KATHARINA SIEVERDING: IRRESISTABLE HISTORICAL CURRENT (#1)
By Horace Brockington
Sieverding’s art provides an essential platform for socially responsible art. She is known for enormous photographic enlargements depicting biological processes, political events and manipulations of her own self- portraiture. Her themes center upon genocide, genetic research, beauty and self-metamorphosis. These concerns have become essential for successive generations that have often embrace her strategies especially from in her large-scale installations. Sieverding views art as a means of mass communications, and as part of a real world didactic. Sieverding’s art has been described as proof of art ‘s ability to adapt itself to speaking about circumstances without being compromised or illustrative.
Works by the artist including " Life/Death" (1969/1995) recently digitally re-mastered, and presented at the Musterraum, Munich, "Night Human Being (1982), and "Transformer" (1973) have richly added to the contemporary history not only of German art, but international practices. However, Sieverding is not an artist to gesture in the past, her most recent works, including the installation "Metamorphosis of Evolution", and "Visual Studies" attest to her continual fascination with art, process and content. Her underlying themes continue to involve issues related to identity, individualism and society. Through this approach, Sieverding wants to speak to the way and means of the individual as a vital agent of social change. She explores the complex political potential in conceptual constructions and representations, often adapting strategies that will engage the viewer into the interaction with the particular work. Sieverding’s art continues to propose critical starting points for artistic statement and public debate. Forms resulting from manipulation during the developing process formulate images that transcend race, gender and age. Her works remain based on themes of identity, individuality, society and technicalization of man and nature. Her works are equally based on art historical references. Often, the works speaks to a re-examination of Germany’s past. This exploration aims to de-mystify German history. To a larger extent, her works highlights the tensions between certainty and perception of memory, evoking certain sensations and emotions. Her art addresses the role of art as an antidote. Its central message stems from the deep humanism at the center of the work. Confronting issues of political disruption, the large-sale color photographs functioning as viable art objects.
Since l967 Sieverding has persistently concentrated on the conception and construction of large-scale imagery using film and photographic media. Although. Her video works has often been described as possessing a "Fassbinder-esque" quality in both thematic treatment, and the cinematic movement within the works for the most part her approach is analogized by conceptual practices as such the artist’s emphasis is often on the duality of the specific material as well as the immaterial quality and the quality of light. . Sieverding remains a pioneer in the use of large-scale film and video as art. Sieverding has characterized her works as hybrid pictures surfaces that border between truth and fiction, iconoclasm and "Pictorial Turn". Her works has always stood almost adverse to traditional definition of photography.
The artist is highly motivated by process, often using a variety of technical solutions in order to generate her images. With her intent in expanding the possibility of photography within the realm of contemporary art practices, Sieverdeing became a pioneer for and a major influence for photographic art today. Working mainly with large- scale photographic and projected imagery, her monumental photographic portraits often appropriate the scale of billboards. This approach is a direct by-product of her keen interest in advertising. Scale is important for engaging the viewer, requiring that he/she becomes an active participant in the work. The viewer’s awareness of the constructive nature of the image namely their perception of the image are largely conditioned by their own awareness. Katharina Sieverding understands her pictures both as projection screen images and energetic objects which activates the imaginative power of the viewer. The artist uses the techniques of the photographic statement in order to hold sense and meaning.
The recognition of the photograph as a literal and symbolic fusion of light and darkness is at he heart of Sieverding’s work. She understands the ability of the photographic image to exploit the boundaries between exposing and fabricating a sense of reality, a quality manipulated in both advertising and film, the two most important media that have influenced her.
One critic has noted: "She believes strongly in the subjective reality and focuses on the subject in her work. She often uses images of herself in her large-scale photographs. She prefers the medium of photography because for her, it uses the objective to discuss aspects of subjective alienation in reality. Sieverding questions our perception of reality and asks the viewer to accompany her in a journey of explanation and discovery of what reality is for her. By accepting that one’s reality is subjective by its own nature she searches to find the universal problems. The photographs are large in scale and multi-paneled. They read very flat with a simple image —to ground relationship. The photo-image has no depth and nothing lies in the background. Sieverding’s photographic process reveals the critical and a conscious analysis that inform the decisions in her work. Everything is pushed forward into the world of the observer. The spectator as well as the artist is challenged to confront his or her perceptions of reality and to establish a personal point of view. She believes it is precisely this type of dialogue and cooperation that formulates the subjective"1
Katharina Sieverding was born November 16, 1944 in Prague. After spending one year (1963-64) at the Hoschschule fur Bildende Kunste, Hamburg Sierverding enrolled at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf where she studied until 1967with Teo Otto. While at school the artists also worked on set designs and construction for theatrical performances at venues such as the Burgtheater, Vienna, the Schauspielhaus, Dusseldorf, and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin. She continued her studies at the Kunstakademie through l972 under Joseph Beuys. Beuys emphasis on the creation of the artist persona is evident in Sieverding’s early photographic work, which features of large-scale close-up self-portraits that she varies by changing makeup, lighting and focus. In the mid- l970s Sieverding began making monumental photographic tableaux that combined image and text. In l976 Sieverding came to New York City to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art ‘s Independent Study Program and remained in Manhattan becoming a member of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the New School for Social Research in l977. She traveled throughout the United States and Canada in l977 lecturing, performing and creating installations at institution such as Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, and Concordia University, Montreal.
