Markus Krottendorfer | Pointing toward the Stars

Markus Krottendorfer is showing portraits, photographs whose visual and material character recalls vintage prints from the early days of photography. With their silvery sheen, reflecting the surrounding light, they are fitted into an installation that divides the elongated gallery space into individual booths. This intervention in the already narrow space practically compels one to encounter each of the photographed people individually. And it is indeed an encounter of an ambivalent kind. It almost seems as if one were looking into a mirror that throws back the image of a stranger as a reflection, and thus allows them to emerge all the more presently as an individual. What can be recognised as one’s own, what as other, and what connects all these people? The immediacy staged by Markus Krottendorfer and the method of reproducing the photographs, developed over numerous trials, have reasons rooted in content.

Addressing photography as a medium, up to and including the interrogation of the technical process of recording and reproduction, already has a long history in the art world. Just as in painting, it is the conventions of depiction, the material, the isolation of individual components, the modes of presentation, etc. that in many ways form the starting point for the œuvre of various artists. In part it is also a gesture of (technical) return, intended to create a critical distance from the unquestioned and taken-for-granted use of images. In the specific case of Markus Krottendorfer’s exhibition, all this is merely a side aspect; the central concern is one of content, and the technical realisation was conceived from this pivotal point.

Initially, it was encounters with people whose way of life began to interest Markus Krottendorfer. What they had in common was that they organised and managed their lives in a way that, on superficial observation, could be understood as a refusal to consume and as dropping out. We are familiar with swap meets, repair cafés, urban gardening, sharing systems, etc., mostly from urban eco-elites. In this particular case, however, these were people who made no great fuss about their life choices, who sought no opposition and no self-justification, but rather went their way quietly and out of inner conviction. Living by this is often also the basis for these people’s creative work in the broadest sense.

Viewed as a whole, this, their way of being, can be described as a genuine EIGEN/LEBEN (OWN/LIFE). This largely self-determined way of life also arouses longings and makes it appear as a utopia realised. Looking into such a future, pointing toward the stars, Markus Krottendorfer locates an ideal that may seem to us a thing of the past: a way of life that is not directly subject to the constraints of consumption and feasibility, that does not know the dependence on the various small technical devices of our everyday and working lives, and that does not even have to escape the flood of communication and images, or indeed the ever-accelerating processes of living, production and consumption. It is an ideal that can on the one hand be located b e f o r e the whirl of present-day life, and it is at the same time an ideal that, as a reaction to it, signifies something yet to come. This intersection of future and past led Markus Krottendorfer to his specific choice of materials and mode of presentation. He uses the semantics of the materials and the evocative qualities of the photographic image not for the medium’s self-reflection, but to unfold levels of content by formal means. The genre boundaries of portrait photography do remain as zones of orientation, but the significance of the works on show points far beyond them.

Kurt Kladler