The Image As A Dialogue System

Elisabeth Wörndl's photographic oeuvre

by Margit Zuckriegl

To speak of the "image" as a category means venturing out onto a complex terrain. In an age in which the traditional production of imagery as in classical easel painting has increasingly become declared obsolete, photography generally refers to a technical image-generated medium. In (photographic) practice, however, a "parallax shift" has become ever more pronounced: it is as if the parameters were being dissolved beginning with the terminological edges. Photography, accordingly, no longer only means the representation of real existing situation produced by means of technical processes. It has also become expanded in pictorial, manipulative and natural (additional) processes. These processes are based only on the primary material of photography, allowing photography to conquer further dimensions and other aesthetic categories.

In this sense, (photographic) imagery, with its advanced, compositional thrust, is coming to resemble works of conventional painting. An attempt can be made to integrate them in a more general art historical analysis.

The way out of the photo-theoretical ghetto to an assimilation in art history seems legitimate and even inevitable given the new strategies of producing photographic imagery. Just as innovative photography follows an evolutionary loop to presumedly conventional pictorial criteria, current art history sees itself forced to check its (allegedly) established criteria and parameters on the basis of the new pictorial media. Ultimately, the present crisis of whatever "identity" a general one, be it in artistic design, be it in the scientific-theoretical realism, be it in political and social action.

As media transfer and cross-over become composite notions of style, entities such as national state or national group are no longer adequate. The same is true for exclusivity of current art historic vocabulary. The once firm term "identity", "to be in harmony with oneself" (1) has begun to waver. A new vulnerable, perhaps transitory situation calls for new approaches.

In view of its meanwhile paradigmatic, non-anonymous production practice, photography must subject itself to a cooptation through art history, – an art history that can perhaps slowly begin to apply adequate analogous criteria to photographic artworks.

At the turn of the century Alois Riegl (2) had used concepts such as "purpose of use (Gebrauchszweck), raw material and technique", that are (meanwhile) antiquated, referring to artworks in new correlations. Be that as it may, his insight that these notions (with special emphasis on "technique") are "coefficients of friction within the total product" has remained rampant up to the present day.

If one substitutes "technique" with the word "medium", this provides a modified view of Riegl's approach for today's "art production" in the sense that an artwork results from a direct confrontation with the medium, "as a result of a certain, purpose-oriented artistic will that wins over in the struggle with technology".

How important such theoretical analogies can be is evident in Elisabeth Wörndl's photographic work. The artist represents a position within today's photographic artistic practice which is explicitly under the sway of the crucial identity question: the question as to the position of the artist medium and the back-and-forth between media-immanent option. Also important is the principle of combination and ultimately the question as to one's own personal integrity.

Ever since her first photographic works in 1991, a subjective, self-reflexive perspective has been central to Elisabeth‘s Wörndl's photography.

The search for her identity, the image of herself within the artwork continues to grow given the intensity of the evidence: from a diary-like line of text (3), integrated self-portraits (4) to the photographed computer tomographies (5), her work has increasingly moved inwards, from the outer world to the inner world.

The technical media she selects for her photographs are defined by the result. She makes technologies available which are used in very different realms as image-producing systems: computer tomography in medical-diagnostic practice as three-dimensional X-ray images, the ergographic body simulations (6) in industrial development to ensure optimum fitting and material adaption in the production of underwear and T-shirts.

Very much in keeping with Riegl's understanding, Elisabeth Wörndl's series of photographs are not to be understood as products of a technical use of diverse media. These media could not be ascribed a genuinely "creative" character. Rather they are developed from a conceptual framework whose realization takes place in a "struggle" with the media. The "struggle" implies a command of the medium, a sort of recourse to various media which the artist can deploy depending on conception and intention.

This principle of concept and medial presence is opposed by further a conceptual pair from Riegl's art history, namely the dialogue system of pattern and ground.

The relationship between basic surface and the ornamentation on it has been meticulously traced in late-Roman art industry and in comparative studies on antique clasps and buckles and early-Medieval fibulae. Even though this is one of the most crucial issues in art history in general, today it seems to be almost banned.

The pejorative character of the word "pattern" thwarts all related reflection. Each theoretical work analysis is characterized by an exegesis that suppresses everything. Wherever contents, significant narrative meanings come to the fore, form-analysis only assumes a secondary role if at all. Elisabeth Wörndl's photography series are all influenced by the dominance of a dual layer system.

In the early works, the transformed photographs were the backdrop for a message in the sense of lettrisme (pattern on ground). This relationship changes in the Daphne-Series where a self-portrait, possibly already present in the ground, emerges from the photographic reproduction of statue almost like a picture puzzle.

In "Digital Selfportrait", the amorphous black ground of the painting enables the dazzling-white contrast image of bones reflecting rays of light – and organ substance: the ground is where there is nothing; the pattern results from a negative process.

The most complex interlocking of pattern and ground can be found in the "Body – Spaces" series. Here analogous urban images are overlapped by digital schematizations of bodies.

The relationship becomes radically inverted. The ground is the conventional picture, is what is being related, what lends itself to being defined and interpreted. The pattern places itself over the ground as an enigmatic veil, as coded, distorted and ravelled contraction.

Elisabeth Wörndl's scheme of a dialogue system in which pattern and ground merge seems to have culminated and to have assumed a narrative-poetic dimension in a synthesis of sensual perceptions and content.

These series of pictures cannot be experienced as pure photography. Pure, depicting photography hardly figures and is not dominant enough in the present dialogue system. Only certain parts of the picture can be seen as exemplifying a world abstracted in the media, dissolved in binary codes and virtual information impulses. The concept of the picture as pure combinatorics, overlapping or additive layering would be too superficial for the approach applied here to construct imagery.

It becomes clear that the repertory of art history can also be deployed for a photo-theoretical discourse. The recourse to old (now slightly reinterpreted) art historical categories as that of technique and the relationship of ground and pattern offers an unusual, yet perhaps quite adequate tool for analyzing the general system in Elisabeth Wörndl's complex photographic works. Her "virtual journey around the world" (7) is a search for one's self in an increasingly infathomable reality. Yet it is also an artistic credo in a highly technical, cold media world still capable of developing narrative animate impact.

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