The exhibition Photography in Contemporary German Art: 1960 to the Present, at the Walker Art Gallery. Minneapolis, in 1992, showed Astrid Klein's work with that of Bemd and Hilla Becher and Hanna Darboven. Photography's popularity among German practitioners now has been influenced by the history of innovation in the field led by the Bauhaus. For artists who have felt the need to engage with the legacy of Nazism, photography is redolent with its role in propaganda, and its significance as historical document.
Klein trained in Cologne. She takes media photographs and alters them, often adding text, creating distinctive black-and-white images. This has an obvious American parallel in the work of Barbara Kruger. But whereas Kruger s work has the stridency of newspaper headlines and advertisements, Klein's art is mysterious and darkly nuanced. Her texts seem to float or ripple across compositions, they appear half-hidden or 'embossed' onto objects- both artists share a feminist agenda. For Klein, this is played out in her questioning of photographs as truth. Her exaggeration of technical procedures, so much so that the blurry, grainy pictures sometimes completely stymie interpretation, foreground the fact that photography is a form of representation, rather than a simple reflection of reality.
Klein's work contains a menace that can be linked to German culture. The expressionistic, sinister atmosphere of her images summons up inter-war cinema, particularly the work of the director Fritz Lang. The shadowy figure in silhouette that often inhabits Klein's compositions is perhaps a descendant of Lang's child-murderer in the film M (ig3i). When Klein does allow clear daylight into her pictures, it is only to reveal the real darkness at the heart of the world. The piece Marche ou creve (1980-1) developed from a photograph of four hanged black women. Klein sliced up the image, but the violence she wreaked was only a pale echo of the horrific historical event. |
