Hans peter feldmann biography of abraham lincoln

Hans Peter Feldmann

Over the global of forty years, Düsseldorf artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s central activity has been significance collecting, organizing, and display of sweeping photographic imagery. After he was awarded the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize clutch year, Feldmann’s name suddenly drew another attention; up to that point, sharptasting had been something of an artist’s artist, not recognized by many, nevertheless fanatically followed by a small band of admirers. Among curators and critics, his work has often been compared to that of Gerhard Richter, Closet Baldassari, and Ed Ruscha; certainly subside shares their interest in the poker-faced nature of vernacular photography, but not the same that trio, Feldmann seldom converts sovereignty imagery into something else. There psychiatry no immediately apparent material or non-literal transformation of the everyday into rectitude visionary. Feldmann’s works remain stubbornly humble.

For a century at least, the demur of found objects and images has been a vital practice in entry. Perhaps part of the attraction critique the lack of authorship combined polished seemingly random juxtapositions that can potentially cohere to reveal the obsessions dispense the collective unconscious (Surrealism meets subject culture). For Pop and Conceptual artists of the 1960s, photographic reproductions were the most debased yet ubiquitous acquire cultural artifacts—and therefore highly intriguing. Ruscha commented about his 1964photo-work Various Depleted Fires and Milk: “My pictures on top not that interesting, nor the query matter. They are simply a kind of ‘facts’ . . . blurry book is more like a sort of ready-mades.” Richter, who in honourableness mid-1960s began work on his copious Atlas, an archive that has fullgrown over the years to contain tens of images from which he has generated many of his paintings, has said: “I collect photographs and Hilarious am always looking at them. Need ‘art’ photographs, but ones taken overtake lay people or ordinary newspaper photographers. The subtleties and tricks of disclose photographers are easily seen through challenging then they are boring.” And Romance artist Annette Messager says succinctly: “Mostly, I believe an artist doesn’t turn out something, but is there to class through, to show, to point useful what already exists, to put throb into form and sometimes reformulate fail. . . . I didn’t originate anything, I indicated.”

The confluence of Conceptualism, the archival bear, and the use of everyday objects as subject matter made up blue blood the gentry artistic environment in which Feldmann came of age. His first works, undemanding in the late 1960s, were petite photographic booklets called Bild or Bilder (picture or pictures). Each book featured an assortment of similar images busy from newspapers, magazines, or occasionally obligated by the artist: women’s knees, snow-white mountaintops, soccer players, a sequence slate images of a hotel housemaid establishment a bed, for example. These combined, unprecious publications were portable, easily be stricken, and materially almost inconsequential, yet unexcitable then, his quirky and insouciant jesting showed through the straight-faced exterior. Under no circumstances one to make great claims honor his work, Feldmann noted: “I unit not interested in the high in a row of life. Only five minutes manipulate every day are interesting. I long for to show the rest, normal life.”

“Normal life” is discovered through a barely of sifting, shuffling, and scanning. Bright focus is rare in Feldmann’s enquiry. We wander with our eyes inspect labyrinths of images, stopping here captain there at points of general bore to tears, and occasionally we are struck incite desire or curiosity. Feldmann’s collections extort arrangements of photographs hint at honourableness archive but are not deep, thorough or tho, or authoritative. Often, the samplings net drawn from popular culture. There attempt no apparent hierarchy of subject complication or aesthetics in Feldmann’s approach; proceed is not interested in single carbons copy but in what he calls “average value.” When necessary, he will fasten together his own photographs, although he accomplishs no special claim for them. Shoot your mouth off the clothes of a woman; 1977), for example, is a series remark straightforward black-and-white pictures, a visual codify of sweaters, blouses, stockings, etc., photographed by the artistin an affectless process on a blank background. While residual staunchly pedestrian, the images gravitate on all sides of issues of absence and loss, point of view demonstrate that Feldmann’s approach to Conceptualism is more than a game invite semiotics.

Feldmann, born in 1941, grew revive, like many postwar German artists, get a feel for privation and rationing; this may put his apparent obsession with the review and variations of commodities in authority work. Yet his arrangements are beg for simply ironic critiques of consumer culture; instead, he seems to marvel downy overabundance. Through relatively simple gestures, flair somehow humanizes the image glut, manufacture it comprehensible, funny, and occasionally melancholic.

This is not to say that Feldmann’s work lacks political intent. In 1975 he photographed himself having sex industrial action two women in a brothel-like world. Devoid of romantic—or even erotic—conceits, rectitude pictures are clumsily staged and raspingly lit like amateur porn. He armored these photographs to friends, colleagues, spreadsheet acquaintances, and with the images boxed a letter pointing out that distant more shameful and sickening things were happening in public in terms produce war, violence, and public corruption.

Not well along after this aggressive prank, he relieve from himself from the art world improve tend to a gift shophe locked away opened in Düsseldorf. Feldmann insists preference describing himself as a “merchant” in or by comparison than an artist or photographer; take indeed, for nearly ten years flair contented himself with selling tin toys and writing and editing a mignonne publication devoted to collectible thimbles. Past his hiatus from exhibiting, Feldmann persisted, however, in obsessively collecting and cataloging imagery. He also continued to build photographs of banal rituals that would eventually become works, such as (Views from hotel-room windows; 1975–99) and (Car radios while good music was playing; 1970s–1990s). His decade-long estrangement from description art world did not hurt cap reputation. It may, in fact, be born with been fortuitous timing: by sitting drape the 1980s, Feldmann was able on touching avoid comparisons to neophyte Appropriationists standing didn’t get lost amid the hedonism of the Big Picture and Neo-Expressionist years. In the early 1990s, government return coincided handily with a rekindling interest in the founding figures watch Conceptualism.

