Telefön, 2011.

Alfred Hitchcock once remarked that if you should meet your double, you should kill him. Kathrin Sonntag might counter that such a meeting should be cause not for homicide but for a family portrait. On encountering Sonntag’s work, one quickly learns that things are rarely quite how they first appear, and that one thing is usually connected to something else. Encompassing photography, film, sculpture, and installation, Sonntag’s practice reveals an uncanny world of odd angles, unexpected likenesses, and visual puns. In her photographs and slide installations, seemingly casual arrangements of quotidian objects turn out to be carefully orchestrated compositions staged for the camera. For her 2010 exhibition Futur intérieur at the Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zürich, Sonntag constructed a kind of temporal hall of mirrors out of the prehistory of the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation, under whose auspices the exhibition was mounted and funded. The Guggenheims—whose family originally hailed from the same Swiss village from which the American Guggenheims emigrated in the mid-nineteenth century—had been keen collectors of both pre- and postwar modernism. After their deaths, portions of their collection were distributed to the Israel Museum and to two Swiss museums. The remaining works went to auction at Christie’s in 2005, with the proceeds going to fund the foundation’s cultural philanthropy, including a generous prize awarded each year to an emerging artist. As the centerpiece of her exhibition, Sonntag created Annex, a slide projection of eighty-one still-life compositions in which Sonntag arranged various materials from her studio in relation to a series of openings of the Christie’s auction catalogue, elliptically referencing the works pictured within it. In one, a torn envelope partially obscures a page detailing Roy Lichtenstein’s 1969 Study for the Great Pyramid (fig. 1). The envelope’s black-and-white security pattern and upturned corner echo the painting’s benday dots and yellow ground, the latter appearing again in the sheets of yellow and black craft paper upon which the entire composition is arranged. In another image, an assortment of rubber bands, some colored paper, and a few sugar cubes evoke the quasi-abstract forms in a 1964 drawing by Sigmar Polke. Nearby, an assortment of photographs, correspondence, and publications from the foundation’s archive were laid out in three shallow vitrines that pointed to the multilayered relationships between collecting and displaying both works of art and objects from nature, or between notions of art as something one lives with and art as a type of commodity. These themes were also present in other works in the exhibition. On one wall a large-scale photograph—reproducing a spread from the Christie’s catalogue—depicted the interior of the Guggenheims’ apartment, with paintings hanging on pale yellow walls and sculptures displayed atop a large wooden credenza designed especially for the Guggenheims by the Swiss architect Karl Egender (fig.3). In front of the photograph, atop an antique-looking oriental carpet, stood a low, wheeled cabinet—the younger sibling, as it were, of the credenza in the photo—topped by a sculpture of a seated woman facing a pale yellow wall punctuated by “blank” white rectangles, as if a group of long-stationary works had recently been deinstalled. In addition to bridging the gap between domestic and institutional spaces, this bit of mise-en-scène also highlighted the sometimes uncertain afterlife of artworks when they enter the market. The sculpture, originally attributed to Germaine Richier and dated to 1944, had been in the Guggenheims’ collection since 1958 and had been among those works designated for auction. Although included in the catalogue, and despite the fact that the Guggenheims had been friendly with the artist, a lack of documentation proving its authenticity ultimately led Christie’s to pull

1The wheeled cabinet and sculpture were borrowed from the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation. Sonntag found the carpet on which they were installed in the storage of the Kunstraum Walcheturm.

2Having been told that Dr. Guggenheim liked to draw in his younger years, Sonntag inquired as to whether any of the drawings were extant. The self-portrait in the exhibition was loaned by a US-based nephew of the Guggenheims.

