commonly considered to be the absence of sounds or movement. Sometimes one speaks of "islands of silence," whereas the connotation of a utopian place is often particular to such islands. Grenzhaeuser's series Die Konstruktion der stillen Welt ("The Construction of the Quiet Earth") is dedicated to the Arctic environment in ist unequal combination of nature and industrial exploitation.
Her connection to classic documentary photography with digital image montage reflects two basic perspectives of contemporary ways of looking at landscape: On the one hand each form of documentation registers its dependence on patterns of perception and cultural memory. On the other, space and time are no longer relevant as linear concepts - something that has been the case since the early 20th century. These exist rather in provisional dependencies that today can be seamlessly connected to virtual worlds of experience. Despite their science fiction like impression, the photographs of Spitzbergen are rather far from the utopian.

200 years ago, 18th century artists and travellers held small, oval mirrors in their hands on which, using layers of colored film, the picturesque landscapes could be captured on the mirror’s surface when one passed by sights. The inventor of this "Claude-Mirror" was the painter Claude Lorrain, who is still considered to be a master of landscape montage. The mirror has always served as a magical optical instrument that makes the invisible visible and as a possible passage way into a world in which time and matter belong to a different order than that of reality. The circumstance of the "here-and-simultaneously-there" belongs, when viewed logically, in the category of the impossible. It belongs to the world of riddles and paradox. If one, however, tries to determine the point at which this simultaneousness occurs, one comes to that very fine, two-dimensional border, which is a mirror of those states in both directions.

In Grenzhaeuser's photographic works the real simultaneously constitutes an invisible place and, in a strange way, these seem to be identical to each other although they are not: "Everything was exactly the same, just totally different." Their topographies are located somewhere between inside and outside, presence and absence, image and illusion. They are places that have, in their own way, become timeless because the components of a distinct determinability in space and time have been alienated.

Underlying this is a long transformation of image contents that is also a transformation of the image internal tension. Parts of the images become, similar to a battery, discharged, emptied and void of figures at a certain location, while exactly the opposite occurs in other places: objects are moved, colors added, etc. The perspective arrangement is also askew: near becomes far, the angle of vision is shifted; horizons are made unrecognizable or defined anew.

It is no coincidence that Grenzhaeuser particularly turns her attention to the sky when she reworks the images. That the skyscape of an image is robbed of its natural, meteorological order in order to create space for subjective or metaphysical atmosphere is not particular to painting. Around 1850 the photographer Gustave Le Gray worked with images of clouds that he then copied numerous times into different landscapes. The documentary photographer, Frank Hurley, also made use of the montage in order to impart his images with an urgency that brought him as much fame as criticism. If the sky, however, was used in Le Gray's composite negatives and in Hurley's retouching as a way to intensify an image's dramatic composition, Grenzhaeuser goes beyond this both formally and contextually. Not only are sky and earth literally "displaced," they are mounted using techniques that are traditionally connected to the "other side:" reflection, duplication, displacement and distortion.

Grenzhaeuser's photographs are not subject - although they appear to be - to central perspective, but are rather the result of an internal journey through a landscape charged by the imagination, while the varied angles of perspective and objects are redefined and incorporated onto the surface. There, where this internal image world comes into contact with the quasi-documentation - still regarded as real and recognizable by the viewer - is where the flexible border runs, on one side of which is the mirror of the photographic tableau, on the other the uncanny element in the subconscious of the beholder. "With regards to the paradoxical instance the following applies: it is never where one looks for it and it is likewise never to be found where it is looked for," claims Lacan (quoted by Deleuze in "Logik des Sinns," Frankfurt 1993). The paradoxical instance here is the sliding unreal that made the genius loci homeless on Grenzhaeuser's photographs, because it was released into a virtual hall of mirrors beyond space and time.
The invisible transitions have been retouched, leveled to the ground, dulled over by clouds. A barren track of land, a hut, a satellite station, a container field: all attain such a discomforting, suggestive power that it makes the viewer dizzy; his focus becomes distracted by the alleged documentarization, grazing time and again on that in-between-place that is simultaneously visible and invisible.

