Wolfgang Bock
Fragmented Views
New panoramic works by Christoph Rihs
War, memory and representation
The year 2006 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the battle of Jena and of Auerstedt. On its march to Berlin, Napoleon’s army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Prussian troops in Thuringia. It was a black day for Old Prussia, as the defeat also paved the way for a later political re-ordering of the continent. To mark this anniversary, the Swiss artist Christoph Rihs, who lives in Weimar, is showing photographic works in the foyer of the Jenoptik Werke in Jena. Conceptually his images deal with modes of seeing, models of the world and forms of recollection. Rihs is presenting a series of large panoramic colour photographs in the Diasec process, showing digitally altered motifs: changing perspectives united in complex, ornamentally or amorphously arranged images of landscapes, trees, facades and interiors. Rihs thus brings together particles and ensemble, fragments and circle to create new aesthetic constructs.
Panoramas as emphazied images defined through fragments
Seen from a formal viewpoint, Rihs’s works can be situated in a particular tradition. In the 19th century, large-format images enabled expanded panoramic views. These were shown in specially-constructed rotundas, until public interest favored the competition, the cinema. Favourite subjects for panoramas were “soft” images of cities, landscapes – and of course battles. Such images were made possible through a panoramic view or a view from above. Around 1800, Marc-Theodore Bourrit, Horace de Saussure and Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth thus produced “circular views” of mountain ranges.
Rihs’s wide or spherical images of landscapes, objects and interiors take up this tradition. His views of buildings are distorted, broken down into their individual, photographically visible parts. The painted panorama sees itself as an illusory painting whose round, dome-shaped or spherical line imitates an aesthetic of the sublime, the freely wandering gaze. By contrast, panorama photography, the field in which Christoph Rihs works, also produces round images, albeit based on a changing ideal standpoint, but these are now deliberately strung together as fragmented pieces: this particular additive whole also remains an open fragment, despite the apparently closed round form. What is more, Rihs’s fragmented panorama photographs have an impact on the traditionally painted ones, making them recognisable again as works consisting of the individual visual perspectives of different painters.
Structurally speaking, Rihs also takes up several other aspects of a heterogeneous historical tradition. First there is the pictorial representation of the battle as painting, etching or lithograph, and the composition of various such depictions in so-called contemporary illustrated broadsheets and tableaux, like the Scenen aus der Schlacht bei Jena, the Genaue Darstellung des Schlachtfeldes bei Jena, Naumburg und Eckartsbergen or the Souvenirs de Napoleon. Second he paraphrases both the older, schematic cartographical representations of the events of battle drawn by geometers which are also made up of individual parts, and the more recent aerial and satellite photographs which are subsequently put together to produce a complete view of the earth. Thirdly he also refers to certain oral and written stories about the events which he compiles into a homogenous report and fourthly in the framework of his depiction of nature allegories like trees or tracts of land, but also of memorials, souvenirs or simple sites of commemoration and admonition within the framework of collective memory.
Coloured polygons
To achieve this, Rihs digitally processes individual pictorial fragments. He thus produces particular moods through coloration, often selecting pale, light shades that create a hyperrealistic transparent light reminiscent of Chinese watercolours. The individual layers, however, remain recognisable and give the images an inherent, fragile, polygon structure that conjures up imaginary scenarios out of external and internal images. The images of interiors, therefore, recall Cezanne’s quasi patchwork colour motifs, coordinated with one another here in a fine and novel interplay between camera and image processing.
Spherical images and frozen time
Rihs presents his images in the form of spheres which take up the panorama viewer’s wandering gaze and lead it on to a new kind of complex ornamental structure. This emerges both in the tree images and the images showing the inside of a swimming pool, but also in the Leuchtenburg panorama image which from a distance resembles the iris of a huge eye.
The spheres also recall planetoids, organic organisational forms in nature, like volvox, reconstructions of insect eyes, thread images, and the squaring of the circle, in which Renaissance astrologists saw a representation of the heavens. Such horoscopes measure the quality of time in space, so to speak. In fact, Rihs’s round images can also be seen as stages in the course of the spatial wanderings of a gaze in time; stages which capture time by fixing the space paced out with the camera. Rihs thus alludes to the chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Maray. Like Maray, Rihs shows individual instantaneous takes together in one image.