DOUBLE TIME Jacob Proctor

the sculpture from the auction and it remains, along with the Egender furniture, in the hands of the foundation.1 Elsewhere in the exhibition, the bridging of past and present took on an obliquely autobiographical note (fig.2). In one corner, a black-and-white 16 mm film projected the actions of a largely offscreen protagonist as she places a checkered cloth over a small wooden table, followed by a plate, silverware, a glass of water, and a sugar bowl, before ultimately whisking the tablecloth out from under the still-intact setting. On first inspection, the film—entitled Tango—would appear to have been inspired by a large, adjacent black-and-white photograph picturing the Guggenheims dining al fresco at a small table topped with a checkered cloth, were it not for the fact that Sonntag had made Tango in 2006, some three years before winning the Guggenheim Foundation’s prize and its accompanying exhibition. A similar logic can be detected in the relationship between the small self-portrait from 2000 that Sonntag hung alongside a similarly scaled, undated self-portrait by Georg Guggenheim that she became aware of as she was preparing the exhibition. 2 Or between the graffiti tag on an exterior window, rendered visible through a hole cut in the wall, and a graffiti-tagged poster for a Monet exhibition hung in the gallery space. Sonntag had kept the poster since her student days and was inspired to include it in the exhibition by the graffiti she found on the windows of the Kunstraum on an earlier visit.3 In the context of the exhibition, each of these three objects—film, drawing, poster—takes on an almost proleptic quality, as if they had each been created in anticipation of eventually meeting their double. Collectively, the inclusion of these objects translates into visual, material terms the linguistic futur antérieur, the verb tense that names what “will have been” and homonymically recalls the title of the exhibition itself. It also connects them to photography’s own peculiar conjunction of spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the simultaneous condition of

“this will be” and “this has been” that Roland Barthes famously observed in Camera Lucida, noting that every photograph—or at least any photograph of a human subject—presents us with “an anterior future of which death is the stake.” 4

Through the use of such means as trompe l’oeil wallpaper, colored gels, and sculptural objects, Sonntag’s recent exhibitions have effected a kind of visual transposition of the space of the studio into that of the gallery or museum. Architectural space and photographic space blend into one another, as objects and images variously and mutually reflect, distort, and intersect in seemingly impossible configurations. Her 2011 exhibition Double Take at Galerie Kamm in Berlin is a case in point. Upon first entering the gallery, viewers encountered Blame it on Morandi, a sequence of eighty-one 35 mm slides that appear to circumnavigate the artist’s studio space, passing over a precise if seemingly impossible constellation of such trademark elements as mirrors, cut fruit, string, a draftsman’s square, playing cards, and the like (figs. 5–7). Accompanied by a jazzy soundtrack that might be borrowed from a 1940s or 1950s film noir, Blame it on Morandi is, on the one hand, an homage to the European tradition of still-life painting exemplified in the twentieth century by the reclusive Italian Giorgio Morandi and, on the other,

1The wheeled cabinet and sculpture were borrowed from the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation. Sonntag found the carpet on which they were installed in the storage of the Kunstraum Walcheturm.

2Having been told that Dr. Guggenheim liked to draw in his younger years, Sonntag inquired as to whether any of the drawings were extant. The self-portrait in the exhibition was loaned by a US-based nephew of the Guggenheims.

3“When I visited the space for the first time and looked at the windows from the outside they were covered with tags. I planned to show the poster next to window with all those tags but unfortunately they had cleaned the windows when I arrived to build up the show. So I decided to have a friend write a tag on the window to recreate the situation somewhat.” Kathrin Sonntag, e-mail correspondence with the author, December 30, 2012.

4Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 96.