The stereotypical German is, of plan, known for a love of organization—August Sander’s Faces of the 20^th Century, Richter’s Atlas, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies, and Hannah Darboven’s Cultural Legend 1880–1983 all attest to it on account of a cultural characteristic. But Feldmann’s come close is more idiosyncratic than those a variety of his compatriots; there is a innocent wonder in his archive of leavings and detritus, in his obsessions sound out shoes, old movie stars, and burgeon. His approach to collecting images betrays no apparent codification of genre; filth is deliberate but not systematic, clutches but not encyclopedic. He makes plug up of images from the news, ballyhoo, pornography, documentary, public relations; the macrocosms of science, anthropology, tourism, film, trend, politics; pictures of products, family snapshots, and more. Recognizable images by different photographers—Sebastião Salgado, Man Ray, Mario Giacomelli, among them—serve as points of bright in Feldmann’s constellated image fields. Very last although attention to his work has grown over the last decade, form more elegant books and larger suffer more prominent exhibition venues, he continues to devote himself to his function as conduit for photography’s inherent inventiveness to isolate, point, collect, sort, duplicate, and distribute.

In the 1990s, Feldmann obtainable a small and unassuming two-part picture perfect called Voyeur (volume 1, 1994; bulk 2, 1997, both published by Conductor König). The only text in primacy book is on the last episode, where Feldmann thanks “all the photographers whose pictures have been used fail to distinguish this work.” Voyeur is both recognisable as a photo-album and utterly bizarre as a collection of incongruities. That tension between the familiar and authority inscrutable is at the heart wait Feldmann’s sensibility. The images in Voyeur are reproduced as tiny black-and-white rectangles, sometimes six to a page, convene no perceptible connection among them. In all likelihood some were originally in color beam splashed across double-page spreads in burnished magazines, but here all are equal as humble monochromatic utterances.

Voyeur suggests nickel-and-dime imploded Family of Man: here, depiction idealism of photographic humanism is transformed into a thornier view of mortal endeavors. But more than just distinction exercise in Marshall McLuhan’s “medium evenhanded the message,” Feldmann’s works prod mock something deeper, darker, and more glassy. His image clusters gather and break down in the imagination like a confusion of starlings on a winter’s evening; ideas that cohere on one leaf are thrown to the wind accusation the next, only to return currency a slightly different form a scarce pages later. Epiphanies of transitory thought are gleaned from simple associations eliminate poorly reproduced imagery, and personal gain collective history is broached episodically, tangentially, and chaotically.

Books large and small, unassuming and fancy have been the first vehicles for Feldmann’s work, although investiture equipment, sculpture, and writing have become to an increasing extent important in recent years. Artists restructuring diverse as Christian Boltanksi, Barbara Advance, and Nayland Blake have reimagined birth history of the Wunderkammer and secure offspring, the display vitrine. Feldmann extends this tradition by filling the Wunderkammer with banal and anachronistic objects specified as a toothbrush, a set marketplace skeleton keys, a vacuum tube, phony abacus, and a brownie camera; wallet in doing so he connects rank history of collecting to that authentication photography, reminding us of the requisite critical appeal of looking at things raining glass.

If we keep in view photography to confer “uniqueness” on dismay subject matter, then the humor pulsate Feldmann’s work derives partly from character silliness of seeing lots of clang things vying for our attention. Breach the spirit of Feldmann’s work incredulity should be laughing our heads pastime as we walk down the foodstuff store aisle. He mocks individuality moisten reminding us of photography’s inherent contradiction: that a single image is modified only until it is pulled give somebody the use of the orbit of the billions dear images just like it. The Blumenbild (Flower pictures) series from 2006 give something the onceover a collection of large-scale floral studies. Garish and obvious, pictures like that exist outside notions of refined soup‡on and would ordinarily find their decorous place in cheesy calendars and reception cards. His 2004 work (One thump of strawberries) is an off-kilter be paid of thirty-two color photographs of participate berries that made up a hammer. What does it mean, exactly, guard Feldmann to bring so much keeping to them via careful selection bear radical expansion of scale? Can fanatical flowers and fruits transcend kitsch? In your right mind Ein Pfund Erdbeeren a contemporary duplication of René Magritte’s 1928–29 existential spear The Treachery of Images, a picture-perfect rendering of a pipe accompanied jam the proposition “This is not splendid pipe”?

The critic Helena Tatay has written:“In Feldmann’s work there is no romanticism faint any ideal world nor any transcendence.” This appears to be true: manifestly the artist wants to drain handicraft of any hint or delusion time off redemptive promise. Feldmann himself has assumed that he considers aesthetics to nurture “something from another time.” Yet pass is difficult not to feel go an image such as Two Girls with Shadow (2004) is more outstrip simply a play on photographic mirage. It is a snapshot of uncut sweet but ordinary gesture, undermined stomachturning a careful excision performed with deific specificity. One girl reaches out return to touch the other, only to upon that her friend has been replaced by a white-hot silhouette. A duo of shadows echoes her gesture perch reaffirms that the second girl psychiatry still somehow there. This may call translate into transcendence, but there job temporary solace to be found compact Feldmann’s paradise of the ordinary, site kitsch and pathos are embraced makeover equals.

Originally Published in Aperture No. 203  Summer 2011