Perhaps Rihs’s round photographs of the domed swimming pool should be seen as such a passage in time: figures stretch in the water, often standing at a point where, physically, they could not have been together. In other words, Rihs represents time as passing in space; he renders time visible. It is appropriate, therefore, that the highest rosette in the glass dome is enthroned above the events, fourfold, like four world clocks. Our memory is organised in a similar way in our unconscious, which, if we believe Sigmund Freud, knows no logical development, but instead piles up layer upon layer as in an ancient town; unlike in that town, however, in our memory those layers exist simultaneously, side by side. Places of remembrance then, are places of such a timeless simultaneity, just as Rihs shows them in his images.
Material cycles. Memory and nature
Rihs uses wide-ranging landscape motifs sparingly, however. Instead he shows images of nature which he has processed according to his particular method and which, like material memory stores, have to vouch for history. As there are no more human witnesses of events who might be photographed, Rihs lets nature express itself as an ambivalent metaphor and allegory of what happened. As a result, the image of nature and the image of history coincide. Rihs devotes special attention to depicting trees, alluding to the widespread Napoleon Oaks or Napoleon Limes whose image and name have persisted in collective memory.
Tormented trees, tormented images ?
Not only does the artist select circles of trees with their crowns inclining inwards, as if in a kaleidoscope, he also presents solitary examples. In the case of one large oak, he pointedly focuses on its powdering red heartwood awakening an association with a bleeding tree, the chêne de l’attaque or the Napoleon Oak. The allegorical link is not the only thing that speaks in favour of a photograph of a tree as memorial. It can also be shown, in ecological terms, that minerals from previous eras are repeatedly stored in plants. Nothing gets lost here: trees, which can survive for several hundred years, actually contain material residues stored from the time of the battles; they are ecological clocks that capture time in their sediments.
This link between trees and memory also addresses a further group of motifs. There are numerous stories and narratives in circulation in which living souls are said to be locked in trees, and in traditional societies crimes against trees were severely punished. Marcel Proust refers to such a totemist saga in connection with his metaphorization of memory:
I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.
And so it is with our own past.
Concealed correspondences
Rihs’s tormented trees are linked with such puzzling correspondences between tree and man, memory and salvation, especially when he, as it were, himself torments his images in order to avoid leaving this analogy to chance, and instead to deliberately tease it out of them. Of course the observer also has to recognise it, which is not easy, as the images eschew any all too swift interpretation. They have a particular blurriness which is to be regarded as a new quality of seeing. The closer you come to the images, the more they resolve into micrological movements. To put it another way: their individual fragments have a particular drift which prevents them from being hastily categorised. Each visitor can look himself, is addressed as a person with eyes. Memory, we learn here, is visible, but at the same time concealed in the obvious.
Cf. Wolfgang Bock, Medienpassagen. Der Film im Übergang, Bielefeld 2006, pp. 40-60, and Bernhard Comment, Das Panorama, Berlin 2000
Between 1827 and 1830 Jean Pierre Alaux produced large interior views of St. Peter’s and of Westminster Abbey. Cf. Comment, Panorama, 166. Saussure writes: “... I got the idea for such a drawing in 1776 on the summit of Buet. Having described the infinite variety of objects in front of my eyes, I realised that without some drawings I could never give my readers even the vaguest impression of what I had seen. If I had used the common vedutas, I would have had to do very many of them, and the more I would have done, the less they would have reproduced the unity and sequence of these mountains in nature ... Using the same method as I, however, the draughtsman can make an exact copy of what I saw by turning the sheet as he turns, and anyone who wants to see the things exactly as he saw them has to imagine that he is standing in the middle of the drawing and, in his mind, enlarge what he sees from there when turning the drawing. In this way, he will notice how all things are linked and how they appear to the viewer on the summit.” (from Comment, Panorama. p. 83)
Cf. Illustrations in Holger Nowak, Birgit Hellmann, Die Schlacht bei Jena und Auerstedt am 14. Oktober 1806, brochure published by the Städtische Museen Jena, 2nd issue, Jena 2005
Cf. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, ed. Mitscherlich et al., Frankfurt/M 1970, Vol. IX, pp. 200-203
Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, In Swanns Welt I, Frankfurt/M. 1978, p. 63. Cf. Collection of motifs related to the tree as seat of the soul, in Bächthold-Stäubli, Handbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Berlin 927/86, Vol. 1, 955
Fragmented Views
New panoramic works by Christoph Rihs
War, memory and representation
The year 2006 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the battle of Jena and of Auerstedt. On its march to Berlin, Napoleon’s army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Prussian troops in Thuringia. It was a black day for Old Prussia, as the defeat also paved the way for a later political re-ordering of the continent. To mark this anniversary, the Swiss artist Christoph Rihs, who lives in Weimar, is showing photographic works in the foyer of the Jenoptik Werke in Jena. Conceptually his images deal with modes of seeing, models of the world and forms of recollection. Rihs is presenting a series of large panoramic colour photographs in the Diasec process, showing digitally altered motifs: changing perspectives united in complex, ornamentally or amorphously arranged images of landscapes, trees, facades and interiors. Rihs thus brings together particles and ensemble, fragments and circle to create new aesthetic constructs.