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a nod to detective fiction’s painstaking, even loving inventories of the scene of the crime. The trompe l’oeil illusionism of American painter William Harnett enters the picture as well, with a winking reference to a painting such as The Artist’s Letter Rack (1879), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 8) , as does Belgian surrealist René Magritte, who is conjured through the presence of a curiously upright pipe as well as in the caesura of the slide sequence’s final images, a curled edge that both breaks and complicates the illusion of continuity between the real and its photographic double (fig. 7) . This preoccupation with doubling, and the accompanying play between rupture and continuity, permeated the exhibition as a whole. In the main gallery, Sonntag constructed a false wall obscuring the view of one of two large street-level windows ( fi g . 1 3 ) . This and the adjacent wall to the right were covered with photographic wallpaper that reproduced—at just a hair less than actual size—a view of Sonntag’s studio, the co-presence of the same objects in both illusionistic and actual space somehow both amplifying and undermining the uncanny effect of visual coherence between the two spaces. Here, as in Morandi, the search for clues is both synchronic within the frame of the exhibition and diachronic in the context of Sonntag’s larger oeuvre and its relation to art history and language. In the work Quodlibet ( fi g . 9) , itself installed on top of the photographic wallpaper, the complex interplay of depth and scale between two and three dimensions once again recalls Harnett’s letter rack paintings and points to one definition of quodlibet as “a philosophical or theological point proposed for disputation, or a disputation on such a point.”5 Sonntag's Quodlibet demonstrates, in microcosm, one underlying logic of the exhibition, as real objects and their photographic representation cohabit within the frame. At the same time, the specific elements within the composition—playing cards, torn envelopes, various framing devices—tie it back to our memory of Sonntag’s own cast of recurring props and techniques. The oblique tabletop setup view that appears twice—split between the lower two quadrants of the frame and again, in reproduction, in the upper right quadrant—could almost be an outtake from Annex, linking the work to a second definition of quodlibet as “a whimsical combination of familiar melodies or texts,” often in counterpoint. In his landmark essay “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” first published in English under a slightly different title in 1980, historian Carlo Ginzburg invites us to consider how the epistemological model that we know as the historical method grew out of earlier forms of conjectural knowledge.6 In particular, Ginzburg traces the contemporaneous emergence, in the later nineteenth century, of the art connoisseur, the psychoanalyst, and the modern detective, exemplified by three individuals: Italian art historian Giovanni Morelli, father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Each of these figures employed tiny, seemingly inconsequential clues to uncover or reveal profound truths about the world around them. In correctly ascribing authorship to a painting, Morelli insisted, we should look not to its most broad or conspicuous visual characteristics, aspects easiest or most likely to be imitated. Rather, we should examine trivial details such as earlobes, fingernails, the shapes of fingers and toes—details described by Freud himself, in his famous essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) as “such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way.” Freud goes on: “It seems to me that his [Morelli’s] method of inquiry is closely related

7Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 134.

5Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. “quodlibet.”

6Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125. The essay first appeared in English as “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), 5–36.

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to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations.”7 Similarly, as Ginzburg notes, “the art connoisseur resembles the detective who discovers the perpetrator of a crime (or the artist behind a painting) on the basis of evidence that is imperceptible to most people.” 8 Over time, these sorts of conjectural models—based on close empirical observation but also on such unquantifiable factors as instinct, insight, and intuition—have come to be overshadowed by a privileging of forms of knowledge based on the “laboratory” model of scientific experimentation, a model based on the observation of immediate, verifiable, and repeatable results. (With the increasingly hegemonic status of forensic analysis in the European and American criminal justice systems, typified in the public imagination by such television programs as CSI and its various franchises, one wonders if that overshadowing has not become a total eclipse.) However, Ginzburg’s inquiry is ultimately one of historical epistemology: he is concerned with changes in how we see the world, how knowledge is acquired and organized, the categories into which we fit new observations or information, and the larger structures that contain, classify, and influence the contemporary and historical development of such factors into distinct paradigms and epistemes Like a good detective, analyst, or connoisseur, Kathrin Sonntag questions what and how we see, how our perception is both culturally conditioned and yet always in flux, somehow both predictable and aleatory. In a recent series of photographs and videos (fig. 4) , Sonntag juxtaposes various objects with cut-paper silhouettes of similar forms, playfully if knowingly acknowledging one of the primary conditions of photography itself: namely the visual mapping of a three-dimensional form onto a two-dimensional matrix. Often back-lit so that the objects themselves are seen in silhouette as well, these works also evoke Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, whose prisoners are unable to distinguish between the reality behind them and its cast shadows on the cave wall before them. But in Sonntag’s world the viewer is not really a prisoner. Sonntag plays with our perceptions, but she also provides us with the information to revisit and perhaps revise an initial moment of misrecognition. Unlike Plato’s allegorical inmates, we do have the ability to toggle back and forth between reality and representation, and even to take pleasure in that oscillation. This is a pipe; this is not a pipe. This is a banana; this is not a banana. This is a lampshade; this is not a lampshade. This is a photograph; this is not a photograph.

7Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 134.

8Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 97–8.

6Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125. The essay first appeared in English as “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), 5–36.

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fig. 1

Annex #14 – Lichtenstein, 2010.

Tabula Rasa, 2010: Tango, 2006. 8 mm film transferred to 16 mm, black and white, silent, 2 min. 30 sec.; and inkjet print. 120 x 90 cm. Installation view, Kunstraum

Walcheturm, Zürich.

Untitled, 2012. HD video, 34 min. 30 sec.

Installation view, Futur intérieur, 2010. Kunstraum

Walcheturm, Zürich.

fig. 4fig. 3

fig. 2

Kann ich nicht nachverstehen, 2011.

Blame it on Morandi, 2011 (details). 81 slides, 27 motifs, Kodak CAROUSEL slide projection, sound, loop. Size variable.

Quodlibet, 2011. Photocopies, playing cards, plastic, color photo, brass, elastic,

paper. 90.5 x 63 cm.

fig. 9

fig. 5–7

William Michael Harnett, The Artist's Letter Rack, 1879. Oil on canvas. 76.2 x 63.5 cm. Morris K.

Jesup Fund, 1966 (66.13). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

fig. 8

fig. 10 fig. 11

fig. 13

fig. 12

Studio #1, 2011. C-print. 50 x 33 cm.

Alloy, 2011 (detail). Inkjet print. 50 x 33 cm.

Mimikry #2, 2010. Lacquered wood, brass umbrella stand, poster.

Size variable. Object: 160 x 30 x 30 cm; poster: 90 x 62.5 cm.

Installation view, Double Take, 2011. Galerie Kamm, Berlin.

Tabula Rasa, 2010: Tango, 2006. 8 mm film transferred to 16 mm, black and white, silent, 2 min. 30 sec.; and inkjet print. 120 x 90 cm. Installation view, Kunstraum

Walcheturm, Zürich.

fig. 14 fig. 15

fig. 17 fig. 18 fig. 19

fig. 16

Kann ich nicht nachverstehen, 2011.

Spiegeleis, 2011.

Telefön, 2011.

Tüchtigkeitsfehler, 2011.

Melankohle, 2011.

Tränengras, 2011.

From the series of 87 slides Mühsam ernährt sich das Einhorn.

A click of the carousel, and the trap is set. “Kann ich nicht nachverstehen” (fig.14): Here, among the groan-inducing substitution puns and cola cans and headless magazine models in matching sweaters—all projected, alongside the image bearing this inscription, within Kathrin Sonntag’s 2011 installation Mühsam ernährt sich das Einhorn1—are we really being quizzed on our reading in phenomenology? Given the slipperiness and silliness of language throughout the installation, we have reason to be cautious. Given what happens throughout Sonntag’s work, on the other hand, among the enigmatic objects and trompe l’oeil installations and photographs of improbable studio setups, we have reason to take the challenge seriously (or at least to take it as a serious cue). But it might take another look to be sure. Or, potentially, to reunderstand. As drawn from Edmund Husserl and deployed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the term Nachverstehen—“reunderstanding”—gestures toward an active or receptive silence involved in one’s response to another’s speech. At these lofty heights, the inquiry concerns language as ideal construct. Given that “I can never have the interior life of another present for me,” as Leonard Lawlor describes it,

“the nonpresentability of the other to me is a kind of muteness.” Yet this muteness is set against “the background of language, the ready-made or spoken language,” which functions as the “hinge” or “pivot” that separates but also connects us.2

