A Bittersweet Life

The picture’s structure traces the cool symmetries of architectural modernity and the dry objectivity of its preferred material: grid lines made of concrete slabs guide the gaze to the picture’s centre at which the strictly rectangular empty space of a dry swimming pool takes up the entire width of the image. At its end, somewhat above the centre of the painting, and again in the middle, the reduced geometrical, balanced form of a diving tower rises up which is flanked on the left and right by two smaller towers that completely match. The strictness and straightness of these elements is underscored by the soft curves on the mountain peaks behind disappearing in sfumato and the downright amorphous-seeming perforations of the concrete skin of the pool. A sharp, small shadow is drawn on the left-hand side in hard contrast in the depths of the pool. Above the right-hand edge of the pool, small blocks are visible like an echo of the pool’s geometry and on closer inspection turn out to be a group of houses.

This scenery seems to have been arranged for the shot, but Frauke Eigen only photographs what she finds. Harmonious compositions, rhythmic contrasts and fine shades of grey characterize her clear black-and-white photographs. In a formal sense the works are sobre, even and concentrated. The choice of detail mostly excludes those connections which could serve a temporal and spatial orientation. Through this focusing, Frauke Eigen’s portraits, which are of enormous intensity, along with the floral arrangements, sculptural architectures, surfaces of the sea and constellations of foliage, generate a system of minimalist structural analyses. The presentation of the photos in matt baryta prints bonded with aluminium and the uniformly almost square formats give the impression of seriality.

Frauke Eigen’s photographic tableaux immediately captivate through a specific intensity which is hard to approach conceptually. At first viewers stand vis-à-vis the pictures as spectators, since they do not know their conditions of production and the reality lying behind them. But already when their gaze glides over the depicted objects and their surfaces, the passive spectators become active viewers who dip into the artist’s world of images through their powers of perception. From receptors of empirical stimuli, from onlookers and gawkers, they turn into participants. On the one hand, they become scientists investigating the causes. This is the state of viewers guided by reason who are situated quietly and untouched, at a distance vis-à-vis the performance and delude themselves into believing that they are in control of the situation. On the other, they are drawn into the magical power of the portrayal and partake of the living energy of what is offered which, because of its character as photographic documentation, is already past. The captured vitality of what is shown combines in its performance, in the intelligence of the staging and in the energy it transfers, with the viewers’ vitality. As both distanced observers and sensuous feasters, the viewers interact with what is shown, but with differing degrees of empathy. Theatre has made these different viewers’ states into the starting-point for two paradigmatic stances: Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre”[1] and Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”.[2] Frauke Eigen’s artistic procedure with regard to production and reception, however, can be assigned neither to the pole of distanced, reflective viewing nor to that of the gaze of surrealist desire.

In a way differing from the models of theatrical reception, the viewers of Frauke Eigen’s pictures feel themselves addressed without adopting a stance toward the motif depicted. Neither something immediately given and phenomenologically described in the photo, nor the objects portrayed are dealt with in the works. Rather, in these photographs it is a matter of how the graphic expression proves its superiority over words and concepts. In this “language of the phenomena themselves”[3], the precise relations of the image elements to each other are articulated much more clearly than in any verbal or visually posed or staged, and thus automatically distanced, description of places, persons or actions. The formal relations in Frauke Eigen’s works communicate their own, specifically iconic meaning. With the concentration on the purity of the structure in the individual subject, an independent cosmos of possible formal and semantic relations unfolds which the artist leaves in the purely visual and thus strictly photographic element. What is depicted is what was there at the time of making the picture and its trace as captured by the lens via the optical mechanism of the camera and passed on to the light-sensitive material. The pictures do not need any relations or references to an outside. Without a pre-given sequence of narration or perspective of interpretation, each of the individual motifs and their constellations unfold an independent, powerful image space.

The effects of Frauke Eigen’s works in their reception cannot be deciphered solely through a description of the means of representation, the preconditions of representation and the objects of representation. This way of proceeding would suggest a strictly structural conception of production, work and reception. Rather, Frauke Eigen’s works unfold a surplus or an in-between in aesthetic perception via the specificity of the photographic paradigm which can best be described by Roland Barthes’ so-called “third sense”.[4] Something is there are about which one knows what constitutes it; one feels it, but words and a denotation are lacking for the cognitive happening that comes about when viewing some of the images. Apart from the purely informative semantic plane of unambiguous objectivity and the symbolic semantic plane intended by the author of the picture with regard to the perceived phenomena and their representation, which can be deciphered by the recipient, Barthes proposes as a third semantic plane the blunt sense. This third sense is located outside any referential system, “It cannot be confused with the simple being-here of a scene”.[5] This sense is blunt because, like a sphere or a curve, it does not offer any purchase and thus cannot be grasped by an analysis of the structure. This third sense floats conceptually, ungraspable between the image and its description. Barthes sees here an analogy with the Japanese haiku, “An anaphoric gesture without denominative content, something like a blow that scratches the senses”.[6] This blow is a disturbance which hits signification. The same thing happens with Frauke Eigen’s photographs. They achieve their effect not by grasping, documenting or staging something, but through an effect generated by the specific character of the formal arrangement. Nevertheless, something is depicted, and without this relation of depiction there would be no photograph.

