NATALIE CZECH
I CANNOT REPEAT WHAT I HEAR
Kunstverein Hamburg
Klosterwall 23 - Hamburg
13/7/2013 - 1/9/2013
The photographic works of Natalie Czech (born 1976, currently living in Berlin) oscillate between concrete poetry and conceptual photography. She highlights the relationships and interactions between images and texts, poetry and the visual arts whilst also exploring the lyrical potential that lays hidden in newspaper articles and books.
The exhibition in the Kunstverein Hamburg is a collection of new pieces specially produced for the exhibition. Natalie Czech will present for the first time her series “Poems by Repetitions”, which was developed in 2013 in addition to the work “Voyelles” (Vowels).
Poems by Repetition refers to Gertrude Stein’s play Saints and Singing (1922), in which the author de- voted herself to the essence and function of repetition. At the end of the text, in which she speaks out in favour of repetition, she suggests various ways of using it, focussing mainly on a dynamic, processual, rhythmising form of narration. The repetition of what appears to be the same also contains a tonal element, similar to the refrain of a song or an echo.
Against this background Natalie Czech singled out existing poems, by Aram Saroyan, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein and others, that are characterised by the rhetorical device of repetition. These poems only become completely visible and readable in the repeated depiction of the same photographed text material and its serialisation as a group. Czech’s visual motifs draw on different media, such as magazines, record covers, books, iPads and Kindle readers. Her painstakingly researched and selected textual fragments (a film review, a set of dance instructions, an essay on the significance of record cover design for the marketing of music, for example) make reference to both the poem in question and to music.
Repeatedly photographing the same texts produces stylistic variations such as minimal shifts in frame and perspective, altered exposure times and the juxtaposition of different resolutions. The photographs are also taken at various times of day, using similar techniques of repetition to those adopted by the writer of the respective poem. The works portray an “allegory of writing” through the complex interac- tion of meaning, repetition and variation.
Czech’s works are a way of writing with visual techniques, though the end product – the photograph – actually creates the textual level rather than merely depicting it. And so, by implication, Frank O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not a Painter can also be applied to Czech to produce the statement “why I am not a writer”. For in the end, artist and author do not differ by their creative process but solely in their choice of medium.
The second new work, Voyelles, goes back to Arthur Rimbaud’s 1871 sonnet of the same title, and to his Lettre du voyant (Letter of the Seer) and its line “I is another”. In Voyelles he attributes a particular hue to each vowel in an attempt to link sound and colour. It is certainly one of the most well-known poems dealing with the subject of synaesthesia. Czech considers how a photograph that brought about such a fusion of the senses might look, or whether (ultimately) this phenomenon can only be conveyed linguistically. She invited ten authors (Erica Baum, Julien Bismuth, Christian Bök, Federica Bueti, Övül Durmusoglu, Jean-Pascal Flavien, John Holten, Barry Schwabsky, Paul Stephens and Judith Vrancken) to write themselves a letter in her name in which they describe a fictitious photograph that represents a synaesthetic moment. The descriptions are entirely arbitrary, but they always concentrate on one of Rimbaud’s colours and its associated vowel. Even if all the letters appear to have been written by the same author, the various people behind them are as recognisable as the different ideas they have of their client. In the end Czech places the individual letters in front of a coloured background to produce a synaesthetic photograph. The letters thus become their own photographic works, which lends another dimension to the numerous questions of authorship in this piece.
An artist's book has been created for the exhibitions in cooperation with the Kunstverein Braunschweig.
Image: Natalie Czech, A poem by repetition by Hart Crane, 2013. Stift auf zwei C-Prints, gerahmt, 55,6 x 90,8 cm. Courtesy Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf / Capitain Petzel, Berlin. Copyright: VG Bild-Kunst Bonn
I CANNOT REPEAT WHAT I HEAR
Kunstverein Hamburg
Klosterwall 23 - Hamburg
13/7/2013 - 1/9/2013
The photographic works of Natalie Czech (born 1976, currently living in Berlin) oscillate between concrete poetry and conceptual photography. She highlights the relationships and interactions between images and texts, poetry and the visual arts whilst also exploring the lyrical potential that lays hidden in newspaper articles and books.
The exhibition in the Kunstverein Hamburg is a collection of new pieces specially produced for the exhibition. Natalie Czech will present for the first time her series “Poems by Repetitions”, which was developed in 2013 in addition to the work “Voyelles” (Vowels).
Poems by Repetition refers to Gertrude Stein’s play Saints and Singing (1922), in which the author de- voted herself to the essence and function of repetition. At the end of the text, in which she speaks out in favour of repetition, she suggests various ways of using it, focussing mainly on a dynamic, processual, rhythmising form of narration. The repetition of what appears to be the same also contains a tonal element, similar to the refrain of a song or an echo.
Against this background Natalie Czech singled out existing poems, by Aram Saroyan, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein and others, that are characterised by the rhetorical device of repetition. These poems only become completely visible and readable in the repeated depiction of the same photographed text material and its serialisation as a group. Czech’s visual motifs draw on different media, such as magazines, record covers, books, iPads and Kindle readers. Her painstakingly researched and selected textual fragments (a film review, a set of dance instructions, an essay on the significance of record cover design for the marketing of music, for example) make reference to both the poem in question and to music.
Repeatedly photographing the same texts produces stylistic variations such as minimal shifts in frame and perspective, altered exposure times and the juxtaposition of different resolutions. The photographs are also taken at various times of day, using similar techniques of repetition to those adopted by the writer of the respective poem. The works portray an “allegory of writing” through the complex interac- tion of meaning, repetition and variation.
Czech’s works are a way of writing with visual techniques, though the end product – the photograph – actually creates the textual level rather than merely depicting it. And so, by implication, Frank O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not a Painter can also be applied to Czech to produce the statement “why I am not a writer”. For in the end, artist and author do not differ by their creative process but solely in their choice of medium.
The second new work, Voyelles, goes back to Arthur Rimbaud’s 1871 sonnet of the same title, and to his Lettre du voyant (Letter of the Seer) and its line “I is another”. In Voyelles he attributes a particular hue to each vowel in an attempt to link sound and colour. It is certainly one of the most well-known poems dealing with the subject of synaesthesia. Czech considers how a photograph that brought about such a fusion of the senses might look, or whether (ultimately) this phenomenon can only be conveyed linguistically. She invited ten authors (Erica Baum, Julien Bismuth, Christian Bök, Federica Bueti, Övül Durmusoglu, Jean-Pascal Flavien, John Holten, Barry Schwabsky, Paul Stephens and Judith Vrancken) to write themselves a letter in her name in which they describe a fictitious photograph that represents a synaesthetic moment. The descriptions are entirely arbitrary, but they always concentrate on one of Rimbaud’s colours and its associated vowel. Even if all the letters appear to have been written by the same author, the various people behind them are as recognisable as the different ideas they have of their client. In the end Czech places the individual letters in front of a coloured background to produce a synaesthetic photograph. The letters thus become their own photographic works, which lends another dimension to the numerous questions of authorship in this piece.
An artist's book has been created for the exhibitions in cooperation with the Kunstverein Braunschweig.
Image: Natalie Czech, A poem by repetition by Hart Crane, 2013. Stift auf zwei C-Prints, gerahmt, 55,6 x 90,8 cm. Courtesy Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf / Capitain Petzel, Berlin. Copyright: VG Bild-Kunst Bonn
