Me, Myself, and Katharina

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The New York Sun

“Katharina Sieverding: Up Close,” which opened at PS1 on Sunday, is comprised almost entirely of photographic self-portraits. Given such ostensibly straightforward subject matter, the show’s difficulty, its inscrutability, hits one like an unexpected slap.


Take, for instance, the first piece one encounters, “Ohne Titel/Ultramarine IVI” (1993). It consists of eight monumental (375-by-300-cm) images of Ms. Sieverding, presented against vertical swathes of wall painted electric blue. Each image is divided into three equally sized, stacked sections, cutting the face into three parts; each has a reddish tone. The prints are grainy, as if they were screen-grabs. The faces they present vary only slightly: In all, the artist’s expression is blank or unaffected; one notices the red of her lipstick, the fact that her hair is pulled back, and that each frames the oval of her face.


How are we to respond to such aggressively scaled visages? What is the photographer’s game here? The piece, clearly meant to recall both movie screen images and billboard advertising, certainly holds your attention. But I suspect the repetition should reveal other aims.


That Ms. Sieverding is virtually unknown in this country undoubtedly contributes to our difficulty in apprehending what she’s up to. In Europe she is celebrated. Indeed, earlier this month she received the Goslarer Kaiserring, the most prestigious art prize awarded in Germany.


Born in Prague in 1944, she studied sculpture in Dusseldorf and continues to live in Germany. Unlike the most recent crop of art-star German photographers, however – Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Hoffer – Ms. Sieverding did not form her aesthetic under the tutelage of the Minimalist photographic masters Bernd and Hilda Becher. Rather, like the painter Anselm Kieffer, she studied with the performance and installation pioneer Joseph Beuys.


The earliest pieces on view do not differ enormously in look or feel from “Ultramarine I-VI,” the latest. “F-I, FVIII, F-X, F-VI” (1969) offers four heavily grained black-and-white self-portraits. In this case, the images are solarized and appear in severe close-up, so that the edges of the face are cropped out.


“Life-Death I-VII” (1969) continues in a similar vein. Its seven parts all contain two columns of three related, though not identical, images per column. Most of the photographs are blurred. One section captures Ms. Sieverding from behind, with her hands held behind her back, apparently wearing a red garment. In another, taken from a low vantage point, she holds a green strip, which might be a length of film stock or a piece of fabric. In still another, her lips are painted red and she holds a cigarette.


Throughout, even in the work from the 1990s,much about this show screams 1970s, the me decade: the grainy, punk glamour of Ms. Sieverding’s face, her affectless expression, her use of slide projections – not to mention the title, which is also used on a Lou Reed album from the period – in “Transformer” (1973). One of the photographs, “The Great White Way Goes Black” (1977) openly refers to the New York City blackout of 1977.


Ultimately, one realizes that Ms. Sieverding’s efforts form a sort of bridge between the late-Modernist styles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, exemplified in photography by the Bechers, and those anti-formalist, culture-and-identity obsessed styles of the 1980s and early 1990s, which derived much inspiration from Beuys. Her


deadpan documentary approach, her attention to minute variations in framing, and her use of repetition – multiple images of the same subject – all stem from the same impulse that gave us the Bechers’ grain-elevator series and Donald Judds repeated boxes.


Yet consider “To Look at the Sun at Midnight” (1973), a series of self-portraits in which gold dust covers Ms. Sieverding’s face. The title indicates that Ms. Sieverding’s gold hue mimics the glow of the sun. But the coloring also implies an actor’s or performance artist’s makeup, and that sort of narrative dramatizing was inimical to Minimalism. “The Great White Way Goes Black,” in which she appears on Broadway at night, wearing a strapless dress and a red visor, as stunning a woman on a Times Square billboard, also suggests the theatrical – though her unshaven armpits and the words of the title print ed across the center of the photograph anticipate the classic 1980s art critiques of advertising.


In a sense, you could say that Ms. Sieverding’s relentless focus on herself raises the specter of identity and gender politics, while her references to film and advertising evince an interest in popular culture: All these “issues” are concerns associated with the dominant artists of the 1980s and early 1990s, a period happily receding into footnotes.


Then again, Ms. Sieverding’s work is better than that of her successors, because she consistently produces compelling aesthetic objects, which only hint at the concepts a lesser artist would foreground. Her faults, when they arise, stem more from late-1960s earnestness than from the blowhard politics to which her work looks forward. With Klaus Mettig, for instance, she created a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film of a trip to China that comes off as a tourist’s trumped-up home movie.


That said, we should applaud the impulse, if not the decision, to include it here, since she doesn’t appear in it at all. This show constitutes “the first comprehensive survey in the United States” of Ms. Sieverding’s work, so I wonder why the curators chose to introduce the artist through such a uniform selection, one that almost never wanders from Ms. Sieverding’s face.


We are left with one facet, though a large one, of the artist’s output. But it is a facet that gives off at times brilliant reflections, and it will delight the eye of its audience.


The New York Sun

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