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A catalogue essay.
Interfaces
Corinna Schnitt makes pictures about social
relations. Not only her video works but her
photographs follow a principle one might describe
as pseudo-narrative interpenetration of inner
and outer. An exterior is always there, a
setting, in public or for a public, as in
the "Family Portraits" or the "Runde
Orte" (Round places) entitled "Freizeit"
(Free time). An inner world is clearly visible
in these, or, more subtly, thinkable; or a
world of experience, which can be aligned
with one’s own, thrusts itself into the
picture. Outer is invariably transposed into
inner.
The pictures seem contingent, casual, banal;
but in fact they are very precisely arranged
and constructed. Schnitt’s observing,
dissecting eye lends the laconic pictures
objectivity, an ob0jectivity that strives
to be, and is, close to social satire. Nothing
is impossible, nothing so far-fetched as not
to have its location somewhere in the forensic
grid of German mentality. If the films, true
to their medium, are photographs strung together
to form a story, like words in a sentence
creating the narrative thread that introduces
us, alongside Schnitt, into a surreal relation
to things, then the photographs considered
as series are variations on a sentence that
might run "Where I come from the world’s
still in order – ostensibly". Conceivable
also are such sentences as "Remember,
you interpret when you see", "Never
be to hard on yourself", and "A
little madness is a great thing".
Schnitt’s picture series are rich in
humour; they are funny, occasionally absurd
and mean; they are also, beneath the surface,
earnest and critical. For, underlying the
casualness, the ludic lightness of the apparently
private, are observations of a far-ranging
not to say wholly German import. Although
the local colour of the Ruhr District and
Lower Rhine do glimmer through, a basic dimension
of "Germaness" in its "Blackest
soul" is unoverlookable. To reveal it,
however, Schnitt does not confine herself
to an inspection of the dark, dusty underground
passageways of her homeland. She also introspects
on her own ideas and cliches vis-à-vis
such phenomena and constructs. This meets
the need for authenticity and honesty, for
controversy and tension even., the swing form
inner to outer – and vice versa –
we must after all consider as occurring not
just spatially but psychologically as well.
Manifest normality also exists quite frankly
and openly as absurdity, both of subject and
of place.
Corinna Schnitt draws our attention to the
social forces that have constructed and created
their respective places. Social circumstances
and relations are elucidated both through
analysis and synthesis. She also gives expression
to the powers of photography – the way
its objectivity creates subjective facts –
as a private washing – and a public washing
machine. Not just "clean" but "pure"
is an oft-repeated theme of the pictures.
She is always personally there in the idyllic
family portraits. As Daughter, mother, wife,
relative or friend in a wide range of situations,
she is part of the photographic as of the
social constructs that obey the familiar typological
rules for portraits of family and/or friends.
What her window series sketched out –
the way change of view (i.e. of background)
from a window changes how objective space
appears – has been neatly gone over again
in the family portrait photographs. It remains
for the viewer to remark how arbitrarily and
schematically the picture of an idyll is constructed,
while the scope for range of mood is enormous.
The positive moments in this mood nexus rest
on photography’s myth of "This s
how it was" and on the psycho-social
myths of "family ties", while what
negative particulars there are grounded in
facts of appearance and in the mental dividedness
of being human.
Common lifestyles. Differences of lifestyle.
Expectations and attitudes towards these.
The particular in the general. The particular
in the everyday, operating in conjunction
with codes of conduct and appearance. In Schnitt’s
photographs, the bounds of observation as
idee fixe dissolve, categorically, and in
a striking way. We, as viewers, become voyeurs
of the self-evident. Around the photographs’
banal-surreal motifs we fabricate stories
and worlds, and are as close to ourselves
as we are distant from ourselves. The question
arises whether Corinna Schnitt’s principle
of inner and outer, confronting us as it always
does with others as we perceive our own identities,
offers – analytically or in a romantic-ironic
sense – a definition of the private sphere?
But it is important to ask what interfaces
are and what they mean, or whether there is
a private what counts is the whole, the interface
is convention, and that we remember just how
constructed the relations between inner and
outer, picture and world, form and meaning,
actually are. The system as a whole is fundamental;
it and its components, its uses and its social
reality.
Translation:
Christopher Jenkin-Jones
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