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Gregor Jansen
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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