| Nowhere is the relevance of the public for the construction of private space
more evident than in hotel rooms. The feeling of withdrawal from public space
is perceived immediately upon entering as the arrival at a small island surrounded
only by a thin skin screening it off from an outside that somehow still remains
present. In particular, the fact that there is no neutral room in between, as
in a lonely mountain hut surrounded on all sides by nature, intensifies the feeling
of the body's dilation and of a new, vulnerable skin providing the body with liberating
opportunities. This situation has something incredibly "constructed"
about it and seems to invite further attempts at construction. The placement of
personal belongings becomes the ritual of taking possession; some people begin
by rearranging all the furniture, others destroy it right away in an effort to
make the process final or to equate it with the destruction of their own immediate
bodies. The body and the small, well-defined space around it become indistinguishable.
But the fragile boundary to the outside also produces tension and pressure; it
agitates and arouses, it might at any moment be punctured and is, anyway, a very
temporary thing. Alone in a hotel room, one becomes a voyeur of oneself. The imaginary
public becomes so real that it becomes possible to take two positions at once:
(remaining oneself) and becoming an eye that observes from the outside. The narcissistic
setting is nearly perfect - but only nearly - and thus becomes the jumping-off
point for Matthias Herrmann's work. His art, which is playful and full of ruptures,
always settles in at the threshold between intimate privacy and the (naturally)
public space. The work delights in a mise-en-scène quality, a quality which
nonetheless never just leads to a one-dimensional result, but instead is always
characterized by false bottoms and alienating effects. The mise-en-scène
is also never truly public; the photographs are made with a remote shutter release
and therefore always have a bit of seclusion about them. They are published only
in the entirety of the series. On the other hand, the mise-en-scène also
works in the opposite way, in that it suggests neither the type of privacy nor
"being different" in which American photography of the '90s, in particular,
set before its lens a broad range of subcultural forms of sexuality and fast life,
with the effect that the results always seemed to remain a form of exoticism.
Matthias Herrmann is not attempting to call lifestyles and their attendant corporealities
into art or to open art up to them. Once again they are only part of a larger
story, nothing authentic, no divisible essence, but arranged somewhere between
pronouncements about art and monochromatic coloration and rather difficult to
categorize. The ruptures in art, the relationship between text and image, the
wide variety of aesthetic approaches are the decisive thing. Good art and good
jokes about art come together and are often no longer quite distinguishable from
each other. This seems to me to be atypical for the genre. Douglas Crimp used the expression "shame-proned", i.e. the positive affirmation of the state of being ashamed, in the context of Andy Warhol's films and photography. Despite Crimp's justified emphasis of the affirmative aspects of, say, "Screentest #2" or "Mario Banana", it must also be said that "real"suffering is also involved there, that Mario Montez is, in fact, a victim as well. The affirmative aspects only begin to appear, additively, as it were, over the course of watching the scene in its entirety: what begins in earnest is then portrayed in a more humorous light - the transferral is sometimes almost sadistic. The mise-en-scène in Herrmann's images works completely differently - there are no victims, as the view is directed not only from the camera toward him, but also the other way around. This if only because Matthias Herrmann relies not just on one particular figure or role in his portrayals, but provides instead an entire palette of widely-varying references ranging from Actionism to various transgender depictions to a kind of bashful kitsch à la David Hockney. This variety of reference points in and of itself makes it impossible to reduce Herrmann's work to a certain narrative or pigeon-hole it as a fixed artistic standpoint. "All bad art is the result of good intentions" may be read in one of the photographs, and the saying can be taken either ironically or simply as a kind of stale joke; but when good intentions mean to cultivate the artistic field from a specific standpoint, it can also be taken as a serious comment on the artist's own work. The work pushes neither a moral nor an anti-moral. The constant change and mix in regard to formal structure and content can, perhaps, place differing positions in relation to each other and define them anew, but it takes on no such positions of its own. The work simultaneously contains the observer and the observed, subject and analysis, .jokes and jokes about art, in their differences exaggerations bordering on the grotesque. The hotel room is the melting point for all these levels because its narrowness is merely an alleged one; it is Matthias Herrmann's studio because it's the place where the relationship between fantasies and transgressions is so strong.
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