70s
Sieverding’s early work is clearly impacted by Nam June Paik’s art especially his l963 works in Germany. Sieverding artistic contemporaries were Gerry Schum, Rebecca Horn, and Franz Erhard Walther. Her schoolmates included Imi Knoebel, Imi Giese, Blinky Palermo and Martin Kippenbergh. However, like many of her contemporary artists, her influences are drawn from a host of international artists. Hers has been described as a non-nationalist history art. Despite being a friend and master pupil of Joseph Beuys with whom she studied in l969 she did not completely absorb his formal vocabulary. Beuy’s developed an enormously charged vocabulary of materials that have been erroneously attributed to his personal biography rather than seen as a by-product of his engagement with an international avant-. It has been noted that while Sieverding’s works clearly demonstrate the indirect influence of Beuys and the School of Dusseldorf. She transformed her practice through the medium of photography outside the Dusseldorf’ painterly tradition from which she emerged.
In her early works Sieverding appears to combine the photographic collage and technical experiments of Robert Rauchenberg, or Nam June Paik, transforming them into states photographic images fused with her own interest in protest against authority of governmental, military and academic institutions. A key departure for Sieverding was the inclusion of cinema and advertising to make her art ethereal, non-precious, and thus truly conceptual. Her works has resisted the "status" object label or marketability of many of her German counterparts such as Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter or Anselm Keifer. In many of her early works the sheer scale confronts and pushes beyond the concept of "collectible " especially in a period before collectors and museum began acquiring large scale photographic works and video installations thus by sheer scale her early works re-confirmed their conceptual quality as public art works
Accordingly, Katharina Sieverding has created works that resisted commodification and pure objectivity according to the classical anti-commodity program of conceptual practices. Her work functions, as a public or political arena. Not surprising then that many consider her public works as some of her strongest.
Sieverding emerged during a period when artists began using photographs in ways conceptually and materially different form those generally produced prior to the l960s. Her work is therefore rooted in a period when artists began to re-examine commercial production technologies and the use of the photographic means as process. As Gary Garrels has noted: "The photographic medium came to be recognized as having enormous physical and conceptual capacities that could touch on and expand the potential of other media as well. This relationship between photography and painting, photography and sculpture, photography and architecture, photography and film, and photography and mass produced mechanical images all came to be explored as points along the continuum of the photographic medium."11
In the 1970s Sieverding began making enormous photographic tableaux combing image and text in which she essentially appeared as a character. The work grows into more sophisticated seamless fusion of picture and captions. The texts were often driven by social commentary influenced by the realities of the 70s and her travels in the United States and China especially large billboards she saw during her travels. In the United States billboards were used for advertising while in China they are used to express political ideology and the idolization of the political leadership. In both cases these large displays in public places are used to encourage identification with the image to absorb the private individual into a social frame.
Katharina Sieverding’s works of the period engage questions of social politics and to what extent is an individual free or controlled by society? What lines exist between private and social responsibility and between personal and political power? In l979 a highlight of the period was an exhibition, "Unwiderstehliche historsche Stromung" (Irresistible Historical Currents). The action in the exhibition works appears isolated and caught by some abstract force. The captions freeze the narrative and projects a social meaning on to the image. The over all effect is both confrontational and ambiguous. Equally, there is a present of a lurking sense of danger and uneasiness.
Along with artists such as Martha Rosler, Valie Export Carolee Schneeman and Ana Mendieta of this period, Sieverding pioneered the contemporary filmic use of the female body, which had long been held in the domain of male artists. Through her play with language, advertising and pornographic imagery her works anticipates Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and variety of works by women artists that would follow in successive generations.
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