Anna & Bernhard Blume
From A to Z

ANNA & BERNHARD BLUME, from the series Trautes Heim, 1985-86, 200 x 127 cm.

The majority of photographic contributions published nowadays in art magazines belong to a an essentially traditional photographic concept shaped by parameters of illusionist space very different from that corresponding to our work. This is the dominant conception in the photography that has been relevant to date, after photography became the perpetrator of the illusionist spatiality and documentary ingenuousness of painting, with the exception of the conception governing the work of the Bauhaus artists and early European and Russian abstract photography.

Doubtless, in other European countries, as well as in Spain, there must be photographers whose work has been influenced by the anti-illusionism of modern painting, which is now over a hundred years old, for indeed, at any rate, there is no objective photography in the sense of an expectation of ingenuous representation.

We too began as painters and draftsmen; we were educated in the fine school of abstract painting. Nevertheless, in the decades of the sixties and the seventies, we came into contact with the circle of the so-called action and performance art, whose traces still survive in our photographic actions, actions that -we must clarify- were organised without audiences and before the camera alone.

At present, we represent the generation that followed the Düsseldorf activism created in the sphere of Joseph Beuys and the American artists from Fluxus. We have aimed at creating an ironic activism critical of fear, which is staged work by work, composing images according to the rules of abstract painting.

Our conception of the anti-illusionist image is made manifest in the renunciation of the colour photograph (all our work, except for one series made in Polaroid, is done in black and white). That we see and photograph with the eyes of abstract painters -without taking on their supremacist, or any other, dogma- can be verified in the examples from our series, created between 1994 and 1995, Transcendental Constructivism, where we proceeded according to the principles of abstract construction and composition, while also commenting ironically, through actions, on the museological fetishisation of these principles in a series of specific scenes.

At that time, we wrote the following ironic statement:
“The photo-action series Transcendental Constructivism simultaneously shows the artists, we two, as the instrument and the victim of arbitrary constructions. The white forms, made of ‘intelligible material’, strive to form logical figures or constitute themselves into enlarged organs of ‘a purer reason’ that has not yet discovered itself.”

ANNA & BERNHARD BLUME, from the series Vasenekstase, 1986, 200 x 127 cm.

Naturally, ‘the white square’ and other abstract archetypes of images are still a paradigmatic incunabulum of modernity. Our use of photography holds this in high regard, while also employed to underline its museological and ideo-aesthetic aura, in such a way that these shapes assault us with the neurosis characteristic of the media like otherworldly inspirational objects.

This is what happens to us as well, like instruments and at the same time victims of a sort of ‘medium assault’ by commonplace objects and artefacts: our too often reproduced series from 1985 entitled Delirium in the kitchen (also in MOMA New York since 1989) -whose publication in EXIT we have chosen to renounce for the time being- utilises the potato as an example (it must be remembered that the potato is a basic food source for Germans) and, beyond this, it reminds us of the slavery of housewives. Meanwhile, American fast food has also arrived to Germany and housewives have it easier.

In several actions we carried out during the decades of the seventies and eighties, we devoted special attention to diverse domestic cult objects, such as the white vase from the German living room, that ‘archetype’ as phallic as it is vaginal, especially for the stiff generation of our parents.

The stagings actually simulate an ironic medium of our subversion, focused on the photographic actions: things and objects, long subjected to human will, somehow come to life in our photographs, and, in turn, in a spiritualistic leap, they ‘objectify’ the human protagonists, who fall prey to an ‘attack of the third species’.

It is clear that such events are of a very intimate nature, inasmuch as they are schizoid. In the staging, also corresponding to this ‘division of the soul’ is the division of work, which converts us, depending on the situation, into subjects or objects of the photograph.

(Translation: Dena Ellen Cowan)