Edmund Piper
dal 18/1/2008 al 19/2/2008
Segnalato da
18/1/2008
Edmund Piper
Wendt+Friedmann Galerie, Berlin
They will have been so beautiful. The protagonists of his photograps often exude an awkward, hybrid lust for life, an unrelenting shamelessness that one normally sees only in pornos, which Piper, of course, quotes ad nauseum.
The Photographic Work of Edmund Piper.
John Falstaff, the huge bearded baby, sits happily in the bathtub. His white-tiled wall is covered in colourful photos of exotic dancers, the cold neon light gives him a soft coolness, an aura of undefinable grey radiates around his mop of curly hair. He holds his fleshy, rosy feet up to us, like cured knuckles of pork in a butcher's shop. On a plank thrown across the tub, which serves as an improvised soap rack, is a still life arranged from full beer bottles, a small TV, an ashtray, and a rustic pan full of shiny, crispy fried sausages that draw one magically into the picture. One approaches the pan and the nearer one gets to it, the more the sausages blur before the eyes in to a grey/colourful mush of tiny, chaotically swirled flecks of colour. The illusion of a dignified solitary idyll is abruptly smothered in a raw pixel salad, the beautiful genre image is debunked, it moulders in to a seemingly pointillist play of light that switches between motive and viewer.
Edmund Piper stages Homo Sacer (sacred man) as an urban stuffed animal in his photographs. In his grungy world of images the models amuse themselves on the lowest level, rummaging around in a messy Disneyland of trashy interiors, bad food, cheap schnapps, S&M malarkey, flat jokes and obvious sexism. No cliché is so crass that it cannot reclaim a poetry, Edmund Piper appears to be saying, and so the tattooed rowdy, the strapping Rubens woman (trailed by a peeper!), the bad-tempered neighbour, the German Gretel, the angry gangsta bitch, the drunken disco dancer, the sardonic domina and Paule, the dustman march through his well-known Pi(m)pered glossy prints.
The protagonists often exude an awkward, hybrid lust for life, an unrelenting shamelessness that one normally sees only in pornos, which Piper, of course, quotes ad nauseum.
One is completely blasted by the references like a pounding from Rocky. This prevents Piper's work sliding in to the unoriginal, and the menacing smell of sweat, the cage stink of this undetermined animal, Man, the force of stereotypes all saturate the images of these creatures who are thrown back to a naked, archaic, elementary existence in these electronic times, in which the cave-dwellers bay out their digital rutting cries with a mouse click.
Piper frames his bestiary with mean images of habitat and landscape shots in which, instead of an eagle, a black crow flies above the blue of our German hills. Caspar David Friedrich did not intend that.
The almost self-stigmatising display of technical no-no's and don't-go's corresponds to the content. The poor resolution, the dim lighting, the pictorial composition that sneers at every rule, all of these become a virtue born of necessity, a compelling, logical, intrinsic means of construction. The digitally captured bodies are consecutively digitally unclear and mangled, the power relationship between material and matter is unreadable.
The stories that the images appear to be telling become - in the truest sense - Pulp Fiction, a macabre hullabaloo, a beautiful new world in which all our happy images and visions have become phantoms, tasteless products of recycling, groping around on the muck heap of history.
Piper's photographs are images against images.
Edmund Piper: „The will have been so beautiful“
Text: Andreas Wendt
Wendt+Friedmann Galerie
Zehdenicker Str. 13 - Berlin