Oeuvres | Documents | Biographie | boeing over | urban creatures

Fault fold, 2001, photocopy, 1000 x 660 cm

Documenta X, 1997

Documenta X, 1997

Groene Pasen, museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, 1997

Groene Pasen, museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, 1997

Cities on the move, slide projectors, PS1, New-York,1998

Avenir des Villes, Future of cities, site Alstom, Nancy 2005

Floating Images

by Sønke Gau

Architectural photography is about depicting buildings both in the planning phase (models) and during building proper (construction phase), after completion and for the purpose of documenting buildings. Although the Austrian photographer Aglaia Konrad, who lives in Brussels (winner of the 2003 »Camera Austria award of the city of Graz for contemporary photography«), pursues a documentary approach, mainly photographing buildings, her work is not architectural photography in the usual sense. Her extensive studies of urban structures are based upon an understanding of space that may, following Henri Lefebvre, be taken as a complex system of signs and codes, actions, representations, allocations of meaning and resulting power relations. Space is constituted and manifests itself as social space which, according to Michel de Certeau, is put into motion by an ensemble of movements: "A space comes into being when you link vectors of direction, variables of speed, and the variability of time. Space is a mesh of moving elements. It is full of the entirety of movements, as it were, that manifest themselves in it. It is, then, a result of activities (…). It is performed as an act of a presence (or a time) and changed through the transformation that results from the successive contexts. Unlike the place, then, there is neither the unambiguity nor the stability of something "own". Hence, as a whole, space is a place with which we do something".(1) The movements that constitute space may be material, topographical, social, psychological and narrative and may overlap on many levels. The means of traditional architectural photography cannot apprehend these complex structures. Aglaia Konrad distances herself from a model of architectural photography that is primarily iconographical and formalistic both through the selection of what she depicts and through the formal reproduction of what she photographs. Contrary to the conventional representative urban views, she is interested not in the landmarks or typical urban scenarios, but rather the urban outskirts: the periphery, the urban infrastructure, building sites and generally unfamiliar buildings. In her work, and independent of their functions and context, these buildings exhibit a certain unspectacular uniformity of design, whose vocabulary of form can be seen as a symbol of modernism.

The progressivism and awakening optimism of modernism aimed to overcome the historical and implement humanist ideals by exploiting new technological achievements. Based on ideas of social utopia and a belief in the purposive rationality of the economy and technology, the beauty of a building should result from the functionality of the architecture. The visions of the avant-garde proved infeasible and gave way to a disillusionment that was due to the fact that the main focus was on the commercial success of these buildings, while humanist aspects were successively subordinated to economic factors. The use and repetition of standardised building elements permitted inexpensive construction and large-scale buildings, as a consequence of which cities were flooded with masses of similar-looking "curtain-wall boxes". The interiors of these buildings are standardised and the outside spaces often reflect the monotony of the interior. This architecture, that looks much the same all over the world, gave rise to the term "International Style".

Aglaia Konrad’s works refer to the promises of modernism and their concrete implementation – the discrepancy between utopia and utilitarianism in the realm of architecture and urban planning. Aglaia Konrad’s stance towards modernism, however, is not emphatically critical. We see a balance between fascination with the architectural and urban-planning ideas of modernism and attention to the collateral damage caused by the fundamental changes due to processes of globalisation. Her pictures from numerous cities around the world evidence the fact that modernism is a global system that eludes definition by rigid boundaries. The photographs are either untitled or the titles are restricted to place names and years. Viewed as a whole, they generate a global picture of the urban sphere with remaining local references that nevertheless do not denote any actual place, nor do they reveal any comprehensible pattern of ordering at first glance. As in the fairy-tale of the hare and the tortoise, no matter where in the world Aglaia Konrad travels, modernism is already there. The artist succeeds in drafting an alternative form of cartography that, unlike the geographical map, that is based on a phenomenological conception of space, depicts structures that may no longer be read as a space-time continuum in view of their splitting. Linear structures with fixed points of reference have been replaced by a rhizomatic movement. The constellation of time-shift and placelessness detaches the photographs from the context of documentation and lends them a fictional, narrative component. The effect of impeded differentiation between reality and fiction is augmented by the fact that Aglaia Konrad combines her photos of real space with pictures that she photographs from the cinema screen or from architectural models. The duplication of representation makes it clear that media-generated worlds, excerpts and stereotypes have long since become intermingled with real space to create a new reality. Urban perception is substantially influenced by the media aspect. Beatriz Colomina (Privacy and Publicity, Modern Architecture as Mass Media, MIT 1994) demonstrated that modern enactments of space are fundamentally visually structured by analysing architectures by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier as the production of theatrical and filmic views. Accordingly, view and picture as key categories of visual culture are equally elementary to the organisation of spaces as, in production and in use, spaces and architectures are largely created by way of views and image sequences. The urban space becomes a screen.

