post_modellismus – models in art - krinzinger projekte - Galerie ...

post_modellismus
introduction
by Sabine Dorscheid
The imaginary is defined by play with inverting mirrors, duplications, identifications
and productions – always based on the pattern of the double. - Gilles Deleuze, How
do we recognize structuralism?
post_modelism describes a recent development
in the use of models in art. The
term post_model does not refer specifically
to the tradition of sculptural models
that have been developed since the
1970s by artists such as Fritz Schwegler
and his students Thomas Schütte (3D) or
Thomas Huber (2D). It makes better sense
to view post_modelism from the perspective
of ‘staged photography’. In a global
sense, ‘staged photography’ is more related
to parallel worlds, persiflages and
the analytic approaches used by today’s
model artists. We can thus integrate the
photographically informed models of the
1980s and 1990s in a survey of recent
post_models.
The catalogue first presents Five Model
Cases (Laurie Simmons, Thomas
Demand, Edwin Zwakman, Oliver Boberg,
Lois Renner) of ‘staged photography’. It
is a passage from critic Ralf Christofori’s
dissertation Bild – Modell – Wirklichkeit
which was recently published. Two further
precursors of ‘staged photography’
proved indispensable for the exhibition:
James Casebere and Cindy Sherman.
Like Laurie Simmons, they ushered in the
‘staged photography’ which took off in
the 1970s in the USA and, subsequently,
in the 1980s, gained ground in Europe.
While photographic mise-en-scènes
already appeared in advertisements in the
1950s, they were only taken up by art
twenty years later in the so-called ‘directorial
mode’ (A. D. Coleman coined this
term in 1976). From the 1980s, photography-informed
models worlds quickly
multiplied and exhibitions traveled
throughout Europe. 1 The staging of motifs
helped photography to succeed in the
artworld as a large format. Large-format
photography became an equal competitor
of painting and a visible factor in the art
market in the 1990s.
Miklos Gaál can be regarded as a direct
link between ‘staged photography’ and
the post_models. He works with the pictorial
idiom of ‘staged photography’, turning
the tables of photography. His play with
focus suggests that his work involves
detailed shots of model worlds. In fact,
he only uses the ’directorial mode’ to confuse
our 20-year-old visual experience.
He shows us the reality in the representative
mode of model photography.
In his essay Artworks based on models
Thomas Trummer covers the entire
scope of recent post_models. The artists
study fields and disciplines in which
models are used or developed even in
everyday situations. For instance, in the
MILITARY (Antal Lakner develops equipment
for a fictive Icelandic army), as TV-
FORMAT (Lioudmila Voropai presents
real exhibition reviews of a fictive exhibition
and thus calls into question the
mechanisms of the artworld / Ola Pehrson
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