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No
doubt, the characters of Klaus Fruchtnis do not have much to tell us.
They were there, perhaps, they passed by this living room or are about
to enter. They hardly linger, conversations float, light silence, glances,
hardly the draft of a feeling, almost an indifference. The memory of
films rise to the surface: “La Notte”, “l’Année
dernière à Marienbad” (Last Year in Marienbad)...
Discretion, reserve, here, as with Antonioni or Resnais, one will know
almost nothing. History evaporates slowly in front of our eyes. Anyway,
what would there be to know? This scenery that will never be disturbed
by any rumor of the world is that of a theatre. A theater of glances.
It is hard to imagine one word louder than another. Or even only words.
A glance is enough. The glance of a man, whose face can not be seen,
on two women on a settee. The glance of a young lady, at a terrace,
on another woman, so similar, the man staying with his back turned in
the background. The glance of a man in the half-open door while only
perfume remains, the trace of people who were here a few seconds earlier
in the hacienda. Triangulation of glances. The observer is in the image,
but somehow excluded from the scene, and the second man, the spectator,
with whom complicity could be established, is also in a precarious position.
Contrary to the great tradition of voyeurism, there is here no pleasure
in the observation, the glance does not own its object. Either the face
of the observer is cut, or its glance carries out of the frame. Always
one is missing. It is perhaps, for a photographer, a way of being modern,
so far as this word means anything. As elsewhere, disillusion sullies
the act, the pleasure wilts. We don’t own anything anymore. To
look at it is now to agree to be excluded from the scene. Not to be
able, basically, to be part of it. The only remaining thing is waiting
(1), without object. A scene to be contemplated. Indefinitely. A little
like the sad hero of the book “Morel’s Invention”
(2). The panoramic effect used by Klaus Fruchtnis never draws us towards
this idea. Past the panoramic, there is the panorama. Let’s remember
the panorama of Fulton or Daguerre and Bouton’s diorama: the utopia
of the total spectacle. The completion of this utopia is not the cinema,
as believe the film enthusiasts, but the “Morel’s Invention”,
a fragment of reality preserved in all its dimensions and eternally
reproducible. There is something of that in the project of Klaus Fruchtnis.
An example: the work presented in Rennes in September, "Demeure",
covers all the walls of a circular room. What is supposed to occur does
not exist in the photographs. One distinguishes only the origin or the
effect. The event undoubtedly takes place between these pictures, in
the middle of the circle. In the diagonal of the images, where the spectator
is standing. He does not see it, he is in it. He is the event. |