Pretext and Posttext
In November 2000 somebody kindly asked me for a contribution of an image and a comment on that image to a magazine. When I had successfully answered that request, I found it difficult to stop writing. More photographs of houses and huts longed for comments, descriptions and stories. Winter was ahead with a promise of cold feet and my friends’ complaints about German weather. Business had been good that year and I had enough money to keep me going for another six months. So, why not stay at home and go on writing about my own photographs? So I did, and after three months I had written texts to thirty photographs. Now, one year later I am about to publish this work in a book. The title is complicated: „Der Beruf, das Gegenteil und die Liebe“. „Liebe“, becaus I refer to other artists a lot, painters mostly, but also filmmakers, musicians, writers and sculptors if necessary. My work is about media subtleties, greyzones, osmosis, gobetweenism, guest-media, starting from the fact that the invention of photography is the result of a confederacy of show business, science, fine arts and the like, therefor a main pleasure when looking at a photograph is finding out which guest medium is at work.
My three critieria when judging one of my own pictures are:
Is it a specific photographic image?
Does it still host a guest-medium?
Is it the result not only of fulfilling the camera program but hopefully also of working against it?
According to this third criterion my main aim in photography is to destroy space[1] (it is part of the camera program to emphasize space, central perspectiv is the code) and celebrate the resulting flatness. Or simulate a different space, ambiguous space, the kind of space you don’t expect from a photograph, but rather from cubist painting.
Gerald Domenig, born 1953 in the south of Austria, close to the Italian and Slovenian border. From 1972 till 1978 art college first in Düsseldorf, then in Frankfurt am Main, where he since lives and works as a poet, „Meister des Franfurter Fragezeichens“, in traditional (old) media like drawing, writing, photography. Recommended book: „Die gute Naht“, Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt 1995 (text in German, black and white photographs).
[1] Schon diese Absicht bringt ein Gastmedium ins Spiel: die Bildhauerei.