FLOATULENTS: Inflatable Photographs by Martin von Haselberg BY DIEGO CORTEZ The Freeman Family Curator of Photography, NOMA
M
artin von Haselberg (aka Harry Kipper) is a member of the infamous London and L.A. based 1970s performance art duo, The Kipper Kids. Also in the early ’70s, he began evolving his deeply psychological public performance work into personal photographic self-portraiture, a practice which he continues today. His musings and extreme muggings for the camera are both comical and aberrative. Their zaniness borders on the insane. His artistic lineage leads the viewer from the slapstick clowning of Spike Jones or Karl Valentin to the heightened abreaction and confrontational politics of the 1960s Vienna Aktionists. In this, von Haselberg’s first U.S. museum show, his latest photographic experiments are presented as inflatable works, which instead of rising into the air, rest upon the floor as sculptures. “FLOATULENTS” are air balloons in the sense of Warhol’s 1964 “Silver Flotations,” but they are more than mere design. Von Haselberg describes these new works as “time-based,” as springing from the facial contortions and grimaces of his performances. But here the balloons are the performers, rather than Martin or Brian of The Kipper Kids. A framed “balloon sections” study, included in the show, reminds us of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Maps (1936-1956). It could also serve as a bantam retrospective of von Haselberg’s photographic oeuvre—a retinal fragmentation of his work. Colors and shapes are intensified in much the same way late ’70s New York graffitists (Crash, Daze, Dondi, Zephyr, etc.) heightened their “tropicalist” palette and inflated the outlines of their calligraphy into the famous “bubble style.” FLOATULENTS are made from images printed on glassine, a delicate archival material normally used to protect photographs and art. They are stitched together and then inflated. Their fragility conceptually alludes to the malleability and frailty of the artist’s ego. (Freud described the ego as a blase or bubble.) Images of the artist’s face stare out at us from the crinkly surfaces of the inflatables, which look crushed, in a procedure that John Chamberlain or Frank Gehry might employ, to lead the
way to abstraction. Their modernist shapes recall Isamu Noguchi’s “Akari” light sculptures, begun in 1951. Von Haselberg’s consistent use of his face as subject, from his earliest performances as Harry Kipper to his subsequent photo auto-portraits, is proof of his long-standing concern with issues related to the psyche, the id and ego of the artist, and the source of his own creative acts. The photographic components of FLOATULENTS were shot in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Argentina, usually under a single light, normally a chandelier or wall fixture, or in the natural illumination of churches. Others were shot in castles, junkyards, and even a forest. The black and white images were taken in the studio in New York. After they are photographed, images are digitally manipulated. Their torsion and distortion raises issues of the plasticity of the body in performance, and of the face in photography, particularly the face used as a solitary “theater” for the creation of other “selves,” perhaps in pursuit of the Anatta, or “nonself,” also found in the work of Claude Cahun or Cindy Sherman. Ultimately, von Haselberg’s work uses ironic procedures to subvert self-importance. “Self” and “ego” are everywhere undermined with humor and critical rigor. Perhaps the homonymic echo between FLOATULENTS and flatulence is von Haselberg’s ultimate comment on artistic production itself. Martin von Haselberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1949 and lives in Los Angeles and New York. His work has been exhibited at P.S.1, New York; Galleria Emilio Mazzoli, Modena; Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, New York; Zabriskie Gallery, New York; Dokumenta, Kassel; and Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles and Vienna. n FLOATULENTS: Inflatable Photographs by Martin von Haselberg is the third in the _museological exhibition series curated by Diego Cortez, Freeman Family Curator of Photography. The exhibition remains on view until September 20, 2009.
Martin von Haselberg Untitled (FLOATULENT), 2009 Archival inkjet print on glassine Five panels each 62 x 38 inches
ARTS QUARTERLY
23