ANSICHTEN . EINSICHTEN . AUFSICHTEN - der Bildhauer und Fotograf
Sibylle Omlin: Looking at, onto and into
Jochen Kitzbihler – the sculptor as photographer
"I deliberately moved slowly through the white of the mountain. What happened? Nothing happened. Nor was it necessary for anything to happen. I was liberated from expectation, and far removed from delirium of any kind. My regular motion was in itself a dance. This fully extended body, which was myself, was borne as by a sedan by my own steps."(Peter Handke, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire)
Sculptural work often has more in common with photography than is immediately apparent. Positioning an installation in a photograph requires just as much artistic perception as locating it in the actual room. This explains why sculptor Jochen Kitzbihler has his sculptures photographed by professional photographers, and why on repeated occasions he has himself explored his sculptural works’ spatial impact by creating photographic documentations of them.
By virtue of his artistic activity as a sculptor working with stone Jochen Kitzbihler has a strong affinity with the landscape. It is not simply that he visits quarries to observe and select stones; he also explores geological landscapes on foot in order to explore and understand his artistic material in its original state. On many occasions the artist has felt drawn to transitional landscapes: the saddle in the Rhine valley, the granite mountains of the Bavarian Forest, the Vogesen, or the high mountain regions of the Alps. In such regions, the granite and volcanic rock he works lies both on the earth’s surface but also in faults and quarries. Producing a photographic image serves primarily to depict the stone in its geological context, i.e., the quarry, but is also a search to determine the relationship between artistic work and the outer world or setting.
Already in the early 1990s the artist developed an interest in using the camera as a medium in its own right. The 1997 catalog on Jochen Kitzbihler’s works contains a series of photographs of a desert landscape on the Gulf of Aqaba: chance pictures taken from the bus and using a 35 mm camera. It is almost like his squinting out of the corners of his eyes; the images carefully placed as a strip of film on the lower edge. The series Tödi (2004)/image/photography/toedi-2004-urner-alpen allowed the artist to see the landscape in different terms. Kitzbihler made a point of taking the camera along with him. There is something candid and uncertain about his use of the camera, indeed, the pictures reveal something of the joy of discovery little blemished by the history of photography. Thanks to such experiences photography became a new method of working for Jochen Kitzbihler, quite distinct from his sculpture.
Jochen Kitzbihler talks of liberation in connection with the medium of photography. Accustomed to working and moving stone blocks weighing several tons, he discovers the lightness of a 35-mm camera, the immediate access it permits to the major topic, landscape, the rudimentary movement involved in releasing the shutter, the fascination of letting the carefree gaze roam, the fleeting moment. Today, he uses the medium-format to produce square photographs.
Taking all this into consideration, it is worth observing his photography in a different light; drawing comparisons, making suppositions and interpretations. What sort of photography does the artist wish to produce?
Let us first analyze the series Schwarze Furka, Rote Wand (2005/06)/image/photography/schwarze-furka-rote-wand-2006, which the artist produced in the main Walser Valley above Alp Laguz in Vorarlberg. The focus of interest: a high-lying valley and a plateau extending out over two kilometers on the edge of the Alp. Winter was setting in and looking back, Jochen Kitzbihler recalls that his journey to the plateau was a dramatic spectacle involving patchy fog, snow and cold. The late autumnal light produced an unusual atmosphere. The gray wisps of fog that drift through the valley basin help to avoid photographic clichés and to get away from certain landscape motifs burned into the collective memory. What the artist intends is not to produce an image of the landscape but rather he wishes to explore the open structure of the mountain and its disorderly appearance largely untouched by human hand: sculptural, layered, reddish pieces of rock, an overcast horizon, white quartz formations, a slope with a small snowfield, blood-red stones, the view of a saddle, slopes strewn with debris and areas of gravel with channels produced by the forces of gravity, rust-colored, dried plants, and finally – barely visible – a blue path marking.
Now and then photography is a strangely cold medium. It requires an artistic intent in order to breathe life into it. The first thing Jochen Kitzbihler explored in the mountains using his camera was the color. As a sculptor he has a somewhat detached relationship to color. He is more interested in black-and-white contrasts in stone than colors. The high-lying valley in the Vorarlberg presented itself to him as an enormous tableau in red, black, brown, white and gray. Archaic colors predominate in the mountain landscape; primeval colors as they already existed in cave paintings. Restrained tones, which the sculptor captures using analog color slide film. We discover these colors on the moon today, on Mars; they are brought to the earth using considerable technical efforts.
Increasingly, compositional interests become the focus of the artist’s attention. Through the square format produced using the medium-format camera the artist repeatedly creates references to the picture’s center. The vertical and horizontal lines are explored; there is something particularly dramatic about the diagonals, whether as the lines of slopes, whether as paths that are lost in the picture background or as the edges of solid, piled up rocks. The photographic research plays around a compositional center in nature, in a world largely untouched by people. Often the center is empty, a white snowfield, a chaos of red and black gravel stones enveloped by the fog.
The artist examines these formal phenomena and geological morphologies with the eyes of a sculptor, who glimpses in the view what constitutes the charisma of this landscape: light and shadow, frugal colors, abrupt, sculptural-looking faults, channels, shallow depressions.
