THE HANDBOOK
------------
Abb. 1 |
Abb. 2 |
INDEX
Past History
After settling in New York in 1989, I expanded my English vocabulary mostly by reading the New York Times. This is when I started collecting newspaper articles in a systematic way.
The articles I chose described circumstances which concerned me personally and triggered my interest since they dealt with a specific problem which I experienced in a similar fashion. I was particularly attentive to sayings that were short and to the point while actually covering complicated facts, making them easy to remember.
|
CH (KG) |
I called this collection "Case History (Die Krankengeschichte)." It meant questioning the self through the input of media and was a kind of psychoanalysis, with the text being the analyst. The purpose was to increase my awareness, cope with the past, language acquisition and assimilation in general. |
|
In contrast to earlier documents, such as the DIARY 1974, which was still mainly composed of personal notes, now a kind of "passive diary" was taking shape: thoughts, ideas and conclusions were already provided in the newspaper articles, I no longer had to write them myself. All that was left for me to do was find and collect them. |
|
|||||||
| DIARY 1974 |
Case History
Totally new and therefore fascinating was, that topics were often presented and discussed in a ruthless manner, as in the following examples:
CH example 1: Memory
One of the first articles I included in the CH dealt with the controversy regarding famous pediatrician Bruno Bettelheim and the questioning of his methods of treatment
|
Erinnerung
|
CH example 2: CATCH-22 [ Remark ]
a) The dilemma between belonging to a minority versus career opportunities
The quandary in which the black Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas found himself in is brought to the point in a single sentence:
|
Catch-22 / Discrimination
|
b) Hide
In a recently published article about the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) the problem is described as follows:
|
Catch-22 / Discrimination
|
c) Show
Reassessment of a status symbol with a negative connotation:
|
FDR-Wheelchair-Controversy
|
CH example 3: Various other topics
|
|
Prejudices An unforeseen effect of moving to a new culture was that I started to develop a new kind of sensitivity. If I had previously been unaware, I now noticed how certain circumstances or persons were described, realizing, for instance, to what extent discrimination can be based on appearance. The USA, a country of omnipresent political correctness, changed my way of reading European newspapers. To illustrate this fact, here is one example from the MH, namely the topic of hair as written in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (one of the main Swiss German Newspapers: |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
THE HANDBOOK
On the visual level however, one particular aspect immediately caught the eye: in my view, the image editors at the New York Times chose ten times more interesting pictures than their counterparts at European newspapers, such as the "Tages-Anzeiger", let alone the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Detail from THE HANDBOOK 1 p. 622 |
Obvisouly, and contrary to Europe where the word takes center stage, the printed image was given priority in the USA.
In contrast to US media that zoom in closer and place emphasis on communication, European newspapers more frequently base their choice on 'corporate identity', neat appearance, and the satisfaction of visual conventions held by their long-term subscribers: come fall and you always have your standard image of a leafless tree in a foggy landscape.
Coming to such a new understanding of images, or rather of the way they were chosen, led to my fascination with the hand in press photography.
This is how the HANDBOOK began.
Following an earlier phase where the hand had been the study template for drawings like the ones contained in the STUDY BOOK of the 80es, I now began to consider the hand on its own, without any artistic transposition. |
In the STUDY BOOK 1984-86, the guiding question - beyond exercising my hand in drawing and concentration - had also been: why was I interested in this image or why I had chosen this particular one rather than another?
It was finally the sheer accumulation of images that would answer this question. However, for the time being, the meaning or the red thread through the collection remained hidden. Since it was hardly preconceived, it would only reveal itself gradually, through the collection as a whole.
|
Ballet of Incomprehensibility
The hand as a figure in newspaper imagery may be the part of the picture that most easily escaped control. There were shapes and forms that one could hardly imagine. It was also due to the fact that the hand never was the focal point: the hand was simply there.
Had one commissioned photographers to shoot hands, the esthetics of the author would have transpired sooner or later. Possibly those hands would even be presented with precisely adjusted photographic lighting. At any rate, diversity would have been limited and it would have been impossible to avoid the esthetic signature of the artist. Yet in photographes that appeared in the printed press, mainly in the New York Times, something different happened to these hands: clearly, here, the much overused topic of the hand recovered explosive actuality.
It became the OBJET TROUVE, thus allowing an approximation to the real hand. This in turn led to a de-popular-ization of the photograph since I was cutting off as much of the context as possible. A kind of leveling took place which finally created a pictural language that was both highly personal as well as incomprehensible.
|
|
Work on the Handbook |
From now one, one cut out of a hand after another was put down on paper. Day after day over a number of years, I worked in a space-saving manner based on image size in a trance-like, meditative state of patient labour.
|
The increasing lack of space due to my ever-growing collection forced me to constantly create more space.
|
This was only possible by adding extra pages.
|
The Categories With the collection growing rapidly the question of structure was there from the beginning. The images were placed slowly and under the exclusion of standard categories like man/woman or work/sport. An organization based on size and position, young and old, skin color, etc. was no option either. With the use of quasi biological terms all the way to philosophical concepts, the categories that slowly emerged turned out to be phenomenological in nature:
The figure of the hand out of its historical context was free to deploy itself, once the goal of separating the image from its time-frame had been achieved. The resulting structure could now be likened to the relationship between the cell and the organism, perceived as a global evolutionary tale, or a system of perception comparing the psychological I to the We.
Memorial to Actuality
History: muted and compressed, collapsed in time in sediments of hands, frozen, senseless gestures and postures of the Now. Through frieze-like patterns and bands recalling the construction of walls, the handbook evolved into a monumental memorial to current events. The collection went through one last and irreversible decontextualization when I decided not to add any kind of explanatory data. There was no mention to which person the hand belonged nor publishing dates and names of the authors of photographs.
|
I used the handbook which had found its place at the Swiss national library in Bern in the meantime, as a model for publication.
Exhibitions: URSUS BOOKS 1997 Carlyle Hotel Madison Avenue and Hope Street, Brooklyn.
Extensions
After acquiring a personal computer in 1997, I started to transcribe the data based on files produced by typewriter into an artistic presentation on spreadsheets. Parallel to this, an expanded version of the handbook was taking shape in digital form.
The Digital Self
Later on, the rapid developments in information technology made it possible to work on a global digital archive.
My aim was to create a mirror in digital form based on the most simple of methods and by limiting myself to ONE pathway. To frame it differently: the digital archive was to be based on simple user-friendly coding without requiring any specialized software. The solution was obvious: everything had to work through the browser.
Learning by doing
Further entries had links to: bibliography, the diary, templates and later additions, and photo projects.
The above mentioned main categories are subject to ongoing work on the catalogue. They really are at the core of my entire documentary endeavor Notebooks The notebooks are a mixed bag between daily life and curiosity cabinet. They function as diaries of real life while looking a bit like "waste books"
The notebooks also contain - next to irrelevant notes, scribblings, addresses, conversation records, vocabulary entries, etc. - studies of drawings and other contents related to the complete work
Articles Today we easily forget how laborious access to Internet used to be and even not so long ago. At the time, the computer had to be hooked up to the phone cable and one had to call the server number via a modem.
As a matter of course, the documents, once read, instead of being erased, were assigned to different files labeled "art", "music", "philosophy", etc. The entire data volume of this archive amounts to roughly 40'000 newspaper articles.
|
