'Keep out', 2006
70 x 52 cm
In music, the mashup revolution has clearly happened. At the beginning of the decade cheap software made it possible to dissect the huge variety of songs available online and people began stitching it back together to create cyborg pop. Now, not only do an enormous number of mashups circulate, but there's incredible quality too; mainstream labels have even gotten interested in plying the trade in repossessed music. "Mashups" aren't just about music any more, either - the word is used for software and video created from various sources of content. Yet there's been little reception of work that relates in the same way to the volume and availability of online images.
Young German artist Natalie Czech may cause the gallery world to finally take notice of the new regime. Her first major solo show, on view at Berlin's Jette Rudolph Galerie until 21 April, displays a series of digital collages composed of recognizable motifs from the online news, repeated ad nauseum. "The Daily Mirror" is a series of curated collections of a "world events": natural disasters, protests, fireworks and confetti. Czech creates her prints by pulling thousands of similar images off the web, corralling them in photoshop and manipulating them into dizzying new arrangements.
Other contemporary photographers have of course toyed with the objets trouves from the web, including some very big names. A few years ago Thomas Ruff, one of Czech's teachers, pulled thumbnails of porn offline, blew them up to poster size, digitially remastered them - then showed them and published a book co-authored with the French novellist Michel Houllebecq. Ruff labeled his made-over ladies "Nudes".
Czech's approach to her source material is more radical. Nothing is remastered - the original resolution of each image - the seams where they join are available on inspection - it's their juxtaposition that makes Czech's pictures tic. Like pop mashups, instead of than concealing their origins, these new images flaunt them - but this knowing cheekiness isn't as much as the endgame as the starting point for something new. Classics like the Go Home Productions' "Stroke of Genius" come to mind, in which Christina Aiguilera's lyrics put to the Strokes "Hard to Explain" yield a tune that rocks out a desperate sexuality more genuine and interesting than anything in either of the originals - the best mashups are not only more clever than their sources, but manage to create something that's totally different.
'Sea of Flowers', 2005
175 x 260 cm
The worlds of "The Daily Mirror" series are far removed from the places where the pictures were originally shot, and despite Czech's uniform technique and source material, extremely varied. The enormous "Sea of Flowers" composed out of 300-odd images from state funerals, which hangs alone in Jette Rudolph's back room hits you with the a sensual and emotional overload in the style of Gericault's Medusa. On the other end of the spectrum, is the black and white series "Holes", four table-mat sized prints each composed of a handful of images shot through bombed walls, in which conceptual and visual wit compete.
Czech's prints are marked by a surreal sense of depth. Thanks to her technique of retaining her source photos' original resolution, in some cases, like "Aftermath", the result is almost holographic. In other's it's just disorienting - "Sea of Flowers" presents what looks like a grandiose landscape a la Andreas Gursky, but it turns out to have no one vantage point, and leaves one a bit queasy.
'Aftermath', 2006
140 x 182 cm
Despite the currency of the source material, if there's a social perspective behind Czech's work her images don't betray it either. A first glance at "Across the Universe" - thousands of pictures of people with protest banners - raises the inevitable questions about the artist's own relationship to the demonstrations crowded together here. The longer one looks, the more elusive answers are.
'Across the Universe,' 2005, 2006
1 aus 6er Tableau; 66 x 54 cm
Natalie Czech walked me through 'The Daily Mirror' as it was being hung last week.
ALIX RULE: So how do you create these pictures?
NATALIE CZECH: I'm always collecting these images - they're all from news agencies.
AR: Companies like AP, Reuters - that kind of thing?
NC: Yes. Always news pictures, which illustrate a type of event. This one is of natural disasters - earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding.
AR: You must wind up spending a lot of time on Google image.
NC: No no, you have to go to the agencies' online archives - the ones that newspapers and TV channels use. The images have watermarks on them, so I wind up cropping the bits that I use, which are normally the parts without text. Generally I take the backgrounds - in this case, the images of disaster, there's normally a person sitting in front of these piles of rubble looking sad.
AR: Have you ever gotten in trouble? Aren't there copyright issues?
NC: No never. Well really, no one can tell. Once I crop something like this, no one can say for instance, "that's my bullethole, I took that bullethole picture." They all look so much the same.
'Riddled', 2005
170 x 127,43 cm
AR: Do you ever use images that aren't professionally taken? There must be tons of amateur shots available online.
NC: No, in the work I'm showing here, they're always from news agencies. There are so, so many of these news images, all so similar. Newspapers' have these special codes so people can understand what's going on. All photographers use these codes if something happens. You need to have the bullet holes when there's a shooting, or when someone famous dies you need to have pictures of the flowers. I like the idea that when I crop these motifs, they lose their history, they lose their stories. After I crop this you have no idea whether it's a bullethole from Iraq or Palestine or wherever. All in the same context, like they are here, they have a kind of story.