The third sense generates in a small detail of the corner of a mouth, in a single, apparently anthropomorphic rib of a leaf, or in the way in which one fruit leans against another, a specific tension. It is an emotion, a form of pleasure which arises beyond rationality solely from perception. This immediately experienced sensuousness is accessible only to aesthetic knowing. Any attempt to name it, to classify it and grasp it in words destroys this sensation. It is a specific quality of the third semantic plane that it evades the grasp of ordering, tranquillizing, rational concepts and thus rigidification. The third sense “remains in a state of incessant erethism; in it, desire does not flow into that delight in the signified which usually allows the subject to fall back pleasurably into the peacefulness of naming”.[7] Instead, in this surrender to certain particles of perception, just as in love, an immediate welling-up of emotionality takes place, a sensitivity for beauty and for that which constitutes the essence of something. In discovering this perception, according to Roland Barthes, we portray ourselves. This encounter with perceptions “is an emotion which simply denotes what one loves, what one wants to defend…. One enjoys, one loves,… one comes to a secret understanding, an agreement with them [the perceptions; A.-C. G.]”.[8]

The redefinition and further definition of performance to a magical, loving connection not graspable by concepts which characterizes Frauke Eigen’s pictures cannot be found in the mere description of the depicted objects, the historical, contextual and scenic embedding and framing of the representation in images. But it is also not possible to make a shot and its viewing independent of the conditions of its reception. The change of representational episteme formulated by Michel Foucault in his thesis about the fundamental change in the concept of reception in modernity[9] implies that this change is inscribed by the self-reflexivity of representation into representation and viewing: the one representing is always also a viewer, and vice versa. And so it is the viewers themselves, who in viewing and surrendering themselves to this viewing, unfold that “in between” which Barthes describes by the third “blunt sense”. Frauke Eigen designs her photographs like haiku, and the viewers are invited, like the narrator in The Bright Chamber by Roland Barthes,[10] to meditate on their desires in view of photographs that move them. For in fact, Frauke Eigen’s works extend the possibility of knowledge set up in each photo by an epistemically conditioned transcendence: The photographs mostly arise in surroundings whose reality, charged by immediate drama in all its cruelty, is present as a matter of course in contemporary representation in the media. Frauke Eigen’s motifs, however, abstain from anything resembling spectacle, any political commentary or any charging with meaning which would satisfy the curiosity of gawkers. Only through the pictures’ caption do the viewers find out something about the motifs’ history which they know of from sensational reports in the media.

Frauke Eigen found the geometrically arranged Poplar Forest (2003) along with the pool scenery already described (Kabul, 2003) and the Onions (2003) carefully stacked in jute sacks against a rough chalk wall in Afghanistan. Nothing tells of the traces which the invasion of Soviet troops in 1979, the Afghanistan war at that time, the Afghan resistance up to the Taliban government and the so-called Northern Alliance have left behind. The unintentional elegance of an arrangement of folds that contrasts with the worried look of the woman wearing the garment captivates us without us knowing that the woman portrayed is a Young Mother (2003). The minimalist building that dominates the roughness of the surrounding steppe in cool splendour and whose black silhouette in another photo with jagged mountain peaks creates an exciting graphic tension is in fact an Afghan Fortress (I and II, 2003). Frauke Eigen also photographed Foliage (2003), whose contours dissolve into a pointillist structure, in Afghanistan.

The depicted elements become also graphic phenomena, such as the child whose reclining shape, together with the wild pattern of the short grass stalks and the powerful lines of two very large tree trunks, generates an abstract structure in which the spatial and temporal co-ordinates remain unclear (Meike reclining, 2002). The tips of fir trees appear in Frauke Eigen’s photographs as a tachist web (Fir Tree, 2002). The blonde hair of a girl combine with the long, slumped stalks of forest grass to make a graphic structure in which flat leaves and the clear white of the girl’s T-shirt provide accents of light (Alessandra crouching, 2002)