Aglaia Konrad is concerned with far more than depicting buildings. She sees architecture as a social process that shapes and is shaped by urban public spheres, forms of traffic, housing and life. This double figure is also reflected by the perspective from which she takes her pictures. She dives into the urban space, moving around in it and documenting what she finds with a certain casualness. Whereas the view of traditional architectural photography derives from plan drawings and commonly uses central perspective, Konrad is not concerned with finding the ideal angle on a building or urban scenario but rather with movement in everyday urban life. She takes her photos from planes, trains, taxis or as a passer-by on her way through the cities. The result is a combination of long-distance and close-up views that depicts superordinate urban structures and also conveys the impressions of movement within these structures. A key theme in the work of Aglaia Konrad is thus urban infrastructure. Junctions, airports, tunnels, bridges and roads in all conceivable variations: motorways, dual carriageways, crossroads and squares. On the one hand, the artist refers to modern ideas of urban planning, that propagated a segmentation of the various urban functional areas into housing and working areas, along with the separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. In actual implementation, this led to a destruction of historically evolved structures, and in order to get from home to work it was necessary to cover longer distances, which, in the course of growing car (mobility), resulted in traffic routes criss-crossing cities. On the other hand, Aglaia Konrad focuses on patterns of perception and gazes that came into being in the course of industrial early modernism. The view out of a vehicle fundamentally changes our perception of the city.

In his book Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise (History of the Railway Journey), Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes how the development of modern means of transport led to the mobilisation of the view: speed separates the traveller from space, of which he had previously been a part. Speed restricts vision. The travellers only see an evanescent landscape. The evanescence of the passing landscape allows him to survey the whole on a general level. "Panoramic perception … no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects. The traveller saw the objects, landscapes, etc., through the apparatus which moved him through the world.« The movement created by the apparatus enters the view which, consequently, can now only see while on the move. »That mobility … became a prerequisite for the ›normality‹ of panoramic vision. This vision no longer experienced evanescence: evanescent reality had become the new reality."(2) The distance to the outside space and the speed with which the impressions pass by the window give the impression of a cinematographic sequence. The experience of "panoramic vision" during the journey causes space to clot into a tableau. The vehicle of information in movement in the urban space and in the cinematic transfer of information is the "passing image", as it were. In this context, Paul Virilio writes, "Natural or artificial movement leads to the concept of the vector of the passing images, of images of the country being traversed or cinematographic images of the film being viewed on screen, where the screen is both the frame of the "shot" and the framing of the "point of view" of the spectator and, in every respect, comparable to the frame of a car’s windscreen." (3) The mobilisation and regulation of the view in the media anticipates and reflects the mobilisation of bodies in modern means of transport. In this sense, urban perception is intimately linked to a form of movement. Because of the stringing together of themes, Aglaia Konrad’s image sequences in her installations and books resemble slow camera travel through a setting that is conceived as a suggestive endless loop and, as such, refers to the return of the same old modernist concepts of space. Just how key the subject of »movement« is to understanding her work is demonstrated by the video work "Effort Square", which was on show at the solo exhibition "KOPIE / CITY – Graz 2004"(4) and "Tomorrow Square" from which a sequence of stills is shown in this contribution. Two adjacent monitors each display two-hour recordings in parallel. While one of the films shows only pictures taken while travelling in various vehicles in various cities, the other presents detailed observations of people moving in the urban space. By means of this contrast, Aglaia Konrad illustrates that she sees space as a social product in which power and inequality are inscribed and which is understood through prevalent forms of representation, but which is equally open to appropriation, and, on the other hand, that movement through space is a constitutive element of its conceivableness and meaning.

The point of departure for her projects is an archive into which she sorts all her photographs. In order to present them in installations or publications she makes a selection for a certain theme, although she can only use a fraction of the extensive collection in each case. As mentioned above, Aglaia Konrad not only distances herself from traditional architectural photography in the selection of her subjects, but also by the formal presentation of what she photographs. She alienates and manipulates the representations. With regard to her installations and her book projects, she works with photocopies and silk-screen printing, blowing up or reducing certain details, visualising the print grid, featuring a motif multiple times in identical or minimal variations, or presenting it back to front. Her strictly composed publications do without glossy pages. Aglaia Konrad’s installations are always related to space. The magnified urban vistas copied onto normal paper are fastened directly on the wall of the exhibition space (not leaving out corners, crossing-points or window areas) or printed on transparent bases that do not cover up the spaces behind them but rather make them an integral part of the work. The space depicted in the photographs, the exhibition space and the space surrounding the exhibition space merge into one. In this sense, the spaces refer not so much to concrete places as to their inherent pictorial quality, a quality already intrinsic to the genre of architecture, and whose perception is characterised by modern gazes. The organisation of visibilities, in which we are inscribed as subjects, has ever been part of a media-based construction of reality that is determined from an external viewpoint. Aglaia Konrad’s photographs of architecture are thus far more than architectural photography in the conventional sense. She succeeds in analysing and depicting the complex mechanisms of production of urban space and the conditions of its perception.

(Translation: Richard Watts)

1.Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns, Berlin: Merve 1988
2.Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, Munich / München: Hanser 1977
3. Paul Virilio, Der negative Horizont. Bewegung – Geschwindigkeit – Beschleunigung, Munich /München, Vienna / Wien: Hanser 1989
4.Aglaia Konrad: »KOPIE / CITY – Graz 2004«, Camera Austria, 14.6 – 1.8.2004.

Text published in Camera Austria