AR: What kind of story do they tell once they're isolated all together?
NC: I guess in a way they speak to one another. It's a interesting question how long a photograph documents the present time. I mean, you see an image, and you say, okay this is from today or yesterday or whatever - but it's weird how interchangeable the images that are supposed to document a specific time are, in fact. I mean, I don't want to criticize mass production or something grandiose like that. But I just ask myself, what do we really know, when we see those pictures in a newspaper or watching the evening news. Every event is unique, but can we only relate to an event, when we see those pictures, which we don't even remember?
AR: I take it that these works we've been looking at, as well as the confetti one on the other side of the room were all composed of pictures taken over the span of several years.
NC: Yes, that's right - they're mostly from between 1995 and now. But in fact this confetti picture is not just confetti, it's only confetti from presidential campaigns. A politician will make a speech and then when they're done, the confetti comes down, you know? It's just from these events - not from a football game, or whatever.
'Win or Lose', 2005
205 x 149 cm
AR: What if there's a really good picture of confetti from a football game. Do you ever cheat?
NC: [Laughs] No, no.
AR: Is it so important not to cheat?
NC: I don't know - I think it's important, perhaps not for the viewer, but for me. The name of this one's "Win or Lose". These big-time politicians celebrate their kind of politics with confetti, you know, it's a always a super-event. There are a lot of American pictures in this one, and also some European ones. There's such a mood of rejoicing - "if you pick me, it'll be a party." And meanwhile on the other hand these kind of democratic decisions are being taken all the time, all over the world. In these pictures [that the confetti is sampled from] there are always politicians throwing up their arms and shaking hands and just standing on the podiums. And then there's this confetti-rain.
AR: On the other hand, if you were using pictures that were just amateur shots, they'd be authentic in a much different way.
NC: Of course not. With these professional photos, it's people doing their job. They're kind of indexical images.
'Across the Universe,' 2005, 2006
1 aus 6er Tableau; 66 x 54 cm
AR: Let's take a look at the protest series, shall we?
NC: So with these, every image represents one year; and they start in 2000. I do one every year - I want to have a whole huge series. Maybe up til 2010 or something.
AR: [Laughs] Why?
NC: Well, it seems to all happen very slowly, but politicians go away; things change. Like in 2002 or 2003 it was all Iraq, those were the only protest banners you could find. But now, it's rather hard to find them. And then here in 2000 it was... well you had the fall of Milosovic, Al Gore and Bush's campaign, Austrian Joerg Haider, Madeline Albright, and about this Cuban boy, Elian. And so lots of things change, but other signs crop up every year. They're not removable - how did you put it before? I include everything that's happening in a given year.
AR: Oh: you don't cheat.
NC: [Laughs] No, otherwise, I'd privilege some of the voices over others. I don't want to have that kind of influence.
AR: Why protest signs? Have you ever been involved in these kinds of demonstrations yourself?
NC: Oh, of course. Hasn't everyone?
AR: I don't know that they have... what kind of stuff were you involved in?
NC: Hmm, against nuclear power, and these kind of student protests against university fees. Oh, and some stuff around the Iraq war. But I'm not so much into it. I mean, I'm not some kind of demonstration fanatic, this was something I was doing, when I was younger, just for the experience . (I would never be the one to say say, "okay, let's make this super banner" - I've never myself made any of these banners, for instance.)
AR: Have you ever had people who've been really involved particular kinds of protests get upset about these pictures? After all, they make all these of different causes appear more or less equivalent.
NC: Isn't it like that though? I mean, isn't it the case that you look at these protests and a some point you can't help but see them together? These pieces are called all "Across the universe", from the Beatles song. And I really kind of like all these different voices from all different countries. In a way the series shows the flip side to the "everything becomes better if you vote for me"-feeling in the "Win or Lose" picture. So many of the problems that people are protesting about are the result of these political contests, and the decisions that result. Anyway I don't want to pass judgement on the protests or the protesters. I just wanted to have the image look a certain way from afar, and then when you go close, you can read the different kinds messages.
AR: Well, the show is called 'Daily Mirror', which seems to imply that you can just reflect back what's going on without editorializing. But I wonder if that's possible? Marx might say that just regarding all these local particular struggles together, you bring a particular critical perspective them.
NC: I'm not sure I understand what you're asking.
AR: Well - put a more artistic gloss on it: you're curating these images in a way, right? And I wonder if it's possible to be a curator without taking some kind of critical position.
