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LOCAL ANTHROPOGENIES - PHYLOGENESIS
A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY (1992)
COLETTE DUCK (Germany-Belgium, 1949)
Cosmological transformation
Since the 1970’s, many have started to perceive themselves as being in
an expanding Universe among a luxuriant geological and biological evolution,
one that was irreversible. This somewhat enlightened the cosmological voyage through civilizations in the manner of Max Pam, and through moments of history in the manner of Scianna. This should also be our starting point to understand the perception of the cosmological
transformation in the manner of Colette Duck.
Cosmological transformation is as old as the hills. Yet, the aggregative
and instinctive elements of WORLD 1, which of close continuity, only kept the elementary
case of aggregation: the procreation. The WORLD 2, which of distant continuity,
almost fled aggregation, as the latter shattered its search to integral parts
and wholes in their acme (their integration climax). Even the functioning
elements of WORLD 3, that of discontinuity, were at first a lot more
combinatory than transformational, as testified by Picasso or Bauhaus. In
summary, we had to wait until the 1970’s and the feeling of
one-time-never-again that affected the Universe itself for the irreversible
factor of time as such to become the heart of an artistic subject.
Music – through its temporal nature and sensitiveness to
fluctuation – first testified of this new sensitivity, when Steve Reich,
Phil Glass, and La Monte Young created musical mechanisms that invited grasping
sound as a place of infinitesimal, fecund, ceaseless mutations. The shock was
generalized. Exemplarily, since 1965, polish painter Opalka continues to write,
each day, from painting to painting and from line to line, a suite (sequence) of
positive complete numbers from one to the infinite in endlessly paler greys,
which are destined to fade away with his own life. Most happenings, as their
name indicate, centred on the patient grasping of unpredictability and the
irreversibility of time going by. In all of these cases, the artist has become
a cosmologist celebrant.
Photography played its role in this transformational vision. But its
version in black and white was more suited to recording macroscopic
transformations, like in the work of Denis Roche. The infinitesimal cosmologic
transformations required colour photography. Colette Duck testifies this, even if
in her work, along photography, this aim also called upon painting, sculpture,
video, ready-made, and chemical alterations. We shall limit ourselves to her
photos.
Browsing through the book-catalogue published by Espace Médicis in 1991
(CD), we are first struck by the archetypal role played by the coloured
auto-thermogram. There, the theme is the own body visualised in a particularly
fluctuating factor, its heat, and in the most proprioceptive as, in the tightest
connection between the taker and the taken, the operator varies – on the
monitor – the grasping of himself to select what he finds the most
intimate and most moving. We measure the privilege of the female body, a place
of cosmological effervescence that are ostensible in menstruation and
particularly in the gestation and lactation, where two confounded and distinct
organisms conduct an exchange.
However, the infinitesimal cosmologic transformation overlaps the own
body and concerns the external world just as much. Another theme was hence
required, one that was sufficiently universal, mutational, and where mutation
would be fit to be shown in a way that was once again visual, tactile,
kinaesthetic, proprioceptive. This theme is the mountain, which is changing,
secularly and daily, which can be touched and grasped in a gravitational
effort, visible by a great people for whom it is the God through its mass,
through its anteriority and by its name. Colette Duck’s mountain-transformation
is the 3000 meters of the Austrian Zugspitze Wetterstein (*CD).
Only colour photographs could exalt this geological and meteorological
transformation at point-blank and in the mid-distance, in the visible and in
the infrared (close to the thermogram), in a touch-vision (as the thermogram,
again) that coincided with the co-apted gravitations of the rock and the body
of the alpinist in such a way that the projections could record not only simple
surfaces, but depths and embraces. When the final editing gives way to series
(*CD), these orchestrate amazements and efforts, sometimes eliding, but never
inverting the states of the experience. If a photograph is isolated, and in
this case does not possess a sequential orchestration, it requires, to become
tactile, the pictorial or chemical touching up.
We then see that, photographically, it is not so much the colour photo
that is transformational, but the suites of colour photographs. If, since 1900,
the Scanachrome allows for an intervention in the dimension, the texture, or
the colour of an isolated photograph, it cannot modify the contours and also
requires, at the end of the day, the pictorial or chemical touching up to
include the tactile aspect and the mutation (except assuredly in the auto-thermogram
that would lose all sense if they were altered.
We will draw a parallel between Colette Duck, whose mother was German,
and Dieter Appelt, who is roughly the same age. On both side, we find the same
specifically German grasping of the concomitant explosion and implosion. The
same packaging of space and time, that means that there are never surfaces
without depths. The same combination of softness and savagery, of caress and
breaking-in, of vision and touching. We will say that Colette Duck also has an
Italian side, more precisely Venetian, since the Brenner is the sole separator
between Innsbruck and Venice. Dieter Appelt too, in 1981, photographed the
depths of time-space in Venice, the transformational, entitled Venedig in his series Ezra Pound.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.
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