A Leaf (2003) captivates with its clear geometry and touches us because of its apparently anthropomorphic forms just like the Mangoes (2003) leaning on one another which Frauke Eigen found in Mexico. The heart-shaped contour of the leaf and the sensuous curves of the fruit arouse our gaze to life. The wrinkles of the Woman from Teuahuantepec (2003) reveal, in an interplay with her hair tied behind in a severe style and woven into a plait, a beauty which finds its harmonious counterpoint in the metallic reflection of the golden ear-ring in the centre of the picture. Three cormorants describe in the sky a flight formation that seems arranged into a hieroglyph. It is of secondary importance for the gracefulness of the portrayal that this Bird Flight (2003) takes place over the Pacific coast of Mexico. Even the sand, the woven eyelets of the towelling, the freckles of the Girl on Beach (2001) in Ukraine and the waves of the sea of Portugal (Lapping Waves, 2002) fall apart into individual structural components instead of telling a summer story.

Among these photographs works are to be found which Frauke Eigen has made by multiple exposures of shots which are composed of motifs from Potsdam Square (1997, a series of 12 photos) in Berlin. They show clearly the conceptual approach which pervades the photographer’s artistic procedure: a fascination for structures and formal webs characterize the portraits as well as the subjects of trees reflected in the water (Reflection, 1999), the constellations of leaves, and the lines and contrasts generated by folds in the skin and fabric. Sharply contoured budding branches contrast against an indistinct sky or ephemeral cloud structures and show motifs which Frauke Eigen first found in her home city of Berlin (Spring No. 200, No. 201, No. 204, Birch Tree, all 2004). Porous webbing, continuous transitions of colour and rusty surfaces characterize a series of striking shots of Found Objects (2000, series of 14 photos) from a mass grave in Kosovo which Frauke Eigen made when working as a photographer for the Technical Aid Service and through which, above all, the artist became well-known.

The intensity of Frauke Eigen’s photographs arises not from the paralysing view of bodies torn apart, not from the horror of the stench of decaying corpses that can be inkled behind them, and not from the accusing, sad eyes of the refugees which the society of the spectacle normally keeps in store for spectators doomed to passivity in view of the spectacle. Frauke Eigen’s works unfold their power rather through the photograph with her highly individual means and the rules inherent only in this system, through the visual picture made by an apparatus, through bringing the past to presence. This power unfolds also on a third semantic plane, so-called by Barthes, beyond the conceptual plane when viewing the apparently sobre real, and in viewing the viewing thus stimulated. Instead of providing answers and interpretations, these works arouse critique of the flood of images and the deprivation of rights of viewers. Frauke Eigen’s photographs lead back to the origin of images, to the shadows cast by the light of the fire or the sun, whose source seems perplexing to viewers and whose outlines, however, despite that, they are able to trace.

The overrated martial arts film, A Bitter-Sweet Life,[1] is pervaded by a metaphor which the Korean director, Kim Jee-Won, presents in a short initial sequence. Asked by a disciple whence the movement in the willows he is looking at comes, whether it is the wind or the branches and leaves, the master answers without looking up, neither the one nor the other — your spirit and your heart are the cause.

1. Bertolt Brecht, Die Straßenszene. Grundmodell einer Szene des epischen Theaters. (1940). In: Manfred Brauneck Theater im 20. Jahrhundert. Programmschriften, Stilperioden, Reformmodelle. Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt 1982 pp. 277–286.
2. Antonin Artaud, Das Theater der Grausamkeit. Erstes Manifest. (1932). In: Manfred Brauneck, op. cit. pp. 395–404.
3. Étienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et particulièrement en physiologie et en médicine. cited after Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison Das Bild der Objektivität. In: Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie. ed. Peter Geimer. Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2002 pp. 29–99, 29.
4. Vgl.. Roland Barthes, Der dritte Sinn. In: Roland Barthes Der entgegenkommende und der stumpfe Sinn. Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp 1990.
5. Herta Wolf, Das, was ich sehe, ist gewesen. Zu Roland Barthes’ Die helle Kammer. In: Herta Wolf (ed.) Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters. Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2002 pp. 89–107, 100.
6. Roland Barthes, Die helle Kammer. Bemerkungen zur Photographie. Übers. v. Dietrich Leube. Frankfurt/Main Suhrkamp 1989 p. 17.
7. Roland Barthes, Der dritte Sinn. op. cit. p. 61.
8. A.a.O.,S. 56.
9. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine Archäologie der Humanwissenschaften. Übers. v. Ulrich Köppen. Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp 1971.
10. Roland Barthes, Die helle Kammer. A.a.O.
11. A Bittersweet Life. Drehbuch und Regie: Kim Jee-Woon. South Korea 2005 approx. 120 Min.

Catalogue: Frauke Eigen, Fotografien 1999-2005

Text: Anna-Catharina Gebbers

2005, 72 pages