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16/6/2011

Steven Pippin

CEAAC Centre Europeen d'Actions Artistiques Contemporaines, Strasbourg

A Non Event (Horizon)1
curated by Bettina Klein

Like evidence from the scene of a crime medium format and 35mm analogue cameras are displayed in a vitrine. On the wall, prints of the final shots are lined up, capturing the moment when the bullet from a pistol destroyed the camera and the negative inside it. Steven Pippin began the series Point Blank, comprising twenty photographs to date, in Wisconsin, USA, in 2010, and continued the series with several experiments in London. Despite the great technical precision that the project requires for its realization, it is ultimately the uncontrollability in the moment of the apparatus’s destruction that gives it its special charge. The color prints show abstract shard forms, broken structures, that are somewhat reminiscent of organic ramifications, yet through their artificial chromaticity they also refer to the chemical process used for their creation. In some of the pictures, it is possible to make out the bullet piercing the camera; sometimes in blurred motion, or, as in Deep Field, as an isolated planet in a universe of shattering particles.

As in his early works from the nineteen-eighties, Pippin is not interested in employing a photographic process to arrive at a specific visual result; rather, the process itself determines the result to a great degree.

The almost endless array of possible photographs (whose sense Pippin has repeatedly questioned in his texts) is brought to an abrupt end through the act of violence. A quote from the catalogue Discovering the Secrets of Monsieur Pippin,2 in reference to his earlier works with pinhole cameras, could also be applied to Point Blank: “One way would be to turn photography in on itself so that a certain self destruction would occur. Pictures disappearing into the blackness of which they were formed, ending the medium forever.”

Along with the new series, Point Blank, the exhibition A Non Event (Horizon) shows a selection of Steven Pippin’s photographic works, videos, and films that investigate the medium of photography. Among these are a few works that have never been shown before, such as the photo of the Champs-Elysées that Pippin took as a nine-year-old from the back seat of his parent’s car, the company portrait of Wide Boys Photographic,3 early pin camera and video experiments, and the 16 mm film Launderama (1989). The latter Pippin made by filming the front of a washing machine during its cycle and then developing the film afterwards in the same machine, adding the chemicals via the detergent dispenser.

For years, Steven Pippin produced his photographic works by converting various objects (a refrigerator, photo booth, bath tub, wardrobe, etc.) into pinhole cameras. The production of the pinhole camera and the act of photographing, which often took place in public spaces, were as important as the resulting images. The outcomes produced through the limitations of this rudimentary technology are reminiscent of images from the early days of photographic history. Yet it is not about a nostalgic quotation; rather, the conceptual rigor of the work demands that supposed mistakes, such as the distortion caused by the form of the objects used, must be accepted. The apparent patina on the prints made from the washing machines cum pinhole cameras comes from the negative being scratched during the development, and is therefore only a material trace of this particular process in the domestic apparatus.

The logical conclusion of these experiments is to not view the camera primarily as a device for producing images but rather to make it into the very object of artistic reflection. The Quantum Camera, with its lens wrapped around itself and an integrated mirror system, is just such a self-reflexive, absurd object. It categorically resists any type of functional use (and the non-blacked-in remnant of the brand name CANON emphasizes this even further).

Finally, the series Analogital, produced in 2008, demonstrates the transition from analogue to digital photography, which has been vehemently discussed since the end of the nineteen-eighties and is now almost complete. The shutters of an analogue and a digital camera were released simultaneously and the resulting prints were combined into a single image. The analogue part is a handmade C-type print, whereas the digital part is realised with an inkjet printer.

Pippin chose natural or cultural borders as subjects for the images; for example, the digital and analogue pictures were taken positioned to the west and to the east of the prime meridian at Greenwich or else positioned above or below a horizon line.

The rapid increase in image production cannot be brought to a halt. Perhaps the collapse that Pippin has prophesied will soon come about, and maybe he’s right when he says that the ultimate camera would be one that makes photography completely obsolete. In any case, it is more important than ever to continue thinking about the medium of photography, even if this means it has to symbolically give up its life.
Bettina Klein

1) Event horizon is the boundary of a black hole.
2) Discovering the Secrets of Monsieur Pippin, text: Frédéric Paul, Steven Pippin, Michael Tolkien, FRAC Limousin, 1995, p.52.
3) Pippin and a friend set up a pseudo photo company of this name during their studies. The photograph shows the two founders with their complete photographic equipment and is reminiscent of the back cover of the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma (1969), where two roadies pose with the band’s symmetrically arranged stage equipment.

Press contact:
Debora Fischkandl Tel. +33 (0)3 88256970 communication@ceaac.org

Opening friday 17th june h 6.30p.m.

CEAAC Centre Européen d’Actions Artis tiques Contemporaines
7, rue de l’Abreuvoir, Strasbourg

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