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From
Gothic to Modern: the Faces/Facades of Roland Fischer
by Sarah Stanley
“ … we are not entirely
matter, nor are we entirely idea … through images, and in images,
we can comprehend opposites, grasp complex relationships, and ultimately
fathom both the interior and the exterior in their entirety. “ Roland
Fischer, Kunstbunker, September 24, 1995
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Roland Fischer, a key figure in contemporary German
photography, had his second solo exhibition in the United States at
Von Lintel & Nusser Gallery from September 6 to October 6. Well
known for his monochrome explorations of portraiture, this show of ten large-scale
photographs included the facades of gothic cathedrals and corporate high
rises, buildings of archetypal recognition. Fischer’s presentation
of the gothic with the modern is hardly spurious. The soaring, light-filled
skeletal volumes of the gothic cathedral were sources of inspiration for
early skyscraper designs by Berlin architects in the 1920s and 30s, in particular
Mies van der Rohe’s expressionist glass skyscrapers. This formal continuity
is revealed through Fischer’s superimposition of the interior of the
gothic cathedral with exterior views. In Fischer’s combination, the
stone façade weaves into the erupting forms of the interior space.
The stone exterior dissolves into an array of geometric forms, reenacting
the great transformations in architectural form precipitated by the construction
of the Crystal Palace of 1851, a building now seen as the earliest precursor
of the glass architecture of the modern office building. The diamond-shaped
verticals of the pointed arches appear to peel open from the dark shell
of the interior, introducing an organic quality of movement into the static
iconography of the cathedral. As the image itself is crucial for Fischer,
the superimposition of interior/exterior opens up new visual territory.
In line with Fischer’s disruption of the stone façade, Monet
declared, regarding his Cathedral series, that “everything changes,
even stone,” to express his intentions to capture the shifting conditions
of light and vapor that surrounded the façade of the Cathedral of
Rouen.
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Fischer’s treatment of architectural form is related
to the formal language of portraiture that he developed in his Los Angeles
portrait series, 1989-91. The faces of these women float within the blue
or black frame of the customary suburban swimming pool, a monochrome color
plane with almost mathematical characteristics. Freed from any personalized
identification such as fashion, jewelry or social context, the women’s
individuality recedes while more universal qualities show forth from their
unadorned flesh-toned faces. In similar ways, Fischer engages the facade
of the building -- frontally, sometimes framed against the stark blue sky
and often completely isolated from the local context of surrounding buildings.
He rarely identifies the building by name, preferring to leave the photo
untitled with only the name of the city as an index of place. What interests
Fischer least is the documentary aspect of photography. Instead, he captures
the flat planar quality of the modern office building as a purely visual
effect associated with the glass curtain wall, its imposing height and reflective
surfaces. The planarity of the façade also refers to the flatness
of the photographic image. In certain photos, Fischer goes further by cropping
to the boundaries of the building’s façade so that only the
vertical and horizontal lines of the windows and structure remains framed.
The overall visual effect of this rectilinear treatment recalls the linear
enclosures of Mondrian, an artist who was both inspired by and responsive
to the architecture of the city. Fischer’s photographs of the modern
office building come close to releasing the photographic subject through
the color and line of pure abstraction. He uses the digital imaging process
to transform the photographic image into a starkly abstract image, in order
to “correct’ the waviness that results from the steep viewing
angles required to photograph tall buildings. The monotone colors and bold
lines of Fischer’s digitally-edited photographs share certain visual
elements of abstract or color field painting, yet the distinctive surfaces
of photography always remains a prominent aspect of the work.
Photography’s move towards abstraction derives from a conceptual narrative
related to the social and cultural context of global capitalism and the
qualities inherent in digital production. New German photography exhibits
a strong fascination with surface, with rectilinear geometry, with primary
colors and shapes, with smoothness and evenness that were the central preoccupations
of modernist painting a century earlier. Fischer’s architectural photos
are monumental in size, most measuring between 5 and 8 feet in length, the
size constraint related to the print limitations of the C-Print created
from a digitally-produced negative. The trend in contemporary German photography
towards larger formats is yet another direct engagement with abstract painting.
Certainly the lingering drive to legitimize photography as a fine art has
also certainly contributed to the oversized formats of the last decade.
An abstracted image invites a larger format, as it can be viewed close up
or far away and still make visual sense. It also heightens the visual impact
of color and line. Photographers first made the leap into oversized formats
during the heady art market of the 1980s, a period during which Roland Fischer
as early as 1980 and later Thomas Ruff in 1986 first used oversized formats
to show their portrait series. The effect of the larger scale on content
and image created a sensation, and became the norm thereafter for other
German photographers such as Thomas Struth, Axel Hutte and Andreas Gursky.
Fischer handles the large format in the same way used as the Dusseldorf
group, placing white margins around the entire image and laminating the
face of the print to Plexiglas. The glossiness of the photographs self-consciously
presents the branding features of corporate capitalism, a brash, superficial
style that Fischer closely associates with Americanism.
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Architecture has long been the subject of photography,
originally due to the requirement of long exposure times, and later, when
picturesque views of cityscapes and the American skyscraper became the norm.
The skyscraper’s soaring vertical lines, glittering steel frame and
reflective glass façade appear tailored to be pictured in a photograph.
The contemporary office tower and the rectilinear facades of corporate architecture
also provide ideal subjects for photography, a medium that is nothing but
an exact recorder of distinct volumes in space. In terms of German photography,
Bernd and Hilla Bechers’ documentation of industrial architecture through
a typological model provided the basis for new encounters with the city’s
built form for the fresh wave of photographers emerging from the Kunstakademie
in Dusseldorf. Clearly Fischer draws upon the same imagery and architecture
of corporate capitalism that has fascinated both painters and photographers
associated with “Corporate Realism.” What differentiates his approach
is his willingness to bridge the stylistic distances, in this show for instance,
between the Gothic and the Modern, laying bare the roots of architectural
abstraction through the contemporary logic of the digital image. In Fischer’s
hands, the smoothness and precision of the digital image ultimately call
attention to the reproducibility of architectural style through the manipulation
of images and surfaces of the modern city.
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