Other artists have addressed the topics of closeness and distance in photographs taken in the mountains. For instance, in ”Bedenken des Gesehenen” ("Consideration of the seen", by Paul Cézanne) the artist considers how the parts in the series are arranged with each other. What does he wish to show, what does he want to omit? How is he to express in the series of pictures the emptiness and exposure that seized him during his work? An observation of the series reveals that the artist is concerned with the same topics as concern him as a sculptor. How should he direct the gaze over the surface of a stone? How do empty interior surfaces and cropped space relate to each other? What do outer shapes and edges look like in the disorderly mass of nature?
Now and again Jochen Kitzbihler believes he has discovered primeval phenomena on the mountain slopes. He was struck and very moved by the organic nature of the meandering glacial drift from the series Schwarze Furka, rote Wand: a line produced by the force of gravity, water and wind, which was presented to his camera like a gift. There is in these photographic works also a contingent portion, which the artist consciously allows and develops.
A second aspect that interests the artist about the medium of photography is defining the perspective in the mountain scenery. Generally photographing without a horizon line, the perspectives during the ascent in the Vorarlberg vary between frontal views, looking into and looking down onto. As the landscape often drops away sharply this allowed different angles of view and incited the artist to explore the terrain from various altitudes.
During a hike in the Gotthard massif in autumn 2005, the artist was struck by the white quartz veins – even from a distance. As silica compounds are light they float to the top of the earth’s crust. What fascinated the sculptor was that the pale lines lent the stone a compositional structure. The veins measured between about 50 and 100 meters long, and look like markings. There are small, dried grasses near the stones, and the autumnal landscape presented itself in the colors rust, gray, black and white.
The artist then proceeded to follow the course of the veins and captured their movements by photographing them. With the camera at eye level he looks down onto the white crusts that seem to erupt out of the earth’s interior. When combined, the linear stone markings in the pictures entitled Christallina (2005)/image/photography/cristallina-i-2006-san-gotthardo create a cross. Produced at the same time as Christallina the series p. 2730 (2005) /image/photography/p-2730-m-2006-san consists of six photographs, which were taken at the height of one meter above the earth’s surface. As such, P. 2730 is a description of the altitude: 2729 plus one meter. Aerial photographs is the term the artist uses to refer to these pictures, which depict the stone formations rising barely above the ground, one minute directly from above, the next floating into a slight perspective.
Prompted by his interest in Land Art, the artist dealt at length with the photographs by Robert Smithson and Richard Long before embarking on his photographic work in the mountains. Their unaffected photography is in keeping with Jochen Kitzbihler’s own aesthetic preferences. The documentary photographs of Concept Art and Land Art in the 1960s and 1970s, which focused directly on the subject convey the simplicity we also find in Jochen Kitzbihler’s photographic aesthetics. True to the nature of classic documentary photography the artist neither employs tricks nor does he produce orchestrated images.
And yet he does not see himself merely as a conceptualist; Jochen Kitzbihler employs the medium with all its technical means – precision equipment and lenses – as a contrast to the raw morphology of nature. His fascination for technology comes from his work as sculptor which involves the frequent use of complex, specialist machinery: diamond sawing, milling, laser technology. And these sophisticated technologies also rely on water – thereby bringing the cycle of nature full circle.
In another work in Vorarlberg, Jochen Kitzbihler elaborated the connection between photographic treatment and available technology. The Filschena series (2005/06)/image/photography/filschena-2006-vorarlberg revolves around a central stone located at a megalithic cosmic energy field on the alps by the same name. In his documentary treatment the artist shows the veined stone in its environment, its position, the composition of the stone and the surface overgrown with lichens. In order to depict the stone in its scenic context the artist also integrates photographed finds into the series: an aerial shot taken from an airplane on which you can just detect the stone, and a printout of an altitude model of the place produced using the very latest digital technology, and which looks like a picture of a planet’s surface.
As was the case in the Christallina series the artist sought to explore the relationship between large and small. He suspects that it is possible in the smallest structures to detect something of this, and this is transferred from the place to the stone, and thus to the photograph. Though he does not received clear answers from his photographic research, the mere fact that he engages in research, questioning and examining using images results in his attaining a gradual knowledge through observation.
The artist experiences differences in scale as a photographic tectonic juxtaposition – in the same way as the observer does. Shapes and morphologies are revealed to the sculptor in a hitherto unprecedented manner. The mountains have been transformed into an existential space for the artist, which he visits for personal reasons connected with his photographic intentions. In the empty, exposed character of nature he discovers the colors and the landscape, rocking his body and eyes in it as if in a sedan.
[1] Peter Handke, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, Salzburg 1980, S. 41
[2] Jochen Kitzbihler, Schnittstellen, Aust.Kat. Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern 20.4.-8.6.1997, Kaiserlautern 1997
[3] Vgl. Klaus Honnef: Die Intensität der Malerei wieder die glitzerhafte Fotografie. Ein Gespräch mit Heinz-Norbert Jocks, in: Kunstforum International, Der Gebrauch der Fotografie, Nr. 171, Juli-August 2004, Rupichteroth 2004, S. 143- 157, hier S. 145.
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