Michael Schirner
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Creative iconoclasm by Hans Ulrich Reck
That pictures only come into being, i.e. seem alive, in a present perception is a fact that applies to virtually all images. It particularly applies to the kind of pictures that can be termed artificial constructs; pictures simply intended to offer an impulse, an occasion or a starting point of such perception. This is essentially an achievement of radical modernity, which replaced ritual and aural, religious and sacred images with aesthetic reflection that should not be seen as a purely abstract, philosophical category, but as a poetic form. Ever since Kazimir Malevich, for example,
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seeing images has meant actively cultivating one’s own perception. It has meant being able to see sight and to observe one’s perception at work in the mechanisms of the image’s effect. The structure connecting the author, the work of art, and the viewer is becoming more complicated. Images are losing their previous authority and gaining new power. They are transforming from representatives of meaning to power plants of experience. In the course of modern poetics, the artwork itself and the authority of its producer has shifted according to the experiences of the viewer.