Richard Schütz
english
Richard Schütz
The first impression is absence, wrapped in morbid signs of a cheap
affluence. Its surface comprises compositions of displacement:
accumulated signs from unrelated sources. Still there is a fragile
equilibrium visible in the way things happen, akin to flotsam,
shifting between stability and disintegration.
The entanglement of goods in use and of things out of order blends
seemingly naturally with its normative context, the urban space,
reduced to just another layer of the document "The city, the waste
and death". However, the evidence of its Civitas occurs only in
bleak leftovers of productive attempts which failed in a service
society's dream, hence coagulating into a consumer's nightmare: The
decent symbols of wealth and status crumble into a disarray of
misled attitudes; ruined with it are the desire for comfort and
control.
But the show goes on. The cipher of Babylon reinvents itself with
its evergreen prospects deriving from progress and construction to
conceal its wrecked previous version.
With its intentional character but accidental presence of disorder
these photographs focus on a society trying to keep afloat.
Richard Schuetz
Blind Trip (2005 /DV/ 46 min.)
A film by Ioannis Savvidis and Richard Schuetz
Marathon Plain. When you look at this landscape, there is no way to
see it. You can arrive there and hate it, miss it, or realize that it
illustrates an ahistorical culture: the concept of authority implied
and imposed by constructed spaces. The issuance of stimuli in order
to say what it is: the power of the city as metaphor of the human
condition. Still this myth has to be re-invented, occupied and
interpolated by stereotypical but local attitudes. Their hypertrophy
evoke the everyday collective hallucination of the promise of the
modern age proceeding in its erosion with the illusive symptoms of
suburbia. This phenomenon - as indifferent as it is poignant - is at
best incompatible and at worst calculated. From that point of view
the film shifts attention with its form of a minimal road movie
towards the arbitrary dimension of a multiple encoded environment,
dismissing the notion of an invisible history to refer to the real as
a situative notation of triviality composing itself in a seemingly
accidental manner. The non-narrative dramaturgy of the dissonant
scenery unrolls conditions of duration, disintegration and change
like an improvised set of visualised music surprising with its end:
the film as its own topography.
Richard Schuetz
(C) 2005 - Alle Rechte vorbehalten