Panoramas as emphazied images defined through fragments
Seen from a formal viewpoint, Rihs’s works can be situated in a particular tradition. In the 19th century, large-format images enabled expanded panoramic views. These were shown in specially-constructed rotundas, until public interest favored the competition, the cinema. Favourite subjects for panoramas were “soft” images of cities, landscapes – and of course battles. Such images were made possible through a panoramic view or a view from above. Around 1800, Marc-Theodore Bourrit, Horace de Saussure and Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth thus produced “circular views” of mountain ranges.
Rihs’s wide or spherical images of landscapes, objects and interiors take up this tradition. His views of buildings are distorted, broken down into their individual, photographically visible parts. The painted panorama sees itself as an illusory painting whose round, dome-shaped or spherical line imitates an aesthetic of the sublime, the freely wandering gaze. By contrast, panorama photography, the field in which Christoph Rihs works, also produces round images, albeit based on a changing ideal standpoint, but these are now deliberately strung together as fragmented pieces: this particular additive whole also remains an open fragment, despite the apparently closed round form. What is more, Rihs’s fragmented panorama photographs have an impact on the traditionally painted ones, making them recognisable again as works consisting of the individual visual perspectives of different painters.
Structurally speaking, Rihs also takes up several other aspects of a heterogeneous historical tradition. First there is the pictorial representation of the battle as painting, etching or lithograph, and the composition of various such depictions in so-called contemporary illustrated broadsheets and tableaux, like the Scenen aus der Schlacht bei Jena, the Genaue Darstellung des Schlachtfeldes bei Jena, Naumburg und Eckartsbergen or the Souvenirs de Napoleon. Second he paraphrases both the older, schematic cartographical representations of the events of battle drawn by geometers which are also made up of individual parts, and the more recent aerial and satellite photographs which are subsequently put together to produce a complete view of the earth. Thirdly he also refers to certain oral and written stories about the events which he compiles into a homogenous report and fourthly in the framework of his depiction of nature allegories like trees or tracts of land, but also of memorials, souvenirs or simple sites of commemoration and admonition within the framework of collective memory.
Coloured polygons
To achieve this, Rihs digitally processes individual pictorial fragments. He thus produces particular moods through coloration, often selecting pale, light shades that create a hyperrealistic transparent light reminiscent of Chinese watercolours. The individual layers, however, remain recognisable and give the images an inherent, fragile, polygon structure that conjures up imaginary scenarios out of external and internal images. The images of interiors, therefore, recall Cezanne’s quasi patchwork colour motifs, coordinated with one another here in a fine and novel interplay between camera and image processing.
Spherical images and frozen time
Rihs presents his images in the form of spheres which take up the panorama viewer’s wandering gaze and lead it on to a new kind of complex ornamental structure. This emerges both in the tree images and the images showing the inside of a swimming pool, but also in the Leuchtenburg panorama image which from a distance resembles the iris of a huge eye.
The spheres also recall planetoids, organic organisational forms in nature, like volvox, reconstructions of insect eyes, thread images, and the squaring of the circle, in which Renaissance astrologists saw a representation of the heavens. Such horoscopes measure the quality of time in space, so to speak. In fact, Rihs’s round images can also be seen as stages in the course of the spatial wanderings of a gaze in time; stages which capture time by fixing the space paced out with the camera. Rihs thus alludes to the chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Maray. Like Maray, Rihs shows individual instantaneous takes together in one image.
