The Truth of the Archive
Armin Linke's Photography:
Between Document and Fiction
Armin
Linke's artist's talk
at the
Deutsche Guggenheim, March 2008
Photo Mathias Schormann
Whether
he uses his camera to record the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Carlo
Mollino's Teatro Regio, or the monumental streets of North Korea's
Pyongyang—the photographic works of the Milan-based artist Armin Linke
constitute a steadily growing visual atlas of the globalized world. His
monumental C-print "Tokyo Ski Dome" is currently on view in the exhibition
"True North" at the Deutsche Guggenheim. Brigitte Werneburg
on Armin Linke's conceptual art photography.
Armin
Linke's artist's talk
at the
Deutsche Guggenheim, March 2008
Photo: Mathias Schormann
In
mathematical terms, Armin Linke's
slide show in the lecture hall of the Deutsche
Guggenheim lasted precisely 26.666 minutes. During this span of time,
the Milan-based photographer showed 800 images each of which remained on
the screen for exactly two seconds. Armin Linke, who came to Berlin for an
artist's talk in the framework of the True
North exhibition, delivered a serious version of what we like to
call a "flood of images." Not in the sense of the banal criticism we know
all too well concerning the satiety of the senses that we feel subjected
to nowadays; after all, maybe we merely believe that we're supposed to
have this feeling. But perhaps we can put up with far more than we'd
ordinarily suspect; in any case, visitors' thoughtful questions following
this 26.666-minute storm of images demonstrated that the audience was an
equal match. Armin Linke's performance provided an example of our presence
of mind—and it also pinpointed an essential aspect of the photographic
discourse: the archive.
Armin
Linke, Three Gorges Dam,
construction
of a lift for ships Yichang (Hupeh) China
Courtesy
Klosterfelde, Berlin, © Armin Linke
In practice, the Milan-based artist seeks to show his
images not as individual photographs, but rather within a clear system of
references. He stresses the comparison and not the stylization of the
individual photograph as an iconic work of art, as he said in 2003 in a
conversation published in his book Transient.
In keeping with this, Armin Linke likes to adhere to the model of the
archive while presenting his photographs. He leaves it up to the viewer to
discover a particular image or sequence of images in the mass of
photographs, making him or her a temporary curator of sorts.
Armin
Linke, Huis Ten Bosch Resort, Nagasaki Japan
Courtesy
Klosterfelde, Berlin, © Armin Linke
Whether
it's at the Venice Biennial
or, more recently, for his installation in the exhibition You_ser:
The Century of the Consumer, which has been on view since October
2007 at the ZKM Karlsruhe (where
Armin Linke has a guest professorship) – he always allows the viewer to
create his or her own personal set of photographs, thanks to an electronic
scanner and small printer that otherwise spit out flight tickets.
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Armin Linke, Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas,
1999,
Deutsche Bank Collection
Armin Linke's slide show mixed pictures taken at a flower
auction in Amsterdam with images of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze
River in China and the G-8 summit meeting in Genoa in 2001. A photograph
of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas,
which is part of the Deutsche
Bank Collection, was followed by the Khomeini Mausoleum in Teheran and
Thongil Street in the North Korean capital Pyongyang. Then, all of a
sudden, there was the Teatro
Regio by Carlo
Mollino in Turin and a portrait of two police officers in the Nigerian
megacity Lagos, to name only a few of the motifs.
Armin
Linke, Carlo Mollino, Teatro Regio, Torino, Italy
Courtesy
Klosterfelde, Berlin, © Armin Linke
The
greatest conceivable antipode to this ambitious image atlas of today's
world, which by nature strives for completion, is the huge print of the Tokyo
Ski Dome (1998), of course, which can be admired in the exhibition
hall of the Deutsche Guggenheim. One could easily attribute this panoramic
view of an artificially created ski slope beneath the huge dome of an
industrial-sized space to the new Italian landscape photography associated
with names like Walter
Niedermayr, Massimo
Vitali, and even Gabriele
Basilico. The work also mirrors the topography of a global consumerist
world, which Armin Linke documents as a paradoxical space existing in a
real-life science fiction scenario.
Armin
Linke, Ski Dome, Tokyo, Japan
(from
the Global Box series, 1998-2000), 1998
Foto:
Courtesy Galleria Marabini,
©Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
©Armin
Linke
Yet it's not the sober sensitivity he
brings to bear in dissolving the boundaries between document and fiction
that defines Armin Linke's work as artistic in essence, but rather his
conscious intellectual investigation of the archive. It's a given that he
formulates his arguments within the photographic discourse in a distinctly
individual manner—just like the great photographers do. In contrast with
them, however, he always addresses the foundations, rules, and
institutions of this discourse within his work, making them transparent as
he does so. With this strategy, Armin Linke underscores a basic concept of
contemporary art.
Armin
Linke, Oscar Niemeyer, Underground Mobile Walkway, Brasilia, 1999,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Yet it's the special
aesthetic quality of Armin Linke's works that provides the conceptual
background for his exploration of the idea of the archive. The fact that
he stages the techno-architectures of the 20th and 21st centuries as
spaces possessing a nearly immaterial sublimity leads the viewer to lose
touch with a sense of scale and proportion, a perceptual experience that
is both fascinating and disturbing. It's no contradiction that the artist
is concerned with the greatest possible degree of authenticity in the
production of his images. Even the chronicler he characterizes himself as
being only gains access to one segment of reality and hence one
construction of the world—an inescapable dilemma that Linke addresses in
his work in two different ways.
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