NC: The real problem is that the press-images are no more than illustrations at this point. That is, these images already curated by the media, if you work with them there's obviously a critical position involved, but there are also other aspects of the contents and also formal structures I'm interested in, while creating an image. I don't know - in the case of these protest pieces, for me what's really interesting is to see if there's any change through the years. And to wonder about how anyone can think there would be change. I mean sometimes you just have this feeling that it makes no sense to be in these demonstrations - that they are hopeless, and that the messages are all so similar. It's the same with the other pictures, there are so many individual wishes or people feeling something and wanting to should out their messages.
AR: You said "of course" you'd been involved in protest - do you think that everyone has that experience at some point?
NC: Yeah, I mean when you're young everyone has that experience. But then there are some people who are still out there at 40, and I don't know. I would say at that point I wouldn't go out to protest anymore. I don't know, perhaps I would.
AR: I know what you mean, its so intense seeing those people who have just made a career out of protesting.
NC: Yeah! I don't know how they do it. My friend's parents are so into protest. Every year they go out to protest something. I don't know how they keep doing it.
AR: Our parents' generation has a really different relationship to this kind of politics.
NC: Yeah, in my opinion it's more for this late 60s generation - this pre-postmodern generation, before people were so doubtful. Sometimes it feels to me like that there's this kind of decadent attitude around today - you don't see the mass of the population fighting for something. But it's important that there are people going out and trying to call attention about the problems around the world.
AR: Can I ask you a few questions about how you compose your pictures? Once you've sampled these images, how do you go about making them into a new whole?
NC: Well, I crop them, and then I start creating these compositions. I don't plan out what I'm going to do with them or how they will look together before I start, it just comes together.
AR: You trained for years as a photographer, but it seems like in a lot of ways the way your considering and putting together these pictures bit by bit is more like painting. How much do you manipulate each of these images?
NC: Oh, I don't know... there are so many of them. In the 'Across the Universe' series there were about a thousand images in each picture. I make a little timetable, and I say, okay, I'm only spending a minute and a half on each of these.
AR: Why the timetable?
NC: Because it just takes so long otherwise! I mean, if you look at my work, you can see the evidence that the images have be put together. There are some images that have really low resolution, like here, [POINTS] and you can see the seams between images sometimes. I don't know. It doesn't have to always be so super-perfect.
AR: Oh?
NC: It's important to see that it is a collage.
AR: Do you continue to take your own photographs, too?
NC: Yes of course! This is just something different.
AR: Is it something you'll continue working on, or are you going to go back to mainly your own photography?
NC: Well, there are still a few things I want to do with this method. After I'm done with these news agency things, I'll try doing other kinds of pictures using collages.
AR: But still using internet-based images?
NC: Yeah, I'd like to see what happens.
'Holes', 2006
4er Tableau je 24 x 30 cm
AR: What about these holes?
NC: They're from bomb attacks. Usually you see someone sitting here to show how big the bombing was. I like them because they're so minimal, so graphic and simple. For me they're as abstract as these conflicts can be for someone from the other side of the world.
AR: Hmm, speaking of, they look a bit like posters ripping off a wall.
NC: They're also a little bit funny. In fact, they're shot from inside to outside. I like the idea of this view - of looking into nothing. Super-weird, these holes.
AR: Wow. Do you remember where these holes are? That one [POINTS] for instance?
NC: No, I don't - but I could find out. They all have all these special numbers attached to them, the pictures that I use. That the news agencies assign to them.
AR: I love these. They look like a bit like Russian constructivist photocollages, Rodchenko or something. Do you have any stylistic influences?
NC: Yes, of course - but isn't everybody influenced by art history? I mean every image is for sure influenced by different existing art works, but there is not one special epoch by which I am influenced. Every image needs to be created in its own way - on its own terms. I put these things together in a way that makes sense. I like these windows because you look at the way they're broken and you can see animals inside, and I really just want to do something with them - so that they're all included in one picture. Kind of a tribute.
AR: Right. You see animals in them the way you look at the sky and see animals in the clouds?
NC: Yeah, exactly.
Natalie Czech: Daily Mirror
Until 21 April
Galerie Jette Rudolph GmbH
Zimmerstrasse 90- 91
D- 10117 Berlin
T: +49 (0)30 613 03 887
galerie@jette-rudolph.de
www.jette-rudolph.de
Alix Rule writes on art and politics. She has worked for In These Times and Dissent magazine, and her writing has appeared in a variety of other publications. Alix grew up in New York and studied at the University of Chicago at then at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating she worked briefly as an organizer of low-wage workers in London, UK. Alix is interested in interior and outer space, organizing communities, "social entrepreneurship" and above all, clothing. She has recently moved to Berlin. You can contact her at alix.rule@gmail.com.
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