NATHALIE GRENZHAEUSER
Photography Information *Texts	Gabi Schaffner Constructions of Silence: Seen & Not Seen How does one comprised of something that is actually comprised of absence and nonaction? Silence is commonly considered to be the absence of sounds or movement. Sometimes one speaks of "islands of silence," whereas the connotation of a utopian place is often particular to such islands. Grenzhaeuser's series Die Konstruktion der stillen Welt ("The Construction of the Quiet Earth") is dedicated to the Arctic environment in ist unequal combination of nature and industrial exploitation. Her connection to classic documentary photography with digital image montage reflects two basic perspectives of contemporary ways of looking at landscape: On the one hand each form of documentation registers its dependence on patterns of perception and cultural memory. On the other, space and time are no longer relevant as linear concepts - something that has been the case since the early 20th century. These exist rather in provisional dependencies that today can be seamlessly connected to virtual worlds of experience. Despite their science fiction like impression, the photographs of Spitzbergen are rather far from the utopian. 200 years ago, 18th century artists and travellers held small, oval mirrors in their hands on which, using layers of colored film, the picturesque landscapes could be captured on the mirror’s surface when one passed by sights. The inventor of this "Claude-Mirror" was the painter Claude Lorrain, who is still considered to be a master of landscape montage. The mirror has always served as a magical optical instrument that makes the invisible visible and as a possible passage way into a world in which time and matter belong to a different order than that of reality. The circumstance of the "here-and-simultaneously-there" belongs, when viewed logically, in the category of the impossible. It belongs to the world of riddles and paradox. If one, however, tries to determine the point at which this simultaneousness occurs, one comes to that very fine, two-dimensional border, which is a mirror of those states in both directions. In Grenzhaeuser's photographic works the real simultaneously constitutes an invisible place and, in a strange way, these seem to be identical to each other although they are not: "Everything was exactly the same, just totally different." Their topographies are located somewhere between inside and outside, presence and absence, image and illusion. They are places that have, in their own way, become timeless because the components of a distinct determinability in space and time have been alienated. Underlying this is a long transformation of image contents that is also a transformation of the image internal tension. Parts of the images become, similar to a battery, discharged, emptied and void of figures at a certain location, while exactly the opposite occurs in other places: objects are moved, colors added, etc. The perspective arrangement is also askew: near becomes far, the angle of vision is shifted; horizons are made unrecognizable or defined anew. It is no coincidence that Grenzhaeuser particularly turns her attention to the sky when she reworks the images. That the skyscape of an image is robbed of its natural, meteorological order in order to create space for subjective or metaphysical atmosphere is not particular to painting. Around 1850 the photographer Gustave Le Gray worked with images of clouds that he then copied numerous times into different landscapes. The documentary photographer, Frank Hurley, also made use of the montage in order to impart his images with an urgency that brought him as much fame as criticism. If the sky, however, was used in Le Gray's composite negatives and in Hurley's retouching as a way to intensify an image's dramatic composition, Grenzhaeuser goes beyond this both formally and contextually. Not only are sky and earth literally "displaced," they are mounted using techniques that are traditionally connected to the "other side:" reflection, duplication, displacement and distortion. Grenzhaeuser's photographs are not subject - although they appear to be - to central perspective, but are rather the result of an internal journey through a landscape charged by the imagination, while the varied angles of perspective and objects are redefined and incorporated onto the surface. There, where this internal image world comes into contact with the quasi-documentation - still regarded as real and recognizable by the viewer - is where the flexible border runs, on one side of which is the mirror of the photographic tableau, on the other the uncanny element in the subconscious of the beholder. "With regards to the paradoxical instance the following applies: it is never where one looks for it and it is likewise never to be found where it is looked for," claims Lacan (quoted by Deleuze in "Logik des Sinns," Frankfurt 1993). The paradoxical instance here is the sliding unreal that made the genius loci homeless on Grenzhaeuser's photographs, because it was released into a virtual hall of mirrors beyond space and time. The invisible transitions have been retouched, leveled to the ground, dulled over by clouds. A barren track of land, a hut, a satellite station, a container field: all attain such a discomforting, suggestive power that it makes the viewer dizzy; his focus becomes distracted by the alleged documentarization, grazing time and again on that in-between-place that is simultaneously visible and invisible.

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