“For Merleau-Ponty, Nachverstehen is Nacherzeugung (‘reproduction’),” writes Lawlor: “In other words, with Merleau-Ponty, every time I understand again, I institute again; in effect, every reunderstanding is a recommencement; every reunderstanding is another beginning.”3 In its general thrust, Nachverstehen marks that which is produced anew in the act of understanding the production of another. We’re in the vicinity of Sonntag’s project here, I think: an emphasis on production within and over reproduction; an experiment in photography and intersubjectivity; a playful testing of photography’s continuing ability to function, if not quite as abgrund, then at least as common ground.4 As for poor Mathias—whoever he is, and whatever he’s tried to communicate in the blue composition book now marked “I can’t reunderstand”—he may not know what to do with this kind of feedback. What’s newly produced in the act of reproduction: it sounds a bit like photography in general (“to see what a thing looks like photographed” was Garry Winogrand’s variation on the theme), but Sonntag’s experiment is more specific. Her work, to start, is deeply rooted in her studio, even as her studio’s contents have a way of turning other spaces inside out. As shown at the Kunstverein Hamburg, for example, Mühsam ernährt sich das Einhorn spread eighty-seven 35 mm color slides among seven projectors scattered throughout a single space—a lattice of criss-crossing vectors dispersing one’s attention among competing images. Each projected slide is a studio detail of sorts, a close-up record of a curiously well-composed set of items (often arranged atop a folding

1The exhibition title plays off the proverb “the squirrel earns a hard living” by substituting the workaday squirrel (Eichhörnchen) with a similar sounding but unexpected unicorn (Einhorn).

2Leonard Lawlor, “Verflechtung: The Triple Significance of Merleau-Ponty’s Course Notes on Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry,’” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), xxv–xxvi.

3Lawlor, xxix: “Yet it is precisely this specific silence of expression that makes Nachverstehen active….In Nach-verstehen, there is an activity of repeating—the Nach—that keeps hearing from being mere ‘association’ or ‘receptivity.’

4Merleau-Ponty uses the term Abgrund, or abyss, to describe the peculiar but

“inaugural” role assigned to language in the thought of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. See Lawlor, xiv–xv, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Course Notes: Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology,” in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 49–52.

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plywood work table that’s been one of the most familiar features of her work since 2006). The lead characters are usually printed matter or printed photographs, though notebooks and plants make their cameos. They’re nearly always joined by a short bit of wordplay inscribed within the scene, but Sonntag’s exact means of inscription varies from picture to picture, like her angle of view. The slides alternate between direct overhead views (nearly always of items on a table surface), oblique views of the table surface or occasionally of the floor, and vertical views—like Nachverstehen—where Sonntag appears to have collapsed her table and tipped it against the wall, or clipped something to her work shelves. The formal play in the orthogonal views tends to involve alignment within the frame; with the obliques there’s more attention to how the frame of the image cuts or creates shapes. The textual intrusions, for their part, are usually but not always handwritten: sometimes they’re written upon the images they modulate; sometimes they incorporate text within those images; often they’re scribbled on scraps of paper or sticky notes that are laid or stuck or wedged within the arrangement. At times they function like labels, at others like parts of the scene itself. And there’s an equal degree of variation in the nature of Sonntag’s puns or the processes they put in motion. Some are centered upon phonic games that seem relatively detached from their surroundings: “melancholy” becomes

“melan-coal” (fig.15); a stray umlaut on Telefon proposes the invention of a tele-hairdryer (fig.16). Others initiate perceptual shifts within the photographs they accompany. Spiegeleis—which conflates the words for fried egg (Spiegelei), mirror (Spiegel), and ice-cream cone (Eis)—transforms the upturned remnant of an ice cream cone into a yolk over easy (fig.17), while Tränengras—literally,

