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"He saw nothing wrong with making money while he made art", wrote Jack Fritscher about one of the icons of artistic photography in the 20th century, Robert Mapplethorpe. And it's no coincidence that this quip was used as a motto on the first page of Matthias Herrmann's "booklet" (as the artist himself likes to call his publications) "Hotel2/Gargellen" (1998). Herrmann is not only a photo artist - he also contracts himself out as a professional photographer. How fortunate that the shoot for an advertising brochure took him to the hotel in Gargellen, in Austria's Vorarlberg region, where the economic necessity of earning money coupled itself with an opportunity to make artistic use of the situation by turning the temporary workplace into a site for his photographic mise-en-scène art. Completely apart from all this: Matthias Herrmann loves hotels. He will make use of any opportunity to seek out these strange places, settled as they are in between the public and the private, by taking a trip. Sometimes this produces art - and along with it a particular by-product that is more and more establishing itself as a separate artistic field in Herrmann's work: his publications. His hotel stories alone have engendered three such publications. "Hotel1" (1997) came into being during a friends visit to the Hotel Imperial in Vienna; "Hotel3/bondage" (1998) is, oddly enough, an outgrowth of a stay with his mother at the spa hotel Karawankenhof nearby the thermal springs in Villach. As mentioned, it was a job that took him to "Hotel2/Gargellen". In a pose that emits obvious signals, Herrmann stands in the half-opened doorway of his lodgings in Vorarlberg; he greets the viewer with a meaningful look, which seems to promise that behind the door a world will be revealed which it will be worthwile for us to have a look into. In the knowledge that Herrmann favors role-playing, that he most often tries out his numbers on his own body - and not least that he is gay - the temptation proves an immediate success. I accept the invitation, allow myself to be drawn into the hotel room, and turn to page two. Here and on the following pages I am first confronted with the customary, petit-bourgeois character peculiar to small hotels in rural areas: wood-paneled walls, dark carpeted floors, veneered furniture, curtains with little flowers. Actually rather nice, but still without any sense of atmosphere, probably because the interior as a whole doesn't allow any conclusions about a private living situation. This privacy must first be created by each occupant of the room and, as such, is newly shaped by each visitor according to what he or she extracts from the suitcases he or she has brought along and how these things are positioned around the room. In Herrmann's case the few accessoires in question - and they are familiar from the gay scene - are jockstraps and a wig. Everything else is provided by his own body and the use of photographic means. However, it is not his own private sphere that Matthias Herrmann offers to show us in his photographs, but a highly constructed one. Everything he does is staged. Taking on and playing with various identities is a decisive aspect of his work. Herrmann's photographs don't portray gay identity toward the outside, but rather show gender to be a fictitous construction, discursively made. He succeeds in depicting this by virtue of taking on highly varied roles in which he examines and reinterprets normed images of masculinity and feminity. For the remainder of the photographic mise-en-scène, Herrmann leaves his own identity in the foyer of the hotel in Gargellen; it is as an ever-different person that he confronts the viewer with visual boundary-crossings. What environment could suit this endeavour better than a hotel? Herrmann's goal - the deconstruction of gender-specific allocations - has as
its results the frequent use of image citations, be they from art and art history
of from advertising. One example of this is the re-creation of Bruce Weber's famous
Madonna portrait in which Madonna (Herrmann) kisses herself in the mirror. Through
the imitation of this "typically female" pose in the guise of a (masculine)
body, Herrmann has circumscribed the familiar scene with a gay aura. Still, this
strategy, often used elsewhere by Herrmann, appears only this one time in "Hotel2/Gargellen".
Instead of citing images, the artist has come up with a new strategy here - the
text citation - and it is a strategy that elevates the narrative part of the image
immensely. Nevertheless, the text citations give no clue as to a possible identity
or a history of the people depicted by Herrmann. This is prevented by Herrmann's
carefulness in selecting accompanying texts that never speak in the first person.
The text citations function rather as a kind of commentary, at times also as an
appeal - but above all they underscore the ironic undertone that always accompanies
Herrmann's photographs. For his Bruce Weber interpretation, for example, he uses
thus a quote from Oscar Wilde: "To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long
romance." And if Herrmann is unfortunate enough to fall from a heating unit
out of the picture frame, turning, as he falls, his ass towards the viewer, it
lends a note of comedy to Jenny Holzer's statement - meant seriously - that "Teasing
people sexually can have ugly consequences." In spite of the joke made by
Herrmann's image/text combinations, nothing more of the erotic exuberance and
giddiness that was so apparent in "Hotel1" remains. In its place the
text citations underscore the melancholy tone that pervades "Hotel2/Gargellen".
We may take comfort in a statement by Gianni Versace, which Matthias has written
out on a piece of paper loosely attached to the door of that veneered wardrobe
onto which the artist - dressed in cheerless black socks and throwing the viewer
a concerned look - has crept: "Be optimistic, even when you're sad." |