| Matthias Herrmann, displaying his taut, smooth, and white skin, which contrasts with his dark facial hair, and with the tan-coloured female clothing that he wears, is gracefully posed on a light crème-coloured couch with pillows in disarray. His posture—as well as everything else I mention—can easily be read as a camp enactment. It also can be read in another way: in spite of his posed body and pressed clothing, just beneath the skin (of the flesh, or the fabric, or both), he (just as everyone else) is completely out of control, always failing to live up to the Law: gender norms, proper identities, coherent selves, and social standards, for example. So, what does this photograph mean? Indeed, there can be several (simultaneous) readings that can (and will) produce conflicting meanings—there can only ever be a multiplicity of meanings, and all of them provisional, when it is in the throes of desire—and interpretation (whether one admits it or not!) is desirous. Furthermore, one could ask: what is not in desire’s fold, that which wraps you in its productive force? Though Herrmann’s photographs are specific, detailed, they lose all specificity when I recall them—this is even the case when the photographs are in front of me. I mean, I know what they look like—what they “represent”—but I am unable to provide a satisfactory meaning. This is similar to RB's experience with the photographs he cherished and wrote about in Camera Lucida—especially the Winter Garden Photograph. So what of this hotel, the Alexander—discovering its name much later, and that it is re-presented throughout this photography book—along with Herrmann and his body/self/parts, like a perverted, postmodern, and “queer” illuminated manuscript of a room and a body? Here, with photographs in hand and my memory twisting and folding backwards, I am lost (and found) in a moment of déjà vu: I am in another hotel room asking (myself? the room?), “Who was here before me?”, “Who was here before the person before me?”, “And who will be here after me?” “What pleasures and pains have been, or will be, “inscribed” in this room? on this bed? on that couch? on the floor?” It is one place that is concurrently a multiplicity of spaces—all used in multifarious ways by its “guests”—or better provocateurs. The hotel room is, to use MF's term, a “heterotopia”, a realized utopia that is at the “outside” of all places: beyond location, but nevertheless locatable. The hotel room is hidden but also revealed; it is nowhere in specific, but also right here in its specificity; it is a singular multiplicity—with multiple opportunities for singular enactments; it is always open to the tactics of the minoritarian, of the sexual dissident or outlaw, of the Other: Herrmann is located in all of these political positions. Furthermore, according to MF, the hotel room is that place-cum-space “… where one enters with … one’s [liaison] and … sexuality is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept out of public view, and yet without being left to the open air.” That written, the hotel room is a heterotopia par excellence, and, as a heterotopia, it is the creation of—here, via the performance of Herrmann’s body/self—a completely different space: “a different … space as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as [our everyday place] is disorganized, badly arranged, and muddled.” Much like the disorganized couch on which Herrmann gracefully sits, what is demonstrated is how the hotel room can be disrupted, made otherwise in the here and now—but differently, always differently. More than a performative self-portraiture, and more than a simple mis-en-scene of a particular room, this is a demonstration (or maybe a “monstration”)—a “how-to guide”—on inhabiting space differently, which isn’t too far from queer-inhabitation, especially after seeing the delectably unbecoming photographs of Herrmann. Indeed, living up to the task of the queer contemporary artist, he shows how to reinvent, how a room, where one is simply a guest, can be reformatted for queer tactics. Much like one of the many photographs of his cock, resting on a counter, it is a beautifully pornographic still life, and in making such an image he immediately foregrounds what is supposedly illegitimate in art photography and art history: desire materialized as engorged and meaty (a “minimal-cum-baroque” image?). It is moments such as these, which fill Herrmann’s perverse photography book, that demonstrate that the artist is more than a model for his own photographs: he is a technician of perversities, sexualities, and gender possibilities, showing how desire can sweep us away in its violent currents, transforming queer-sexual-spaces, to borrow JPR’s term, out of everyday places, and enacting a queer erotics that is missing from the social—due in no small part to compulsory heterosexuality and its disciplinary machinery. For me—always for me, in the Nietzschean sense—Herrmann’s photographs are demonstrations of a queer life, a queer ethics, and queer tactics, even if he is alone in this or that hotel room—which is never one place after another—but always a new set of possibilities and potentialities in the here and now—even if the photograph was (taken and given) then and there. Robert Summers Published in Hotel V, 2007 |