“tear grass”—asks us not just to recognize a plant’s tears but to see it as a possible victim of police misconduct (fig. 18). And then, at times, we’re allowed behind the curtain, treated to juxtapositions that are more programmatic, more candid about the mechanisms at work throughout the installation: “Tüchtigkeitsfehler,” reads the seeming note of apology slipped beneath a cracked pane of glass (fig.19), twisting a term for a careless mistake (Flüchtigkeitsfehler) into a neologism that suggests a deeper lack of competence or proficiency (a play off the word Tüchtigkeit, which suggests efficiency, ability, or prowess). I have a dim sense that a reference to Arthur Schopenhauer might be woven into the joke (something about incompetence in practical matters as the prerequisite for artistic genius, possibly? Jean Dubuffet once warned that there “are as many geniuses as there are unicorns,” but Sonntag, undaunted, asks us to imagine both species patiently tucking away food for the winter). But I can’t rule out the Friedrichs Nietzsche or Paulsen, or the nagging feeling that I’m being toyed with again. What to make, for example, of the suspicious elegance of those broken edges—they try to pass as a kind of automatic drawing, but they look quite consciously drawn—or the graceful near-symmetry of the uppermost fragments? These images all feign an intention to cast us adrift between the errors of language and the accidents of photography—between slips of the pen and slips of the penumbra—except that the puns and pictures alike seem too carefully crafted. And, toward us, too caring. Lapsed calamities; tiny catastrophes that have renounced their menacing aspect and invited us to stay and chat for a while: the traps that Sonntag sets, like the strategies of doubling and the uncanny effects that writers have noted throughout her work, traffic in a playful uneasiness whose goal is always, in the end, to draw us a little closer, to connect. So with Studio #1 (2011) (fig.10), one component of Sonntag’s 2011 exhibition Double Take (fig. 13). Amid the complex structure of the show, which combined objects, photographs, projected slides, and trompe l’oeil photographic wallpaper at almost actual scale, the which-way-up question posed by the work is the easy

3Lawlor, xxix: “Yet it is precisely this specific silence of expression that makes Nachverstehen active….In Nach-verstehen, there is an activity of repeating—the Nach—that keeps hearing from being mere ‘association’ or ‘receptivity.’

4Merleau-Ponty uses the term Abgrund, or abyss, to describe the peculiar but

“inaugural” role assigned to language in the thought of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. See Lawlor, xiv–xv, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Course Notes: Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology,” in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 49–52.

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part. The picture is shot through with dense links to other works, both within and beyond this particular exhibition. A partial inventory might account for at least the following:

1 Sonntag’s work table: Upturned in Studio #1 to set the aporia in motion, the table finally takes its star turn in Blame it on Morandi, a slide projection that pans her studio only to short-circuit the space. But the Studio pictures can’t leave it at that; they shadow or double the Morandi projections in turn, sometimes almost indistinguishably and sometimes with more substantial reshuffling, as in Studio #1.

2 Regular geometric solids: Somehow always lying about wherever Sonntag points her camera, these polyhedra should pose an obstacle to saying she deals with the “quotidian”—except they’ve shared her space since at least 2006, so they seem to have earned the title. (The discussion of Nachverstehen from which Merleau-Ponty departs, incidentally, appears in Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry.”) Despite their regularity and finish, an early work suggests that they may be handmade: several appear within a countertop still life in Versura (2006); two aren’t yet finished but appear, in the company of tomatoes and oranges, as if they’ve been sliced open.

3 Her long-suffering plants: Posed, toppled, transported to galleries, and caught in kitchen drawers, Sonntag’s patient victims frequently round out the suspiciously consistent RYGB palette of her everyday surroundings (though green is the least steady of these, fluctuating with the vegetation or furniture from which Sonntag takes her cue). This color scheme has increasingly taken hold of her exhibition strategies as well, particularly in Superkalifragilistigexpialigetik (2009), Futur intérieur (2010), and her 2012 installation at the Kunstmuseum Bonn.5