Perhaps Rihs’s round photographs of the domed swimming pool should be seen as such a passage in time: figures stretch in the water, often standing at a point where, physically, they could not have been together. In other words, Rihs represents time as passing in space; he renders time visible. It is appropriate, therefore, that the highest rosette in the glass dome is enthroned above the events, fourfold, like four world clocks. Our memory is organised in a similar way in our unconscious, which, if we believe Sigmund Freud, knows no logical development, but instead piles up layer upon layer as in an ancient town; unlike in that town, however, in our memory those layers exist simultaneously, side by side. Places of remembrance then, are places of such a timeless simultaneity, just as Rihs shows them in his images.
Material cycles. Memory and nature
Rihs uses wide-ranging landscape motifs sparingly, however. Instead he shows images of nature which he has processed according to his particular method and which, like material memory stores, have to vouch for history. As there are no more human witnesses of events who might be photographed, Rihs lets nature express itself as an ambivalent metaphor and allegory of what happened. As a result, the image of nature and the image of history coincide. Rihs devotes special attention to depicting trees, alluding to the widespread Napoleon Oaks or Napoleon Limes whose image and name have persisted in collective memory.
Tormented trees, tormented images ?
Not only does the artist select circles of trees with their crowns inclining inwards, as if in a kaleidoscope, he also presents solitary examples. In the case of one large oak, he pointedly focuses on its powdering red heartwood awakening an association with a bleeding tree, the chêne de l’attaque or the Napoleon Oak. The allegorical link is not the only thing that speaks in favour of a photograph of a tree as memorial. It can also be shown, in ecological terms, that minerals from previous eras are repeatedly stored in plants. Nothing gets lost here: trees, which can survive for several hundred years, actually contain material residues stored from the time of the battles; they are ecological clocks that capture time in their sediments.
This link between trees and memory also addresses a further group of motifs. There are numerous stories and narratives in circulation in which living souls are said to be locked in trees, and in traditional societies crimes against trees were severely punished. Marcel Proust refers to such a totemist saga in connection with his metaphorization of memory:
I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.
And so it is with our own past.
Concealed correspondences
Rihs’s tormented trees are linked with such puzzling correspondences between tree and man, memory and salvation, especially when he, as it were, himself torments his images in order to avoid leaving this analogy to chance, and instead to deliberately tease it out of them. Of course the observer also has to recognise it, which is not easy, as the images eschew any all too swift interpretation. They have a particular blurriness which is to be regarded as a new quality of seeing. The closer you come to the images, the more they resolve into micrological movements. To put it another way: their individual fragments have a particular drift which prevents them from being hastily categorised. Each visitor can look himself, is addressed as a person with eyes. Memory, we learn here, is visible, but at the same time concealed in the obvious.
Cf. Wolfgang Bock, Medienpassagen. Der Film im Übergang, Bielefeld 2006, pp. 40-60, and Bernhard Comment, Das Panorama, Berlin 2000
Between 1827 and 1830 Jean Pierre Alaux produced large interior views of St. Peter’s and of Westminster Abbey. Cf. Comment, Panorama, 166. Saussure writes: “... I got the idea for such a drawing in 1776 on the summit of Buet. Having described the infinite variety of objects in front of my eyes, I realised that without some drawings I could never give my readers even the vaguest impression of what I had seen. If I had used the common vedutas, I would have had to do very many of them, and the more I would have done, the less they would have reproduced the unity and sequence of these mountains in nature ... Using the same method as I, however, the draughtsman can make an exact copy of what I saw by turning the sheet as he turns, and anyone who wants to see the things exactly as he saw them has to imagine that he is standing in the middle of the drawing and, in his mind, enlarge what he sees from there when turning the drawing. In this way, he will notice how all things are linked and how they appear to the viewer on the summit.” (from Comment, Panorama. p. 83)
Cf. Illustrations in Holger Nowak, Birgit Hellmann, Die Schlacht bei Jena und Auerstedt am 14. Oktober 1806, brochure published by the Städtische Museen Jena, 2nd issue, Jena 2005
Cf. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, ed. Mitscherlich et al., Frankfurt/M 1970, Vol. IX, pp. 200-203
Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, In Swanns Welt I, Frankfurt/M. 1978, p. 63. Cf. Collection of motifs related to the tree as seat of the soul, in Bächthold-Stäubli, Handbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Berlin 927/86, Vol. 1, 955