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In the Labyrinth of Signs
1991 - 1993
Riddling Imagination
Incisions in the world of everyday myths
For more than a decade, Wolfgang Zurborn has investigated
the relation between photography and public space, while not
trying to depict urban landscapes objectively, nor investigating
human behaviour the way a journalist would. Rather he has
posed a philosophical question by means of photography: How
far is it possible for a subject in the digital age to attain
individual cognition and performance in an everyday public
context? Everyday worlds and the worlds of images dialectically
merge in the subject's mind: views of the perpetually changing
Lebenswelt are unrecognizably bound to the omnipresent pictures
from the mass media.
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To Zurborn, traffic terminals, concert fields, stadiums, shopping
malls, business and entertainment parks are the zones the
media invade, where the relationship between man and public
space take on new aggregate states of individual cognition
and action. Classical urban architecture's mission to create
urban spaces, intelligible institutions of power and to design
public squares and locations for social communication and
the orientation of free citizens has faded into the background.
In the city centers, as well as at the former city borders,
perfectly functioning arenas of entertainment arise, towers
of capital, consumer malls, transit spaces for pedestrians
and passengers, who meet accidentally, only to immediately
disappear again, densely packed and yet isolated, without
any distance or reflection. Names and meanings are given these
ahistorical and artificial worlds from outside, through pre-fabricated
events, soaps, brands and slogans.
Wolfgang Zurborn has roamed these non-spaces. In his blindingly
flashed, colorfully packed, obliquely cut "pictures of
people" he depicts the living chaos of individuals, how side
by side and almost in slow-motion they follow their media
dreams, thus becoming "picture people" miles away from
themselves, from each other and from their desired images.
The subtext of these photographs lies in the wide gap between
the ironically twisted documentary substrate and the subjective
perspectivation.
From the stream of impressions, stills are taken, that function
politically, because they ask about the influence of popular
myths on individual existence, but without offering handy
solutions. Photography proves to be an ironically collaged
counterforce. By means of the "split view" it radically
explores the leeway left to personal perception and confronts
it with the perfectionist totality and the standardizing mind-set
of the mass media.
In the "Labyrinth of Signs", Zurborn puts this
concept to its hardest test yet. His method of compressing
disparate perspectives onto one picture plane and stressing
the diversion of motives by a decentered composition is carried
to extremes in the vertical photo-combinations. The aesthetic
value of perspectival individuation can thus fully unfold
and reveal the visual dissonance of today's public space.
The radical cut-outs of the super-mounted photographs intensify
the network character of these works. Every partial picture
has a sensual artery of sharply focussed and blurred zones.
Their particular degrees of abstraction create a subtle balancing
act between the free act of associative view and the undeniable
reference to social reality. In the situational single pictures
of the series "Menschenbilder - Bildermenschen"
(People Pictures - Picture People) the contingent scenic context
is maintained through sophisticated eccentric compositions
and, at the same time, fractured by countless indications
beyond the picture's edge, the off. In "Labyrinth of
Signs" the alleged coherence of the world, the supposed
unity of space, time and place has been basically shattered.
The fragments of everyday perception have been reduced to
the limits of recognizability. At stake is the identification
of each fragment and the exploration of its contextual importance
by the viewer. Zurborn: "The materials, planes, colors
and lines acquire the character of strange signs, become part
of a visual riddle and start to interact, beyond theboundaries
of the particular segments. The meaning of this riddle is
that there is no solution. Photography produces a maze of
signs".
What is staged is the confrontation of the carefully searching
eye with the multi-contextuality of the world and its perpetual
transformation as well as the genealogy of the photographic
gaze this side of the tautological clichés, an inventive
view that challenges the viewer to a productive completion.
The virtual scenery in which things meet or collide is no
longer outside the photographic view, not in any given order,
but is grounded in the perceiving imagination of the subject.
Wolfgang Zurborn's photography sees itself as the medium
of an active process of understanding that corresponds to
the dynamics of what, in the end, is uncontrollable about
public space. Glassy see-throughs, rough superimpositions,
irritating distortions, massive blocks and porous crevices,
low-key transitions and daring leaps, seeming insides and
tricky outsides, semantically balanced conglomerates and more
narrative-oriented collages - the compositional range of the
"Labyrinth" works is broad, in order to capture
the experience of today's everyday perception in its living
complexity and its rapidly accelerated change.
Peter V. Brinkemper
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