4 Printed or copied photographs that are themselves studio views—in this case, a black-and-white picture that depicts: 5) A brass umbrella stand in the form of an umbrella, a kind of visual/functional onomatopoeia (fig.11). It’s a found object that responds to a previously found photograph: Sonntag first exhibited the object in 2010, while the image that predicted its appearance, an illustration of an umbrella stand from a wood-turning textbook published in the 1940s, first appeared in her 2007 exhibition in Düsseldorf.6 In gallery spaces the object is always shown on a custom pedestal inspired by its source. In photographs, however, it sometimes sits directly on the floor, as in the photo-wallpaper of Double Take (where the source image also appears) or the repeated image from Studio #1, which appears twice at different sizes on differently oriented surfaces, or again, in the left-hand part of the diptych Alloy (2011), at the center of a complex shadowplay (fig.12). In one of my favorite moments in her work (partway through Morandi), proximity to yet another copy of this image turns pushpins into parasols.

5See the exhibition catalogues Superkalifragilistigexpialigetik: Kathrin Sonntag in der GAK, ed. Janneke de Vries (Berlin: Argobooks, 2010) and Futur intérieur (Lucerne: Edizione Periferia, 2010), published on the occasion of Sonntag’s show at Kunstraum Walcheturm, both of which have been thoughtfully reviewed. See also Fionn Meade, “Mirror and Stage,” Mousse 25 (Sep. 17, 2010), 94–101, and Burkhard Meltzer, “Kathrin Sonntag,” Frieze 131 (May 2010), 146.

6The original image for the pedestal comes from Fritz Spannagel, Das Drechslerwerk; Ein Fachbuch für Drechsler, Lehrer, Architekten und Liebhaber (Ravensburg: O. Meier, 2nd ed., 1948).

7David Campany looks back to Lautréamont’s “chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella” in a recent discussion of art’s traffic with the look of commercial photography:

“Out in the World,” Frieze 143 (Nov–Dec 2011), 97.

8Emmy Skensved, review of Kathrin Sonntag: Double Take, Whitehot Magazine (Berlin), July 2011, http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2011-kathrin-sonntag-galerie-kamm/2339.

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BrendanFay

The skewed relationship between sculpture and source image is clearest in Mimikry #2 (2010) (fig.11) though several associative chains lead to and from this point, ultimately arriving at larger connections between photography and sculpture. Looking backward, it’s clear that the found image resonated with a number of Sonntag’s concerns around 2006–7, particularly the ability of regular pattern to interfere with equally regular geometry (as in the series Korrekt and in her Düsseldorf show, which featured an earlier sculptural interpretation of the stand). En route to the later sculpture, Sonntag’s cameo as Mary Poppins in Superkalifragilistigexpialigetik makes perfect sense. And one might certainly think of Lautréamont’s talismanic function for the surrealists, especially given the pipes and bowler hats that have joined Sonntag’s troupe in recent years.7 In Bonn these appeared in silhouette form, though accompanied by similar renderings of rotten banana peels. A contest between Magritte and Brassaï? The latter association has already been invoked by the notion of “voluntary sculptures,” a term attached directly to her work—though also, and separately, to the “Unmonumental” impulse in recent sculpture featured in the New Museum’s eponymously titled 2007–8 exhibition. In the catalogue for the Aspen Art Museum’s 2011 exhibition The Anxiety of Photography, Matthew Thompson has recently insisted upon the broadest view of this territory, locating photography’s current adventures within wider shifts involving materiality and making and collage in recent art of all types. We can also note the academic parallels, the shared interests that might let us connect Liz Deschenes or Walead Beshty with photo-materialists and thing theorists like Elizabeth Edwards and Robin Bernstein. In this reading, photography’s dialogues with sculpture and renewed investigations of its own materials concern far more than reactions to digital technologies. As Emmy Skensved notes, Sonntag’s enigmas may acknowledge the pseudo-crises of digital photography as a kind of background noise, but her work proceeds via decidedly low-tech means—often by treating printed pictures as things among others.8 For a generation that comes to appropriation as a birthright, Thompson further suggests, distinctions between found and made images continually give way to complex interrelationships (“images that reunderstand us” might be Sonntag’s reworking of a familiar phrase, with the Husserlian prefix underscoring a rebalancing of active and passive roles in this shift), and worries over what photographs are give way to experiments with what they do. Whatever photography we happen to have at the moment, Sonntag primarily seems concerned with putting it to work. What will make us look twice? What will draw us in? What lets a picture function as a basis for shared understanding, as a hinge?9

