Susanne Neuburger

I and You

The dialogical disposition that characterizes works like „ICHDU“ (IYOU), „Puzzle“, „Linse“ (Lens), etc., is not so much the actual encounter in a dialogue than the relation that can emerge in an I-You relationship. The most exemplary model  of this relationship would then be the relation between the adresser and the adressee which Georgia Creimer expands in a communicative work - structure that could either be photography, painting or writing. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who investigated this I -You relation avant la lettre, spoke of „hypostasized relative terms“ in the context of a  ‘me, you and he’ relationship, suggesting a speculative approuch to mutuality (and to perception) while visualizing it. Martin Buber expands on this approuches in his publications of which his book „Ich und Du“ (I and Thou) is greatly significant to Georgia Creimer. Her occasional preoccupation with language is like a reference to the above mentioned model, although in her case language mutates into writing: messages that have long since lost their material body. Even topography has been deprived of site and body. What links the individual works in the group called „Linse“ is the loss of site when the reflection of an object is photographed in a concave mirror while its surrounding space is literally cut and punched out. One of the pictures from this series - the oval form of the sky along a vertical axis - is reminiscent of its archetype, namely, Stieglitz’ „Equivalents“. Rosalind Krauss reiterates that here it is the detail, the close-up „that is the most important constituent of the image“. Georgia Creimer, however, employs even the camera as a model of thinking. Everything that the mirror or the lens - like doubled apparatuses - either distort or magnify appears as if suspended, flying or floating, throwing back into the oval what had been outside it even earlier. In the case of yet another series in which seven ovals also called „Linse“ increase in size from left to right and become rounder in the process, and were made in the courtyards surrounding the studio, the site becomes instable and so concurrently both far and near. Nearness thus becomes evocative of recollection and distance calls up associations to the foreign or unknown other. This aspect becomes underlined in the sequence of waxing formats which seems like a handwriting that kept getting larger while the artist, in the process of making visible, struggled to establish a balance. Neverthrless, a spatial orientation is not always possible since what the lens tells us through ist mechanism is: fly high and fall low. Where is then above and where below? From a distance of just a few steps „100 x Jakob“ looks like a star spangled sky, and even the „Luftmensch“ could claim this region as ist own...

However, precisely the body, though holistically present, is only visible in fragments that could either be a head or a hand, or a body that could be asleep or even awake and puzzled, but when newly combined it has a different background. „Puzzle“ is a combination of interacting plaster forms that embed sleeping heads, i.e., faces. Only the artist is awake or has woken up. Walter Benjamin considered remembering and awakening to be intimately related: „And awakening is the exemplary moment of recollection. It is the instance in which we succeed in recalling our next, the one closest to us (the Self)“. The puzzle thus manifests itself as a „form of practical recollection“ (Walter Benjamin). In Georgia Creimer’s case, however, and not only in „Puzzle“ but also in „100 x Jakob“, the several small parts do not fit together into a whole but rather form a large mass of relations. This extreme concentration on the face, on the gaze and on the eyes stands in contrast to yet another group of works called „Behandeln“ (Handling), which is another version of what is out-side, totally outside, of what the hand does when the eye no longer suffices. The photographs lying on the hands like offerings seem to signalize the dialogical once again which obviously implies ‘You’, yet it is the ‘I’ that has precedence. „Ich bin es, ich bin es wirklich!“ („It’s me, it’s really me!“). Contrary to the implication, it is not really the ‘You’ that is being addressed here, in fact it is the first person - redoubled and concluded with an exclamation mark - that is emphatically reiterated in the sentence. It would seem as if the person were intangible yet describable, „really“ anchored in a not more closely defined ‘reality’. „Really“ must also mean the glass, the ball of glass on which the sentence is written. The self-experience of personality has made way for the repousing eye, the glass, the lens, and the glass is embeded in a grey cushion made of velvet that could „really“ be a functional object once the dialogue commences.

In the three partial aspects of Martin Bubers „I-You-Relationship“, language assumes different meaning, thus: alongside the most (ponderous) human relationships through language, a sublingual „living with nature“ as well as „living silently with spiritual essentialities“ also exist. In fact, it is the latter that seems to me of prime consequence in „ICHDU“, a work that consists of hand-written repetitions of the words ICHDUICHDU on the wall. Here, the linear system of writing is contrasted to abstract photography and circular formations. It is a world of ist own that, while containing a dialogical concept, thematises in its non-representational images the idea of dissolution in the transition between frontiers. These images fringe on visualization or perception, only surfacing where the ‘I-You’ dialogue sets in: It’s me, it’s really me!

Is the Luftmensch, in Yiddish it would mean a lazy, never-do-well, a stranger? And if yes, for whom? Is he not the lovable rebel with head in the clouds, who has lost sight of the horizon? The same systematic disposition of language and image as ICHDU underlies „Luftmensch“. Small round, colourful forms are interspersed between the handwriting that they enclose. They are painting even though they take distance to it by establishing a relation to the written „Luftmensch“. Knowing what it means, the „Luftmensch“ contains links that enliven all that circles around in a colourful and carefree movement. Plaster is a set material that was first dust and then fluid. In Georgia Creimer’s works it takes on sculptural shape (as in „Puzzle“) in contrast to writing and photography and forms a link to older works such as the „Landscape-cakes“. Framed in plaster are photocopies of the works of Thomas Ender, an artist who went to Brazil in order to explore a foreign land, recording his impressions in topographical images. They operate with the idea of „fabricating the foreign“ (Christina von Braun). These charming watercolours simultaneously document a conquest and domestification, the realization of a utopia as well as the extintion of the foreign, thus making the parlour synonymous with conquest. By calling these pictures cakes, Georgia Creimer goes a step further along the path of transforming the ‘foreign’ into the parlour. They are products of extreme dometification and are left in the parlour ready to be devoured.

The multiple called „Blume“ (Flower) is likewise a product for the ‘parlour’ and all the attitudes that it reveals. This work, where Creimer uses the concave mirror for the first time, also forms a link between older and newer works. A flowering potted plant stands on a ledge before a mirror. While the spot on which it stands is precisely defined, the mirror opens a wide range of possibilities that are explained in a manual. The „target choice“, according to the manual is that „realigning your visual apparatus alters the quality of the object...“ or „Visual faculty can be hightened through the movement of the accumulator’s contents...“ The dialogue takes place live here. Despite a division into proximity and distance, it is distorted altered, corrected and bears within it recollection as of a dream: „Awakening , after all, is deceit. It is only trough deception, and not without it, that we are able to release ourselves from the dream state...“

1 Vgl. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, hrsg. Von Joachim Ritter und Karlfried Gründer, Band IV, Basel/Stuttgart 1976, S.20.

2 Vgl. Rosalind Krauss, Stieglitz’ Äquivalente, in: R.K., Das Photographische. Eine Theorie der Abstände, München 1998, S.136.

3 Walter Benjamin, Pariser Passagen II, in: W.B., Gesammelte Schriften, Band V/2, hrsg. Von Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt 1982, S. 10.

4 Ebenda, S.1058.

5 Wie Anm. 1, S.19.

6 Vgl. Christina von Braun, Der Einbruch der Wohnstube in die Fremde, Bern 1987.

7 Wie Anm. 3, S.1058.