| The 130 photographs collected in this volume originated over the course of
the past two years as "works in progress"; they differ from Herrmann's
earlier work in a number of distinct ways. Despite the fact that in both cases
we're dealing with mise-en-scène depictions that came into being in a studio
setting far from the public's eye, and, in both cases, the artist himself serves
as model, the new self-depictions - beyond their increasingly narrative tone (the
figures are representative of something that invites symbolic identification)
- are part of a discourse between image and text which the viewer - that is, each
viewer individually - must set into motion and infuse with meaning. Text cards
are added like the captions in silent movies or the pricetags in a department
store and the image can be "explained" via these texts - "found"
statements, quotations from newspapers and interviews - or, at the same time,
the texts "explained" by the pictures. Like many present-day artists
(by "present" I mean a kind of historical present, including the past
quarter century or so) - Jürgen Klauke, Urs Lüthi, Marina Abramovic,
Cindy Sherman, or Luigi Ontani - Matthias Herrmann utilizes his well-trained body,
which betrays that of the former dancer, and its power of expression as a constant
medium in his photographs, which are rather like the end products of slapstick
seances. Herrmann commands a versatility of expression that extends to desire
and trigger-coordinating operations.
Two things become clear when Matthias Herrmann is set alongside the above-mentioned group as part of a tradition of self-depiction. On the one hand, there is his topicality; he deals with a kind of excessive openness, a nearly cynical exhibitionism carried to the point of absurdity, the pleasure to be had in role-playing, and the deconstruction of markers of sexuality. On the other hand, the innovative nature of his contribution becomes readily apparent when taken in the context of this tradition; his reflections on the medium itself and his questioning of strategies developed in fashion and advertising photography play a central role, along with certain elements of performance development. Herrmann believes that we all are players in the game of dressing and undressing and he plays to a finely-tuned instrumentation of emotions - one need only look in the next best issue of Vogue or at a nearby billboard to see how this works. He doesn't use photography in the manner of Pierre Molinier to create, through its "authenticity", a new androgynous identity, to make the impossible possible, as it were. Instead, he actually destroys the various roles, confuses with his props, or carries on to his heart's desire with metamorphoses that can only be decoded with difficulty by the viewer. While Cindy Sherman creates, as a director might, a hundred different identities of her Self, and Rainer, in his self-depictions, tears down the barriers of the ego's potential for self-expression in order to gain a new identity, Herrmann introduces a variety of different, possible persons. In the beginning of his career, Robert Mapplethorpe discovered for himself the homosexual pornography of 42nd Street in New York and thereby determined that, for him, the most arousing subject of art was sexuality. One of the most well-known self-depictions is his self-portrait with a whip in his anus. If one looks at this Mapplethorpe self-portrait - which breaks a taboo of artistic depiction - and then compares it with work by Matthias Herrmann, the distance in terms of attitude since that time is obvious. The image of Mapplethorpe, with its symbolic content reminiscent of Felizien Rops, is all about the overcoming of the taboo, and at the time it shocked people as an avowal of the artist's outing himself. Matthias Herrmann lives in an age in which porn stars like Jeff Stryker, who are judged according to the measurements and the acting ability of their sex organs, are subjects fit for "civilized" discourse and the artist can question - on a meta-level - fetishism, the pornographic, and the taboos of representation. Dominique Baqué has astutely characterized the paradoxical connection
between pornography and eroticism in Matthias Herrmann's work: "In his refusal
to accept the common wisdom of a separation between eroticism and pornography
(like that between "high art" and "low art"), Herrmann is
one of a very few artists who dare work with pornography as a discipline, even
more: to infiltrate the eroticism with visible signs of pornography. He enthusiastically
embraces the risks involved in the obscene and the grotesque, far from the elliptical
refinements of the erotic: the red clown's nose, which at times adorns Herrmann's
face, is there as an exaggeration, but also for a certain lightheartedness that
makes it possible to defuse criticism in advance. (in:"mauvais genre"
Art Press Paris No. 240, 11/98)
Published in Textpieces 1996-1998 |