Or, dear reader, do I read that sticky-note correctly? “Kann ich nicht nachver-stehen”: I’m a little unsure who’s speaking to whom, actually. Am I missing some kind of play on nicht nachstehen (to not be inferior, to measure up to)? Perhaps we should have started from the notion of a photograph “speaking to,” intitiating a dialogue of equals…. Or maybe the second look isn’t simply about right or wrong: as one aside in Merleau-Ponty’s notes puts it, “what’s at stake is not the recognition of an error—but the mutation of concepts.”10

6The original image for the pedestal comes from Fritz Spannagel, Das Drechslerwerk; Ein Fachbuch für Drechsler, Lehrer, Architekten und Liebhaber (Ravensburg: O. Meier, 2nd ed., 1948).

7David Campany looks back to Lautréamont’s “chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella” in a recent discussion of art’s traffic with the look of commercial photography:

“Out in the World,” Frieze 143 (Nov–Dec 2011), 97.

8Emmy Skensved, review of Kathrin Sonntag: Double Take, Whitehot Magazine (Berlin), July 2011, http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2011-kathrin-sonntag-galerie-kamm/2339.

9See also Blake Stimson’s The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) for an extended discussion of the phenomenology of photography—and the kinds of knowledge the medium makes possible—that cleverly employs Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “pivot subjectivity.”

10Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes De Cours 1959–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), cited in Leonard Lawlor’s foreword to Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xv.

…With thanks to Annie Janusc

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This publication accompanies the exhibition Kathrin Sonntag: green doesn’t matter when you’re blue, on view at the Aspen Art Museum February 15–April 21, 2013.

The exhibition is organized by the AAM and funded in part by the AAM National Council. General exhibition support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Exhibition lectures are presented as part of the Questrom Lecture Series and educational outreach programming is made possible by the Questrom Education Fund.

The visual essay in this publication is an alternative presentation of images from green doesn’t matter when you’re blue (2012), a digital slide sequence included in the exhibition. The title for the slide sequence and exhibition is borrowed from the song “Ohio” by Lambchop.

Kathrin Sonntag would like to thank Akiko Bernhöft, Patrizia Dander, Nina Hoffmann, Johannes Kullen, Jan Molzberger, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, and Pavan Segal

AuthorsJacob Proctor is curator at the Aspen Art Museum

Brendan Fay is a lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan

EditorsJacob Proctor and Ryan Shafer

DesignersKathrin Sonntag and Michael Aberman

TypefacesAmerican Typewriter, Akzidenz-Grotesk, and Monaco

Paper80 lb. Titan Dull Cover, 70 lb. Titan Dull Text, and 70 lb. Williamsburg Offset

PrinterProlific Group, Winnipeg, Canada

Aspen Art Museum590 North Mill StreetAspen, CO 81611

www.aspenartmuseum.org970.925.8050

AuthorsJacob Proctor is curator at the Aspen Art Museum

Brendan Fay is a lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan

EditorsJacob Proctor and Ryan Shafer

DesignersKathrin Sonntag and Michael Aberman

TypefacesAmerican Typewriter, Akzidenz-Grotesk, and Monaco

Paper80 lb. Titan Dull Cover, 70 lb. Titan Dull Text, and 70 lb. Williamsburg Offset

PrinterProlific Group, Winnipeg, Canada

Aspen Art Museum590 North Mill StreetAspen, CO 81611

www.aspenartmuseum.org970.925.8050

Gallery hoursTuesday–Saturday, 10 am–6 pmThursday, 10 am–7 pmSunday, noon–6 pmClosed Mondays and major holidays

Admission to the AAM is FREE courtesy of Amy and John Phelan